Chapter One

“ Icicles hung like stalactites from wet gutters of the carriage as I nervously drew back the cabin window curtain of the Helsinki-Leningrad train and peeked out into the snowstorm. Darkness had already fallen as the train screeched to a halt at Luzaika, the first stop inside Russia.

Snow, as thick as goose down, was tumbling helter skelter out of the gray, leaden sky, but still, through the murkiness, I could make out the figure of a Red Army soldier, his breath, with every exhale, puffing out white vapor into the below zero air. Snow was stacking up like a pyramid on his gray fur hat, and already covered a badge with the hammer-and-sickle on a globe with a red star above it signifying the authority of the Communist party, pinned on it.

The hand-picked frontier guard stood motionless, wrapped in a heavy gray trench coat, a thick brown leather belt also bearing an insignia of the hammer-and-sickle, girded his waist. Strapped on his back was a Kalashnikov automatic. Then I spotted other troops all dressed the same, and fluttering in the wind was the Soviet flag, a red field with a yellow hammer and sickle with a star above it.

What a welcoming party to what was called the "Iron Curtain" by Winston Churchill and later, the "Evil Empire" by Ronald Reagan. Thoughts of nuclear missiles, a never-ending Gulag that had swallowed up untold thousands of courageous Christians and other dissidents, the KGB, Lenin and Stalin, whirled about in my mind.

This trip came into being. while I was studying at Bible School in Finland. It was there that I first heard about the plight of persecuted Christians in the Soviet Union. I learned that the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, led by Vladimir llyich Lenin, had set in motion forces that had caused cataclysmic changes in world history.

Christians, I was told, were deeply affected by the Revolution as "dialectical materialism sought to rule out the supernatural." Religion was subjected to ridicule, oppression and rigid restriction. Since the revolution, a generation of Russians have been told that "... both Moses and Jesus are mythical characters" (The Unabridged Soviet Encyclopedia, Volume 5, p. 157).

I was interested to see if this suppression had erased all remnants of religion so when a trip to Russia was announced, I immediately signed up. l had read somewhere that Alexander Solzhenitzyn, the courageous dissident, had said in the Gulag Archipelago, "I myself see Christianity today as the only living spiritual force capable of undertaking the spiritual healing of Russia."

I desperately wanted to be part of that healing. Of course we now know that the Church has survived and our party were to take in contraband Bibles for the underground believers who could not buy them for themselves. They were just not available in bookstores. The year was 1971 and this was my first adventure behind the formidable barbed-wire border that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Being a Canadian citizen, I had never been confronted by an armed border guard before. The U.S./Canadian frontier between British Columbia and Washington state was, up until then, my only reference point. I had crossed the "Peace Arch" at the Washington State-British Columbia crossing many times and the officers had always given me a friendly smile and a "welcome" or "bon voyage."

As I continued staring through the train' s window at the sullen Russian soldier, I silently asked myself, "Why would anyone want to carry a weapon like that at the border? There's nothing to shoot at." I was soon to discover that everyone from the West was considered by the Soviets to be an intelligence agent of a foreign government.

We had been well briefed by our guide, Raili Väisänen, who had traveled to the Soviet Union on many occasions. She had said that the Soviet border guards were infamous for their thoroughness in searching tourists.

It was like a scene from a spy movie - and the guards did come in from the cold. Unwelcome perspiration beaded my forehead as the soldier boarded the train and began to examine our passports and then roughly rummage through our luggage with gauche manners. I silently echoed the prayer of Brother Andrew, the author of God's Smuggler who once said, "Lord, in my luggage l have Scripture that I want to take to Your children across this border. You made blind eyes see. Now, I pray make seeing eyes blind. Do not let the guards see those things You do not want them to see."

The Lord did! I could hardly breathe as the man meticulously went through our belongings, but fortunately nothing untoward was found. After what seemed like an eternity, the soldier that was conducting the search left our carriage and moved on to check out other travelers. "He really knows how to make us feel welcome," I whispered to one of my colleagues. He smiled and said nothing.

Our eventual destination was to be Petrozavodsk, the capital city of the Autonomous Soviet Republic of Karelia, located in the far northwest of Russia, close to the Arctic Circle on the shores of Lake 0nega. The republic then had a population of about 1 million and portions of it had been seized by Finland during World War II and then recaptured by the Soviets by the end of the war. The trip from Helsinki would take some 36 hours of grueling travel. To get to this remote destination, tourists were forced to ride the night train first to Leningrad and then, after a day in this famous city, could that evening go on to Petrozavodsk. According to the train schedule, there were numerous departures from the showpiece city of Leningrad, created by Peter the Great as an “open window to Europe,” but Western tourists were only permitted to travel during the hours of darkness, presumably to prevent them seeing the countryside, something I considered to be the ultimate in paranoia. There were reasons for this which included poverty and their military sensitivity. They were forty years behind the West and they didn’t want to show that to the outsiders.” (continued)