3
The Life of a Young Christian
By Xenia Howard-Johnston
Aida Skripnikova was born in 1941. She took the sorrow of a suffering people upon her shoulders even before she was aware of it, for her father was shot as a pacifist while she was an infant.
Aida's mother strove to give her a Christian upbringing from the first. Aida says she did not think about religion very much when young, but what independence of mind this upbringing must have given her! Even as a 17-year-old she demonstrated quite exceptional courage for a young Soviet person. At the time of the Pasternak affair (1958), when the novel Dr. Zhivago was violently attacked by the Soviet authorities, Aida wrote to Pravda what the authorities termed an "anti-Soviet" letter, in which she protested at the way Pasternak was condemned before those accusing him had even read this novel.
In her late teens she was much influenced by the faith of her brother. Already in August 1961, Aida was searching for a personal faith in Jesus Christ: she approached a young Englishman, Stuart Robertson (then visiting Leningrad) after the service at the Leningrad Baptist Church and asked him many questions about the Christian faith. Under this influence and others, Aida became a Christian later that year: her beloved brother had died, and in her
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trouble she found renewed strength and a new life in the family of Christ. The "awakening" within the ECB Church, and the establishment of a new independent organization touched Aida, too. "Faith was growing weak," she said, "and suddenly there came an awakening. What I saw was quite miraculous. I saw the dead rising again — the spiritually dead, the weak, proved capable of great feats. Once I was attracted by impressive external greatness, but then I came to know the greatness of humility and patience, the kind of greatness of the church's struggle. This revival quickened my spirit, too, and from that time onward I have not been able to remain uninvolved."
That year (1961) on New Year's Eve, she acted upon her newly found faith by courageously standing up in public, in the Nevsky Prospekt, and distributing postcards on which she had written a poem of her own composition. The postcard was of a picture in the Hermitage Museum by Claude Lorrain, representing a harbor at sunrise (chosen, perhaps, as a symbol of the spiritual sunrise which she had discovered), and the poem on it expressed Aida's awareness of life's shortness, of its pain and grief, and the need to search for and find God before we die. The death of her brother must surely have made her particularly conscious of the end of life at this time.
HAPPY NEW YEAR! 1962
A New Year Wish
Our years fly past
One after the other, unnoticed.
Grief and sadness disappear,
They are carried away by life.
This world, the earth, is so transient
Everything in it comes to an end.
Life is important. Don't be happy-go-lucky!
What answer will you give your Creator?
What awaits you, my friend, beyond the grave?
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Answer this question, while light remains,
Perhaps tomorrow, before God
You will appear to give an answer for everything.
Think deeply about this,
For you are not on this earth to eternity.
Perhaps tomorrow, you will break
Forever your links with this world!
SEEK GOD WHILE HE IS TO BE FOUND!
This slender, pale, brown-eyed girl standing on a street corner on a freezing cold night in Leningrad may not have presented a dramatic picture, but her action started a train of events which is still evolving. Neither Russian nor the world will forget her.
For distributing this poem in the street, Aida was arrested. In April 1962 she was tried by a Comrades' Court, which informed her that she must no longer live in Leningrad and that she was to lose her job as a laboratory assistant and be transferred to work on a building site. The court, it appears from the transcript of Aida's trial in 1968, took three years before it eventually carried out its decision. From 1962 onward she was frequently slandered in the Soviet press: according to a Baptist document dated 15 August 1967,1 this continued for five years. For example, on 4 June 1962 an article entitled "Don't Be a Corpse Among the Living" appeared in Smena (see chapter 4, to which Aida wrote a powerful answer in September 1962 (see chapter 5), but her article was of course not published. In addition she was attacked in Izvestia and Evening Leningrad2 in 1964. Even books referred to
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1. Rosemary Harris and Xenia Howard-Johnston (eds.), Christian Appeals From Russia (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1969), p. 57.
2. Possev, Frankfurt, No. 9, 1968, p. 59: "the title of Izvestia article was 'Pirates from the prayer house,' and the article in Evening Leningrad was entitled 'Obscurantist baseness.' In addition Smena published another article in 1964, entitled 'In the meshes of religious fanatics.' "
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her. V. R. Bukin in Psychology of Believers and Atheist Education (published in 1969, but of course written earlier) said that "experienced Baptists" exploited her "desire to be popular" and made her active on their behalf (accusations which her trial show not to have been true).
With a campaign mounting against her Aida lost her residence permit for Leningrad and could no longer live in her home town.
One girl's action in circulating a defense of the Christian faith to friends may not seem of great significance. Yet Aida was in the very forefront of the samizdat (self-publishing) movement. Her friends were impressed with what she wrote. Some so much that they made copies of the article which they passed on to other friends. These, in their turn, made more copies. The circle widened. Curiosity about the girl attacked in the press grew. People began to ask for her article. It was a remarkable defense of the Christian faith by any standards — not least from a young girl conscious of challenging the whole weight of the atheist system by sending it around. A new form of literary circulation was born. Other Soviet people used similar methods for distributing unpublished literature, so that samizdat has now become a nationwide phenomenon. But the Christians — and none more actively than Aida — were there from the very beginning.
This was a fulfillment of her love for God and her country, not a betrayal. At her trial in 1968, she expressed the great love she bore for her country and longed to see an end to persecution:
"Our country could be the most beautiful country in the world were there no persecution."
In her concern for those suffering for their faith in the USSR, she took upon herself the dangerous and difficult task of informing the outside world of what was happening to the ECB Church. As well as helping to circulate
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the reform Baptist samizdat publications, Herald of Salvation and Fraternal Leaflet, within the USSR, she began building up contacts with foreigners and trying to hand on to them transcripts of the trials of Christians and the lists of Baptist prisoners, drawn up by a group of their wives, as well as other appeals and letters written by Russian ECB Christians in which they described their plight. Those abroad must know what was happening, she felt, and to this end she risked her own well-being.
Through her we discover a little of that "miracle" of which she spoke at her trial in 1968:
"What is happening in my life of our church is a miracle. In the twentieth century when atheists are shouting about the extinguishing of faith, a fire like this suddenly flares up. And I wanted everybody to know about this miracle of awakening."
As part of her work of distributing this reform Baptists' samizdat literature and collecting material on trials, imprisonments, and other forms of persecution for sending abroad, Aida went to stay with her sister in the Ukraine in early 1964, where she was much impressed by the boldness of Christians. She returned in the spring of that year only to find that the police were on the lookout for her, waiting at the bus and train terminals in Leningrad. Nevertheless, Aida managed to outwit the police and got into Leningrad unobserved.
Before leaving for the Ukraine she had given up her job, and on her return had great difficulty in finding work. She eventually managed to find a job at a milk-bottling center, where she worked twelve hours a day for 30 roubles (about $33) a month. Before going south to the Ukraine she had lost her residence permit for Leningrad as well as her job; all her efforts to get reregistered in Leningrad failed.
Meanwhile the police were continuing to look for Aida: they searched the homes of various Christians at
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midnight and in the early morning, they questioned others about her, and in 1965 she was eventually arrested at a prayer meeting held in a forest (since the group had not been able to obtain registration). This is how Marfa Akimovna Skurlova, a witness at Aida's trial and a Christian friend, described Aida's arrest and subsequent trial:
"We had a meeting in the woods, the police arrived and began chasing us off. They pushed and grabbed us by the hair. They took away several people: some they fined. Aida was arrested and brought to trial . . . . And what a trial they organized. It wasn't a good court. She was brought to some factory; they shouted and made a noise; Aida wasn't even given a chance to speak."
At this trial she was sentenced to one year in prison.
After her release at the end of 1966, she again had great difficulty in finding work, nor was she allowed to live in Leningrad, but registered in Volkhovstroye, where she moved into a friend's room in a communal flat on 9 April 1967. After being taken on as an employee at a printing works, where train timetables and forms were printed, she was dismissed on 21 April 1967, after her name had been taken down by the police for attending a prayer meeting. She considered, at her trial, justifiably, that it was because of her faith that she was dismissed. Both a factory and a home for the disabled then refused to employ her because she was a Christian.
Sometime in these years Aida was also forcibly detained in a psychiatric clinic, but she was found to be completely normal and was released.
It was about the time of her dismissal from the printing works, that is, in the spring of 1967, that persecution of evangelical believers in Leningrad became more severe: Christians were not allowed to meet in private, their homes were searched, many of them were summoned to the procurator's office for questioning, some were ar-
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rested, and others fined.
In May 1967 the police began searching for Aida and questioning those who knew her in an attempt to build up a case against her. They withdrew her residence permit for Volkhovstroye in July or August 1967 so that they could accuse her of residing illegally in the communal flat. This is how a document written on 15 August 19673 described Aida's plight:
"For nearly six months she has not been able to show herself at home. The police have been visiting several believers' homes and declaring that they were searching for Aida Skripnikova. The neighbors are required to watch her flat. At the present time a new court case is in preparation against her."
Nearly a year elapsed from the start of the search and inquiry into Aida's activities in the spring of 1967 and her eventual arrest on 12 April 1968. The day before her arrest she was followed after she had been at a service, and the next day, from 7 a.m. until 9:30 p.m., her room was meticulously searched by the police and Aida found herself under arrest. Transcripts of trials of reform Baptists, a list of prisoners, various appeals to Brezhnev and to the UN were confiscated, as well as many issues of Herald of Salvation, and Fraternal Leaflet and a copy of the Bible, her notebook, personal letters, and photographs. The fact that she possessed such documents and had tried to get many of them abroad was used as evidence against her: for it was claimed by the prosecution that these documents contained "deliberately false statements, slandering the Soviet State and social order" (article 190/1 of the RSFSR Criminal Code).
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Aida's trial, which opened on 11 July 1968, is not how she was harassed and barred from fighting the case on the essen-
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3. Christian Appeals From Russia, p. 58.
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tial issue of whether or not there is religious persecution in the USSR; it is the unanimous and courageous testimony from all the witnesses to Aida's utter integrity of character. Here was a person who impressed believers and nonbelievers by being herself, by being seized with a passionate loyalty to God, which gave people a new perspective on the overexploited issue of "patriotism." Christians and atheists, Soviet and foreign, had much to learn from Aida. Were she never to utter another syllable, she would still have made a unique contribution to the development of Soviet society. Aida forcefully defended herself (without the help of a defense lawyer) at her trial with the argument that none of the facts contained in the reform Baptist documents was false and that they therefore could not be termed slander. Nor did these documents or her attempts to get them abroad harm the Soviet State and social order. Russian Christians, she claimed, are law-abiding citizens, not opposed to the Soviet State and social order; they are tried, harassed, and fined, not for breaking the law, but for their faith.
To Aida, the article on freedom of worship in the Constitution, despite its ban on "religious propaganda," implied, by guaranteeing freedom of conscience, the freedom for a Christian to confess his faith, that is to teach children about the Christian faith and to engage in missionary activity. For belief and the expression in words and action of this belief could not be separated. If this article in the Constitution were interpreted, as it is officially in the USSR, as forbidding Christians to express their faith in word and action outside the walls of the building allotted to a registered Christian community by the State, then such a law could not be observed by a Christian: for as Aida said in her defense speech ". . . believers cannot promise to fulfill a law which forbids them to talk about God and forbids parents to bring up their children in the faith. For all their loyalty to the authorities, believers will
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not subscribe to such a law. No Christian mother or father will accept a law which orders them to bring up their children as atheists."
Despite her vigorous and well-argued defense, Aida was sentenced on 15 July to three years of imprisonment.
The experience of prison did not lead Aida to despair and hopelessness. She knew from personal experience the truth of the following words, contained in the reform Baptists' Easter Greeting of 13 March 1969, addressed to persecuted Russian Christians:
"Today HE walks through the dark, damp prison cells, the labor camps surrounded by barbed wire, through the cold regions of the north — the places of exile . . . He visits the families of prisoners, He visits the persecuted church as the CONQUEROR, 'Be of good courage! I have overcome the world!' "
So deep was Aida's spiritual quality, so outgoing the love which she radiated, that even those among her fellow prisoners who had no sympathy with the Christian faith were moved to help her. When the prison authorities tried to confiscate her Bible, the prisoners would all join in a conspiracy to conceal it. Between her and her fellows there was a constant unruffled atmosphere of love and trust.
The authorities were obviously embarrassed at the stream of food parcels, letters, and cards which arrived from abroad. On one occasion they showed her the contents of a parcel, but refused to allow her to touch it. She later said that the knowledge that such friends were praying for her and trying to help her gave her more sustenance than the richest food parcel she could have imagined.
In a private letter dated 21 January 1970, Aida thanked God for "this road" along which she had been led, for it had been a blessing and, by walking along it, she had learned much and experienced the love of God. Because
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her happiness did not depend on external circumstances, it could not be destroyed. Although many days during her imprisonment had been very hard to bear, although she missed her freedom, her home and friends, she never regretted her action in trying to send abroad information about persecution of Christians in the USSR, nor could she have rejected the command of God to do this work for the sake of an easier life, for without God, life, to her, was meaningless. As she said at the end of her final speech at the trial:
"I'm not a heroine. I love freedom and would very much like to be free now with my family and friends. But I can't buy freedom at any price; I don't want to act against my conscience. I love freedom, but what good is freedom to me if I can't call God my Father? . . . The knowledge that my soul and thoughts are free encourages and strengthens me."
On 12 April 1971, Aida was released from prison: her face had grown thinner during those three years, but it was alight with the Life of Christ, who had granted her His grace and presence.
Chapter Four || Table of Contents
