He told them he was anxious to try to help Christians in Russia, and explained about the document which he had received in London. They asked who wrote the letter. Two women, he replied. What were their names? Varavva and Pronina. Bourdeaux later recalled that the silence which followed was total. The two women he was talking to were Varavva and Pronina. Six months earlier they had travelled nearly 1,300 kilometers to try to find a foreigner. They had met the French schoolteacher. Now, amazingly, they had met Bourdeaux. 'Be our voice, speak out where we cannot,' they begged him. 'From that moment,' he says, 'the direction of my life was set. I had to find some way of serving the persecuted Church full time.' Over the years which followed, Keston built up a reputation for disseminating extensive and reliable information. It has built up a formidable information chain across Eastern and Central Europe and, along with the BBC World Service, it became a highly valued and respected lifeline. In the 1980s, taking some of his inspiration from Keston and from the 35s - the Women's Campaign for Soviet Jewry - Danny Smith, a Christian journalist and campaigner, began to try to galvanise Evangelical Christians into taking action over particular cases of persecution. He subsequently documented the cases of the Siberian Seven, Valeri Barinov and Raoul Wallenberg.5Through this work we met one another and in 1985 established the parliamentary arm of the Jubilee Campaign. Since then over one hundred British MPs, from all parties and denominational backgrounds, have sponsored individual victims of religious persecution. One of the hidden spin-offs of the campaign was revealed through some unexpected ecumenism when one Ulster Unionist MP was asked to take up the case of a Catholic dissident in Romania. This he dutifully and successfully did, even though some eyebrows were initially raised when he asked local congregations of Presbyterians in Northern Ireland to pray for the man. By 1983 Michael Bourdeaux became convinced that it was only a matter of time before the Soviet Union disintegrated. He said:
Stalinism delivered a body blow to Marxism from which it will never recover. Upon the ruins of Soviet ideology something one day will be rebuilt. No one can yet forecast what that will be. Nationalism could in certain areas become explosive enough to force change, but by its very nature it is divisive among the many peoples who inhabit the Soviet Union. Christianity does not overtly contain as much power, yet its inner strength is more cohesive. Furthermore, even though it is sometimes linked with nationalism (for example, the Russian Orthodox Church or the Catholic Church in Lithuania) it has the power at the same time often to transcend such considerations.