Light in the darkness
David ,Pryce-Jones
Moscow The most Stalinist building in Moscow is the
University, gigantically visible everywhere, so that nobody can miss the ideological nature of thought and instruction in the collective state. A short distance in front of the University is a terrace with a panoramic view of the city. On this Saturday of the Russian Easter, in the afternoon, dozens of women were passing that terrace, each carrying a box or a napkin with a cake in it. They were on their way to the nearby church or, to use the Soviet jargon, 'working church', of which there are about a score in Moscow. According to custom, the priest would bless their cakes.
'You see how old they are,' the Intourist guide said, as though speaking of incorrigibly backward natives. That is the official line. University sciences are held to have exposed and destroyed religion along with other opiums and superstitions from the Czarist era. The elder generation and the Orthodox Church are supposed to die a natural death together. Just to be on the safe side, virtually all the famous ancient churches and shrines throughout the country have long been closed or transformed into museums, complete with slogans and rather simple displays of atheism.
The women with the cakes, true enough, were old; dumpy figures in headscarves like their mothers and grandmothers before them. First they queued into the tiny church, to kiss the altar and light a candle. Then they processed outside to a table where the priest, a young man, swung an incense burner and holy water over the cakes. The sight of a Western camera considerably alarmed them. Photographs were not to be taken.
Celebrations proper were due to begin only at nine in the evening. There was no escaping the build-up. In the hotel, for instance, was an American couple: he with a white goatee and a pipe in the manner of
1910, she a Baptist minister who had been advised by their embassy that written per
mission was needed to attend the coming service. Not so, their Russian escort assured them, they had only to turn up and walk in. Given this conflict of evidence, they set off unhappily in a taxi in search of evangelical Baptists.
Towards eleven o'clock, people were converging in twos and threes to the working church nearest the hotel, behind Gorki Street, within perhaps half a mile of the Kremlin. The church was seventeenthcentury, in decent repair, its domes gilded. Lights within were bright, chanting could just be heard. But the doors had been closed already. The side entrance was blocked off by a semi-cirle of teenagers or students wearing red arm-bands proclaiming them to be druzhiniki, or volunteer activists and guards. They were under the control of someone more senior, in a leather coat, with grey fedora well pulled down. This would-be Humphrey Bogart made sure that nobody went in or out; occasionally he signalled to the boys and joked with them.
Round at the main entrance, the
druzhiniki had formed up in parallel lines. about twenty strong either side. AnybodY who wished to enter the church had to run the gauntlet of these arm-banded kids, who jostled them a little and jeered as well. One woman, and then others, had the courage to do so. Nobody young was admitted. Each time the doors opened, the congregation beyond could be seen to pack the church. The druzhiniki no doubt could argue that they were there to prevent the faithful Suffocating. Informally, in a wide ring around the church, were uniformed policemen with their vehicles. Jolly guffaws were als° exchanged between them and the druzhiniki.
The night was cold, almost freezing. Candles were on sale at a window of the church and everyone was buying them. Eventually a crowd of something like four to five hundred gathered between the two entrances, .8 candle in every hand. Next to me a pretty girl was holding the arm of a curly-headed twenty-year-old, her boy-friend perhaps. Both were praying under their breath. Oil, my other side was a man of about forty, and next to him a woman with eyes tight shut. Plenty of children, babies even, whole families born and educated to be nothing but scientific-minded Soviet citizens.
Without apparent reason, tension began to rise, the sickening instinct that a brawl is in the offing. Humphrey Bogart became much busier. Beefy and vacant in their showing' off, the druzhiniki were massing with expec tation. Of course it is not necessary to go to Moscow to witness ugly young thugs ot the sort — the difference was that they had the licence to enjoy their violence. Police walkie-takies bleeped in the back. ground. But a bell rang high and delicate, the men (though not the druzhiniki) remove.° their hatsand a quite different mood swept in as an archimandrite pitshed past HumphreY Bogart at the door, swung an incense burner over the heads below him, and proclairned that Christ had risen. With a loud voice the crowd joined in the responses. Tears trickled down the face of the woman with tight-shut eyes. A second, and then a third, priest, completed the ritual. At one o'clock, the service was still under way, though a few were drifting home, pausing before an jai, of the Virgin set into the church wall, an° leaving there another candle. The American and his wife had found their evangelical Baptists. No permission had been required, but it had been hard for, them too to enter because of the number 0.1 people. 'Nobody can say the church .11.1 Russia is dead, the congregation was five thousand at least,' they reported, 'very firm in their faith.' Some ten years ago, when Russian Jews were first known to be rear' firming their identity through the practice Of their religion, other denominations were bound to be doing the same, setting the example too. For how else in the dungeon, which is Russia today are tranquillity an° dignity to be experienced? How is the human spirit to be ordinarily expressed there except by a candle lit in the dark?
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