The Russians' Secret: What Christians Today Would ... - GOD'S WORD

2Snow, Fire, and GoldRussia—strange and wild stories of murder, villages burning, wheat fieldsripening on the steppe, long trains of rickety wagons, and horses flee­ing in themud, winter in Siberia—even though we had heard them before, our wonder aschildren grew while we listened to the grandmother talk.The grandmother lived far from Russia, in Canada. After the Bolshevik revolutionand her husband’s death, she escaped from Borosenko, in the Ukraine, with herchildren. When she fell off a wagon she broke her back. Now she was tiny andstooped half over. Others of the family had stayed behind and fled east throughSiberia to Blagoveschensk and Manchuria. There they crossed the Amur river onthe ice into China. “They got so hungry,” the grand­mother told us, “that theythanked God for the Chinese who let them drink their dish water.” Eventuallythose of the family who survived got reunited in Brazil.As she grew older the grandmother began to forget where she was, in North orSouth America, in Asia, or Europe. But more often than not she would peerthrough her flower plants onto her Kitchener street and watch for the neighboursshe knew—in Russia.That, theoretically, would not have been impossible. Many Russian immigrantslived in Kitchener, Ontario. Several immigrant congregations met in the city andthrough them I became aware of more to the story.That awareness involved my friendship, and eventually marriage, to Susan Krahn(with relatives in an unregistered con­gregation in Kazakhstan), the mission Lichtim Osten, and a book given to us in 1972. The book, Christen unter Hammer und1Sichel (Christians under Hammer and Sickle), became my first introduction to astrange new world—a world where Christian believers survived incredibleopposition for a thousand years. More than that, where they have flourished, oftennumbering in the millions “under ground.”How did they do it?