Make the Parallel Polis into Sanctuary Cities
Families and religious fellowships were places of retreat. So were underground educational seminars. These things were part of a communal concept that one prominent dissident called the “parallel polis.”
Under communism, Czech mathematician and human rights activist Václav Benda knew that there was no place in the public square for noncommunists to have a say over how the country was to be governed. Communists held a monopoly on politics, on the media, and on the institutions of Czech life. But Benda refused to accept that dissenters had no choice but to resign themselves to surrender.
He came up with the idea of a parallel polis—an alternative set of social structures within which social and intellectual life could be lived outside of official approval. The parallel polis was a grassroots attempt to fight back against totalitarianism, which mandated, in Benda’s words, “the abandonment of reason and learning [and] the loss of traditions and memory.”9
“Totalitarian power has extended the sphere of politics to include everything, even the faith, the thinking and the conscience of the individual,” he writes. “The first responsibility of a Christian and a human being is therefore to oppose such an inappropriate demand of the political sphere, ergo to resist totalitarian power.”
A key institution of the parallel polis was the seminar held in private homes. In these events, scholars would lecture on forbidden subjects—history, literature, and other cultural topics necessary to maintaining cultural memory. Benda’s parallel polis was not merely a federation of discussion groups biding their time by talking about intellectual and artistic topics. Rather, its driving purpose was first, cultural preservation in the face of annihilation, and by doing so, the cultivation of the seeds of renewal.
Sir Roger Scruton was one of the few Western academics who participated in these seminars, and who even helped establish an underground university that granted degrees in secret. Other prominent Western intellectuals, including philosopher Charles Taylor and literary critic Jacques Derrida, joined the fight. Derrida, like Scruton, was once detained by the Czech secret police and declared to be an “undesirable person.”
When he and his British academic colleagues began to visit communist Czechoslovakia in the late 1970s, Scruton tells me, they were astonished to discover that the Czechs “were determined to cling to their cultural inheritance because they thought that it contained the truth, not just about their history, but the truth about their soul, about what they fundamentally are. That was the thing that the communists couldn’t take away.”
Scruton and his team discovered that the Czech students were starving for knowledge, and not just theoretical knowledge. They wanted to learn so they could know how to live, especially under a dictatorship of lies. Along those lines, in Notes from Underground, his 2014 novel set in Czechoslovakia of the 1980s, Scruton’s protagonist, a young man named Jan, finds his way into Prague dissident circles. His guide tells him what to expect:
And he added that there would be special seminars from time to time, with visitors from the West, who would inform us of the latest scholarship, and help us to remember. “To remember what?” I asked. He looked at me long and hard. “To remember what we are.”10
These seminars forged what Scruton, quoting Czech dissident Jan Patočka, described as “the solidarity of the shattered.” They were an act of responsibility by the old—those who still had their memories of what was real—toward the young. The formal institutions of Czech life—universities first among them—could no longer be trusted to tell the truth and to transmit the cultural memories that told Czechs who they were. But the task had to be done, or as Milan Hübl said, the Czech people would disappear.
Bear Communal Witness to Future Generations
There is a field in the far southern reaches of Moscow called the Butovo Firing Range. Under Soviet rule, it belonged to the secret police, the NKVD, who used it for target practice. During the height of Stalin’s Great Terror, in a fourteen-month period between 1937 and 1938, the NKVD killed 20,761 political prisoners in that field—most of them with a shot to the back of the head—and buried them there.
In 1995, four years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church took possession of the Butovo field. Today, there is a tiny wooden chapel on the site and a large stone church nearby dedicated to the martyrs of the Soviet period. The field itself is a national memorial site in which a monument to the dead stands, the name of each carved onto a granite wall, with the date of his or her death.
On October 30, all Russia observes a national Day of Remembrance for victims of political violence. Here at Butovo field, Russians gather on the site to read the names of the murdered aloud. There I stand in the clearing surrounded by bare trees, wet snow falling on a somber crowd of heavily bundled Russians, observing this ritual of collective memory. After a while, my translator Matthew Casserly and I wander over to an exhibit on the site’s periphery, where the story of Butovo field is told in Russian.
An old man wearing a flat cap overhears Matthew translating the Russian for me. He sidles over, introduces himself as Vladimir Alexandrovich, and asks what brings us to Butovo today. Matthew tells him that his American friend is here to learn about the communist era, because émigrés in the West see signs of its potential rebirth there.
Like what? asks Vladimir Alexandrovich. I tell him about people afraid of losing their jobs for dissenting from left-wing ideology.
“Losing jobs?” he says. “That’s a bad sign. It can happen again, you know. Young people don’t know this, and they don’t want to know. History always repeats, one way or the other.”
Matthew and I make our way over to the large wooden cabin that serves as the national memorial’s office. Father Kirill Kaleda, whom you met earlier in this story, is the Russian Orthodox
