As we prepare to sit down with Father Kirill around a kitchen table laden with herring, salads, cheeses, breads, and other delicious things for the day’s pilgrims to eat, I tell the priest about what we have just heard from the old man: Butovo could happen again.
“Unfortunately, he’s right,” says the priest. “I could clearly see that young people I was talking to today know nothing about what happened here. When I started talking about very simple things, I could see they knew nothing.”
These are young people who live close enough to the Butovo field to have heard the sound of the gunshots back in the Great Terror. The signs of the mass murder here have been preserved in granite for all to see. Yet if not for Father Kirill visiting their classrooms to tell this story, the great-grandchildren of the murdered generation would have minds untroubled by the memory of mass murder.
Father Kirill was thirty-three years old when the Soviet Union fell. This man who grew up in the culture of official lies, and who has given his life to maintaining the historical memory of Bolshevik crimes, emphasizes that propaganda did not die with the USSR.
“Despite the fact that there’s so much information available, we see that so much propaganda is also available. Think of what’s happening now with Ukraine,” he says, referring to the armed conflict between Russian-backed separatists and the Kiev government.
“We have seen the way TV changed us Russians from thinking of them as our family to being our enemies,” he says. “The same methods from the communist era are being used. People today have a responsibility to search out more information than what they are offered on TV, and to know how to look critically on what they’re reading and seeing. That’s what is different now than before.”
His point was that the cultural memories Russians have of closeness with Ukrainians are being erased thanks to propaganda.
As we talk, a woman comes in from the cold and takes a seat at the table. She is Marina Nikonovna Suslova, the Moscow city official in charge of rehabilitating the names of political prisoners. She is passionate about the work of preserving the memory of what communism did to the oppressed. She grows visibly impatient with the priest’s modesty in our interview and leaps into the conversation.
“This memorial would not exist if not for your faith!” she exclaims to the priest. Then she turns to me.
“Father Kirill is a historical figure in Russia, and he will remain one, because it was his faith that allowed him to create this memorial complex,” she says. “It was inspired by his faith, specifically. This historical complex not only gives a different view of history, it gives a different feel of history. And it’s telling a truth that needs to be told.”
It is—and it is telling that truth not only in words but also embodying it in place and ritual.
See, Judge, Act
Memory, historical and otherwise, is a weapon of cultural self-defense. History is not just what is written in textbooks. History is in the stories we tell ourselves about who we were and who we are. History is embedded in the language we use, the things we make, and the rituals we observe. History is culture—and so is Christianity. To be indifferent or even hostile to tradition is to surrender to those in power who want to legitimate a new social and political order. To perceive the critical importance of memory and the role culture plays in preserving and transmitting it is critically important for Christianity’s survival.
We have to tell our stories—in literature, film, theater, and other media—but we must also manifest cultural memory in communal deeds—in mourning and in celebration, in solemn remembrance and festal joy. The crowd of Russians who stood at Butovo field in the cold, wet autumn weather to read out the names of the murdered—theirs was a poignant act of cultural memory. So were the theatrical performances of Wojtyła and his troupe behind closed doors in occupied Poland. Seminars on literature, history, philosophy, and theology that dissidents held in their apartments to help one other remember who they were—these are things Christians in our post-Christian societies should revive. Classical Christian schooling, both in institutions and in home settings, is a great way to revive and preserve cultural memory. Less academically, we can celebrate festivals, make pilgrimages, observe holy-day practices, pray litanies, perform concerts, hold dances, learn and teach traditional cooking—any kind of collective deed that connects the community with its shared sacred and secular history in a living way is an act of resistance to an ethos that says the past doesn’t matter.
Less formal, everyday acts within the home are more powerful than you might think. The way Christians talk about God and weave the stories of the Bible and church history into the fabric of domestic life is of immense significance, precisely because these things are so ordinary. This is training children and parents alike in cultural memory. The language Christians use—the words, the metaphors—matters, as does the way we pray together and the symbols we employ to embody and transmit meaning across the generations. We may not be able to communicate that meaning to a world gone insane, but as Orwell knew, simply by staying sane when everyone else is mad, we may hope to convey the human heritage.
CHAPTER SEVEN Families Are Resistance Cells
Family is where we first learn to love others. If we are lucky, it is also where we first learn how to live in truth.
The loosening of family ties and of traditional
