Last week I wrote about volume I of The God of the Gulag, Jonathan Luxmoore’s study of the 70-year Communist persecution of Christians in Russia and Eastern Europe. Having now read volume II, “Martyrs in an Age of Secularism”, which roughly covers the period after the death of Stalin in 1953 until the collapse of Communism in 1989-1990, I asked Luxmoore: what had inspired him to undertake such a long and often harrowing labour?
He tells me there are four reasons. He thinks that the full story of the persecutions has never been told before – only accounts within individual countries. Again, he wants readers to understand that recent martyrs of Communism are no different from those in the early Church who had suffered under the Caesars; “these are modern figures like St Perpetua”. He also feels that attempts to conceal or play down Communism’s violent past should be challenged and brought into the open. And he thinks it important to record the changes in Communist methods during these decades, which required different kinds of Christian witness.
