Looking for a light in the Soviet tunnel

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE
IS THERE a "light" in today's world? Does truth shine forth, or are we plunged in darkness? This is a question today's Christians may well pose. And if there is truth, and light, which developments of modern politics belong to this category?
Does Gorbachev's muchheralded "thaw", for example? I personally have great difficulty in believing that the man is being 100 per cent honest in all his proclamations — and even if he is, by the very nature of the Communist State, his changes would bring about an end to the system that controls the Soviet Union now.
Remove a strong police, remove forced labour camps. (upon which the whole of the Soviet economy is based), introduce democratic elections, and the whole house of cards will fall. Because the point of a system such as the Soviet one, is that it is based on power.
Perhaps Gorbachev — who of course is leagues ahead of tyrants like Stalin — can slowly ease off the pressure, very gradually clean up a few corners of the Soviet arena. But no overnight sweeping reforms can be hoped for: a dictatorship such as the Soviet one has never existed before — covering from books to words.
I met Stalin once. I was working for the Guardian then, and was based in Moscow. I remember that I attended one of those Politburo meetings. He entered the room, and everyone began to applaud. I noticed that there were two policemen studying their watches during the applause — and I couldn't understand what they were doing. Then the policemen lifted their hands and the applause stopped: Stalin was to have exactly seven minutes' clapping — no more no less. With a society like that, you'd have to raze it to the ground, before anything changes.
I also had the pleasure to meet, and get to know, Svetlana, Stalin's daughter. She decided to leave her homeland and came to England — this was more than 20 years ago. She wrote me a marvellous letter, describing herself as a "fan" — my wife and I invited her to visit. We grew to be very fond of her sensitive, strong, obviously a woman who had lived through many sorrows. And in Svetlana there was present that spirituality — or at least an echo of it — that is so remarkable in the Russians.
They are a terribly religious people, deep down. I remember Solzhenitsyn saying that there was a greater Christianity in the USSR than in the USA. He told ine that during his years in the Gulag Archipelago, in the labour camp there, the man who slept in the bunk above him constantly taking out a tiny slip of paper and reading it — before sleeping, sometimes during the day. Solzhenitsyn noticed how this fellow prisoner seemed so cheered by whatever he was reading from the scrap of paper. Finally, one day, Solzhenitsyn asked the man what he was reading: it turned out to be words from the Gospels.
I think that in order to fully appreciate the potential the Soviets have for a deep religious spirit, one must remember just how much suffering took place in Russia, among Russians, from the beginning of time. And it is such suffering that is likely, in the end to give them back their faith. A faith more timetested than our own.
I remember one episode while I was staying in Moscow: we were filming inside a supposedly abandoned Orthodox church. Because the building had not been lived in for years, there were flocks of pigeons up near the ceiling, behind doors, above the altar ... everywhere. One of our film crew began to make barking noises — to scare off the pigeons. And then, as if the skies had opened, down came flying a couple of black-clad baboushkas — old Russian women — who screamed at us and waved us away: they didn't want such blasphemous noises in their holy place, even though it was supposedly abandoned and deserted.
One of the great ironies of our time, then, is that in this land where Christianity is forcibly banished, it is most likely to flourish. And in England, one wonders, will the religious spirit start afresh? Probably not. After all, here our minds and visions are cluttered by goods, alternative lifestyles, greed, success, In the Soviet Union, the only realm one can aspire towards is the Christian one there is no house on the Riviera, no mink coat to hope for.