Perestroika and glasnost have opened up Eastern and Central Europe in surprising ways. Holiday companies now offer weekends in Moscow. Returning visitors pass around snapshots of themselves pictured against a backdrop of Lenin's tomb. Lenin's embalmed body seems a suitable symbol for a corrupt state caught in suspended animation, wrapped in a winding sheet of theoretical directives and political slogans. For the Christian the filled tomb also provides an interesting parody of the empty tomb in Jerusalem. The authenticity of Christianity's claims are found in the empty tomb. For seventy years Lenin's mausoleum became a totem for State centred religion. Latterly, Mikhail Gorbachev's encouragement of New Age religious movements in the Soviet Union provides another example of the substitutes for faith which socialist governments have tried to encourage or impose. Notwithstanding Marx's dictum about religion being the opium of the people, his heirs have had a pretty good stab at inventing their own religion. All the great tyrants of history - Nero, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot, Ceausescu - are examples of man making himself into God (which, incidentally, is the core of New Age thinking - see Chapter 10). False ego, power and wealth become a substitute for God. The suppression of the truth of the Risen Christ became an overwhelming priority of the Soviet State. Systematically, dissenting Christians were rounded up and treated appallingly. The hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church was filled with KGB agents and Communist officials, dissenters were sent to forced labour camps or put into psychiatric institutions. Although the Soviet authorities under Gorbachev appear to renounce some of the most distinctive features of Marxist-Leninism, including the belief that a religious faith necessarily blinds you to a correct understanding of the world, it would be absurd to pretend that there has yet been an irreversible shift. Gorbachev has bowed to the inevitable and taken a number of pragmatic decisions. Russian Christians point out for instance that (at the time of writing) the much-promised new laws guaranteeing religious freedom have yet to be enacted. Given their experiences since 1917 they can be forgiven for harbouring doubts. The brutal assassination of Father Alexandr Men in September 1990 illustrated how wellfounded are their concerns.3
Michael Bourdeaux, Varavva and Pronina