(The Nationalist, 1 April 2005)
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin was a leader in the Bolshevik coup of October 1917. He was editor of Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, and a member of the Politburo. He wrote on economics and social science. One day in April 1930, he went to Kiev in the Ukraine to address a gathering on the topic of atheism. He spoke for an hour, throwing every argument he could find against belief in God, adding insults for good measure. At the end, he asked if there were any questions. There was silence. He looked from left to right and waited. Still silence.
Then a man rose from the audience, walked forward to the platform, went to the microphone, and shouted into it, ‘Krustos vos kress!’ (Christ is risen!) This was the Easter greeting of the Russian Orthodox Church, and had been used for centuries. It was familiar to everyone in the hall. En masse the crowd rose as one and shouted out the response, ‘Krustos vos kress!’ with a roar that sounded like the rumble of thunder.
Bukharin was later accused of having plotted to kill Lenin and Stalin, and was executed in 1938.
Alexander Kerensky became prime minister of Russia after the revolution of February 1917. In October 1967, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik coup, he said, ‘The future of Russia will not be decided by the events of the last fifty years, but by the deeper spiritual traditions of the nation’.
The Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave an example of that tradition from his days as a prisoner of Stalin’s, ‘At a quiet station called Torbeyevo,… I caught sight of a small peasant woman in the usual shabby clothing…. Suddenly the prisoners who were lying on the top bunks, sat up to attention. Large tears were streaming from the woman’s eyes. Having made out our silhouettes… she lifted a small, work-calloused hand and blessed us with the sign of the cross, again and again. Her diminutive face was wet with tears. As the train started to move again, she still went on making the sign of the cross until she was lost to view’.
Peter and Judas. Both betrayed Jesus: Peter denied three times that he knew him; Judas sold him for the price of a slave (not only sold him, but sold him cheap). Both were sorry: Peter wept bitterly; Judas said, ‘I have sinned in betraying innocent blood’. After that, they differed: Peter came back, Judas turned away. One asked for forgiveness, and received it. The other seemed to think forgiveness was impossible and went and hanged himself. When we sin, how do we respond? As Peter, or as Judas, as Bukharin, or as the peasant woman?