Stricken by grief over the spiritual desolation and resulting alcoholism ravaging the Soviet Union, Father Dmitry grew increasingly bold in his evangelism. He began giving bold sermons in his Moscow parish, homilies that brought Christian teaching to bear on real-life problems. Word spread that there was a priest unafraid to speak to the real suffering of the people. Crowds began coming to hear the prophetic cleric. When the institutional church, which was under KGB control, ordered Father Dmitry to stop using homilies to stir up congregations, he continued his talks at home.
In his 2014 book about Father Dmitry, The Last Man in Russia, journalist Oliver Bullough quotes an atheist saying that after hearing the priest preach, “the immorality of Soviet society, its inhumanity and corruption, its lack of a moral code or credible ideals, means that Christ’s teaching comes through to those who it reaches as a shining contrast. It stresses the value of the individual, of humanness, forgiveness, gentleness, love.”3
Another witness said that “when Father Dmitry answered our questions publicly, it was like a mouthful of water.” The priest stressed to his audiences that they needed to cultivate hope that tomorrow can be better, and that they must embrace the suffering and love them into healing. Bullough says that in 1973, when Father Dmitry’s talks became known all over Moscow, the priest drew atheists, intellectuals, Christians of all denominations, and even Jews and Marxists.
Why did they come? Because they lived in a total system that insisted that it had all the answers to life’s questions. But the people, they were completely miserable, and lost, and in pain. They knew it was all a lie, because they were living within that dark lie. They were drawn to people who looked like they were living in the light of truth.
Alexander Ogorodnikov was a celebrated Soviet youth leader who, having become disillusioned by communism, devoted his passion to serving the church by creating independent discussion groups. In our Moscow meeting, he tells me that at one of his seminars there appeared an elderly writer who sat listening to the young Christians—every single one of them had been atheists from good Soviet families—talking about the faith. The visitor said not a word.
“Finally he stood up and said that he was the son of a high official of the tsar. He said, ‘Brothers, you have no idea what you are doing. If just ten of you had been in Saint Petersburg in 1917, the Revolution would not have happened,’” recalls Ogorodnikov.
“That man had already been through the gulag,” he continues. “He felt welcome with us. We had a really, really brotherly atmosphere in the seminars. Those seminars were like a bonfire where people could come and warm up their frozen Orthodox hearts. This was the blood that flowed in our veins. This was our confession of faith.”
Viktor Popkov was one of the disillusioned young Soviets who had found his way into the tiny Christian movement of the time. I sit down with Popkov, an Orthodox Christian, in a kitchen in central Moscow. In the early 1970s, Popkov had no interest in faith. “I was just living in a swamp, trying to find just a little piece of dry land on which to stand,” he says.
Nothing was real about life under communism. The state’s control was total. What led Popkov to seek fellowship with Christians was reading The Stranger, the celebrated 1942 novel by Albert Camus, the French existentialist. Though Camus was an atheist, the novel compelled the young Russian living in an atheist state to look for Christ.
“The question stood before me: What is the point of living?” he tells me. “If Christ is real, what is that supposed to mean for me? That was my point of departure from Soviet life—and I know a lot of people who found similar points of departure.”
Slowly, Popkov felt himself drawn to church. The local Orthodox priest didn’t want to talk to him. If the government found out that he had been speaking to a potential convert, the priest could have been sacked. Popkov heard through the Moscow grapevine about groups of people coming together to talk about Christianity. Unfortunately, if he’d heard about it, the KGB usually had as well.
If you came to the meetings anyway, the KGB would pressure your parents and teachers to dissuade you from the faith, Popkov remembers. It was hard to deal with, “but at the same time, you gain experience of a different life. In this experience of faith and this encounter with Christ, you receive a new feeling, and you know that you would not go back to how you used to be for anything. You are willing to endure anything they throw at you.”
“You can’t really prepare for it,” he went on. “To have a living connection to Christ, it’s like falling in love. You suddenly feel something you haven’t felt before, and you’re ready to do something you’ve never done before.”
For Viktor Popkov, that meant enduring years of harassment from the secret police, culminating in a 1980 prison sentence.
“Maybe this will sound strong,” he says, “but the principles and the things that you confess, you need to be ready to die for them—and only then will you have the strength to resist. I don’t see any other way.”
This truth is what the Romanian Orthodox priest George Calciu proclaimed to the youth in Bucharest in one of his 1978 Lenten homilies—a sermon series that earned him a second stint in prison:
Go, young man, and tell this news to all. Let the light of your angelic face shine in the light of the Resurrection—for today the angel in you . . . has overcome the world in you. Tell those who until now have oppressed your divine soul: “I believe in the Resurrection,” and you will see them coil in fear, for your faith has overcome them. They will fret and shout
