“When it comes to survival, maybe what’s most important is simple fidelity: not by evangelizing people directly but by developing honest relations with one another—not looking for whether one is good or bad, or judging them by their ideology,” says Kęska. “He was constantly observed by the secret police, parked right in front of his home. During the severely cold winters, he would bring them hot tea to warm them up. Because they were people, just like that.”
Making Grief Easier to Carry
Vakhtang Mikeladze is a well-known documentary filmmaker from the country of Georgia. He is advanced in age, but still filled with theatrical, old-world flair. Visiting him in his Moscow apartment involves raising more than a few glasses of Georgian brandy in sentimental toasts. It also takes an American visitor into a world of almost incomprehensible suffering.
Mikeladze’s father, Evgeni, was a famous orchestral conductor in Tbilisi when he somehow ran afoul of Stalin. In 1937, he was arrested, tortured, and shot by the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB. Vakhtang, then fifteen, and his seventeen-year-old sister were taken into custody under a law that mandated punishment for family members of “traitors to the fatherland.”
During our long, emotional conversation, Vakhtang spoke of the shame he carries with him still, but he did not reveal why until the end when, in tears, he told me about the night the secret police came for the Mikeladze teens.
“When they arrested my sister and me, we were completely scared,” he says. “They put us in the back of a truck. They put my aunt in the cab, with a soldier. When they went out of the building into the truck, they had this kind of closed courtyard. Everyone was out there watching and weeping.
“As we drove, my sister and I were sitting across from each other looking at one another. There was a soldier on either side of us. As we were driving along, out of nowhere different trucks were joining us on the highway. We became a long caravan of the arrested. When we realized all these other trucks were full of the arrested, she looked at me and smiled, and I smiled back. We realized that at least we weren’t alone.”
The tears flow freely now. The old man softly mutters, “I’m ashamed that I was glad at that moment.”
As painful as that memory is for Mikeladze, who would go on to spend many years in the gulag, it testifies to the importance of camaraderie amid travail. Father Kirill Kaleda tells a story about Saint Alexei Mechev, a Moscow priest who died in 1923. Earlier in his life, Father Alexei’s wife died of an illness, leaving him with six children to raise. Bereft and paralyzed, Father Alexei sought the advice of Father John of Kronstadt, a well-known Russian Orthodox priest who was canonized after his death in 1909. Father John told the mourning priest, “Join your grief with the grief of others, and then you will find it easier to carry.”
Father Alexei took the advice. He went on to become a renowned pastor, spiritual father, and counselor of the broken. When he died in 1923, the Bolshevik regime let Tikhon, the patriarch of Moscow, out of prison to celebrate Father Alexei’s funeral. Father Alexei’s son Sergei also became a priest. In 1944, Father Sergei was executed in prison by the Soviets for his faith. Both father and son are now canonized saints. Their icon sits above the fireplace in my living room.
College instructor Mária Komáromi sees so much loneliness among the students at her Budapest institution. She thinks about the communist years, when she and her late husband held small group meetings with young Christians in their Budapest apartment. Those sessions helped struggling youth so much, she remembers. Maybe something like that could do so again.
“The first step no doubt is to acknowledge this loneliness,” she says. “For young people, the fact that they have lots of social media friends conceals the problem. So we have to counteract that loneliness. That can be done by forming small communities around basically anything.”
Sir Roger Scruton, who helped Czech allies build the intellectual resistance, emphasizes the importance today of dissidents creating and committing to small groups—not just church communities, but clubs, singing groups, sports societies, and so forth. The point is to find something to draw you out of yourself, to discover your own worth in relation to others, and to learn how to accept the discipline that comes through accountability to others and a shared purpose. Indeed, Václav Benda, though a Christian, worked hard to bring his fellow Czechs of all creeds together for any purpose at all, if only to defy the fear and atomization that the totalitarian regime depended on to carry out its rule.
Komáromi agrees that we have to start somewhere in our rebellion against contemporary atomization. The individual standing alone against the machine will be crushed.
Organize Now, While You Can
Zofia Romaszewska is one of the true heroes of modern Poland. She and her late husband, Zbigniew, were academics and activists in the Solidarity trade-union movement. The couple joined the fight for liberty and human rights in the 1960s, when they hosted dissident meetings at their apartment. When the communist regime declared martial law in 1980 in an attempt to smash Solidarity, Romaszewska and her husband went into hiding, and founded the underground Solidarity radio station. She was eventually arrested, but amnestied after several months.
Today, at eighty, Romaszewska, now a grande dame of the anti-communist resistance, still retains the spark and tenacity of a street fighter. After five minutes of speaking with her in her Warsaw flat, it’s clear that any commissar faced with a firebrand
