In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

C H A P T E R T H R E E The Path of Faith zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcba The 1960s Generation Living in the Soviet Union, and always being bothered by the constant lie, you had the sensation that there must be a great deal that they are simply hiding. I was led to a sense of readiness, readiness to believe in something else. I didn't know what that something was, but the readiness was there. —Osip, Jerusalem 1998 For those Jews in those days thefact that we were Christians was not an issue. Most of them had been in Stalins camps. Christians were not enemies. They were all allies. In those days we were a minority ofoutcasts. —Michael, New York 1998 Stalin's death brought forth a very acute crisis in Soviet ideology and in the spiritual body of the nation as well. —Yuri Glazov, The Russian Mind O NE C O L D S P R I N G DAY I N 1993, the dissident religious author Zoya Krakhmal'nikova asked to speak with me about her latest project: the formation of an international association she called "A Christian Alternative to the Threat of Russian Fascism." KrakhmaFnikova is among those who rediscovered Solovyov for the post-Stalin generation, and she has come to focus more and more on the Russian philosopher's defense of the Jews. I was thus curious to hear how she would speak about what she saw as the current betrayal of Solovyov's values by Russian nationalists, both within and outside the Church. She took me into the study of the crowded apartment she then shared with her daughter's family, and, offering me a cassette recorder, began to tell me about her early years as a Christian, and her current attitude toward the official Russian Orthodox Church.1 52 The 1960s Generation zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYX S3 Zoya, who is the mother of a good friend of mine in Moscow, had always been a forbidding presence, talking in whispered tones to cassocked clergy in one room as I chatted idly with her daughter about work or children in another. I realized that I knew next to nothing about her background . After some prodding, she revealed that she was born in Kharkov' in 1929 to Jewish parents that she characterized as "indifferent" to religion , although not exactly atheists.zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLK We were Russian intelligenty [members of the intelligentsia], she offered, as though this self-identification required no further explanation. Perhaps she was right, for in the decades surrounding the Revolution, as in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s explored here, Jews made up a disproportionately large percentage of the so-called Russian intelligentsia. In the effort to create a new, communal society with opportunities for all, many Jews, like Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein), abandoned not only religion, but also any markers of their past, individual or ethnic identity. Zoya, the future dissident, received an advanced degree in philology and quickly joined the Soviet Union of Writers. Already an officially published critic, she began to participate in the Moscow dissident movement in the 1960s, however, and soon turned to Orthodox Christianity. Over time, she was influential in bringing a number of Russian Jewish intellectuals to the Orthodox Church, including her then-husband, the critic and writer Felix Svetov. Zoya was silent in the interview about details of the baptism, and when I returned to her in 1997, she was distracted and wanted mostly to provide me with contacts in Israel, where she had recently traveled. She had aged considerably, and I chose not to probe too hard. Felix, however, related this story to me: Zoya was thefirst [in the group] to be baptized. A certainfriend showed up, severalyears younger than we are, a film director. He was a very talented man with a complicated history, who came to Moscow andfor some reason became a believer. He didnt exactly come to the Church, though; his spiritual development was all very complicated. An individual. We had conflicts with him on this later. Nonetheless, he read a great deal, proselytized, and affected many people. He was a very strong missionary among us. Around that time, there was also a certain priest: Father Dmitry Dudko. Dudko, born in 1922, was first arrested and sent to the Gulag in 1948, as a daring student at the Moscow Theological Academy. After more than eight years in the camps, he was released and "rehabilitated" in 1956 as part of the post-Stalin cultural thaw, and was finally...

Share