People say that if you take one slab out of a dam it can never be put back and eventually the whole structure will collapse. So it certainly was with the Berlin Wall.
I have often been asked, 'Was there ever a time before the wall came down that the demise of communism seemed certain to you?', to which the answer is yes: I had predicted this more than once in public.
So when did I first know that communism could not survive? By the time of the election of Pope John Paul II in October 1978 or the aftermath of his first visit back to Poland the next year I was certain, but already had strong doubts before then.
I had lived in Moscow as a student for the academic year 1959-60 (a member of the first-ever such British Council exchange). I did not then have any intimation about the collapse of communism, imminent or long-term, but rather the experience filled me with foreboding and pessimism. I could not even forecast with confidence the survival of either evangelicals or Russian Orthodoxy, so violent were the inroads of atheist oppression into the lives of believers. I did, however, manage to become the first person to communicate to the West the extent of this persecution and it was on the basis of this experience that eventually Keston Institute (as it now is) was born.
Baptists get organised
From 1961, with incredible fortitude and organisation, Russian Baptists began to gather systematic information about their opposition to Nikita Krushchev's renewed persecution. This was under the very noses of the KGB who dumped any activists they caught straight into prison. Already these evangelicals exhibited an indomitable spirit. Tragically for them, and also for the integrity of Christian leaders in the West, not least fellow Baptists, communist propaganda systematically vilified them and almost no-one took seriously what they had to say. The official Baptist leaders in Moscow denied the facts of the persecution and impugned the integrity of those who reported it (and of those few in the West who listened to the voice of the oppressed).
However, from 1965 a few isolated voices within the Russian Orthodox Church began to make themselves heard; the issue of religious persecution and opposition to it began to edge itself on to the agenda of international Christian organisations and political debate.
The losing side
It was about ten years later that I became convinced that communism was not going to win the war it had declared against religion. If the oppressors were going to lose, given their massive control over media, education, the KGB and every instrument of state, would the resulting defeat not have an impact on their own self-belief?
Information began to filter through to Keston from Lithuania which, for me, put the opposition to communism into a new perspective. The country, though ten times smaller in population than Poland, had been just as solidly Catholic before its subjugation to communism. I had never been there, nor did I speak the language in which most of the information was reaching us, but Lithuanians began translating some of the most important documents into Russian. When I read them I was bowled over by their detail and the vigour of their defence of religious liberty (and by extension of the integrity of their country in the face of the oppressor).
My resulting book, Land of Crosses: the Struggle for Religious Freedom in Lithuania, 1939-1978, was published in 1979. The first words of the Preface are:
'My first acknowledgement must be to the Lithuanian people, whose outstanding qualities - loyalty to their heritage and dedication to their beliefs, despite the most systematic persecution over the decades - inspired me in the first place to tell the story of their faith.'
Ready to sacrifice
Perhaps one factor more than any other had impressed me: that children, educated entirely under the communist system and never having experienced the pre-1939 freedom, were as ready to sacrifice themselves for their country and their church as their parents. I devoted a whole chapter to the 'Battle for the minds of the Young' and the evidence showed communism on the defensive. Children were prepared to stand up for their faith in the face of the ridicule of their teachers and sometimes their classmates. There were significant numbers of people in their 20s among those tried for their 'political' activities. Nijole Sadunaite, the story of whose trial, imprisonment and testimony in letters smuggled out of labour camp was to reverberate around the world, was born only in 1938.
The abiding loyalty of these people to Rome, the symbol of their faith, shone out in many documents, but the election of the Polish Pope came just as I was completing the work and too late to incorporate its significance into the text. However, I wrote in the Conclusion of this 'tiny nation...(whose people) have a message for the world.' I continued: 'The astonishing election of Cardinal Wojtyka as Pope John Paul II in 1978 makes it certain that much more will happen faster than could possibly have been envisaged.'
18 years ago I lacked the full vision of what would happen, but clearly felt that events of unimagined significance could unfold.
The book sank like a stone in a pond, but without making the ripples: a single review in the Church Times and then silence. There was a warm commendation from the Lithuanian community in exile, but also an intensification of the accusations of those who felt that I was hopelessly out of touch with reality and a troublemaker to boot.
Yet there were some who saw that Keston's work was making a genuine contribution. It was little short of miraculous that I was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1984. This was the opportunity to deliver a summation of my world view. I could now see, perhaps only in dim outline, the collapse of the Soviet empire looming ahead:
'When I look at the complex ethnic map of the Soviet Union I see Lithuanians, I see Jews, I see Ukrainians and Armenians, yes, I see a myriad of Muslims and of Russians. I don't see 'Soviets' and when I hear some such phrases as 'the aspirations of the Soviet people' I know that we're in the realm of 'newspeak'. I also see an empire, no less real because there's no sea between Moscow and its subject people. I see an empire in the process of decay, because there's no binding loyalty which will keep it together. The Red Army, not Marxism-Leninism, provides its cement.'
The rest is history
In five years the rest, as they say, would be history. No, of course I did not foresee how soon or by precisely what process communism would collapse: least of all did I predict a Gorbachev who would forbid the troops to shoot at the removal of the first brick from the Wall. I would, if pressed, have anticipated a bloodbath, perhaps right up to 1988, when the Russian Orthodox Church celebrated its millennium and I was able to witness, during those unforgettable summer weeks in Russia, the religious fervour that gripped a nation after seven decades of persecution. That there was almost no bloodshed in Eastern Europe was due in no small measure to the almost universal hatred of communism proving to be more deep-seated than even I had envisaged.
So it was that those of us who had been branded as 'anti-communist' in the Christian arena, and therefore voices to be ignored in the development of international relations, proved to have been right.
However, this was not the time for triumphalism. There was immediate work to be done: not so much perestroika of our own organisation, for after 1988 we were ready, but setting up a web of new links with the aim of helping the churches of Eastern Europe to reconstruct their lives. Perhaps even we did not appreciate the full extent to which the blight of communism had poisoned the very core of Christian life in so many places: among Protestants in Eastern Germany, for example, just as seriously as within the Russian Orthodox Church or among the Baptists of what would soon be the 'former' Soviet Union.
Moscow office
Even before the demise of the Soviet Union we had set up an office in Moscow. We had to end the isolation of our original Kentish home: the move to Oxford, where there would be better contacts and where the church history contained in our archives would be more accessible, was essential, though the financial cost of this almost broke us.
Today we are established in our new home, located in the most strategic place to undertake the tasks in hand: publishing information, financing theological scholarships, advising governments as well as churches. Still no other organisation in the world approaches these tasks in the systematic way which is the Keston tradition. We undertake them with only a third of the staff which we used to have, but firm in the knowledge that the work is blessed by God. Our very survival has proved it.
Michael Bourdeaux is the Director of the Keston Institute, 4 Park Town, Oxford OX2 6SH.
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