More than anything else, Jonathan Luxmoore's God of the gulag is a work of remembrance. In this two-volume journalistic account of the twentieth-century persecution of Catholics in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the author aims to ‘retrace and bring to life the very real men and women who … stood up for the faith under communist rule’ (p. xxii). His goal is not so much to advance an argument as it is to chronicle the suffering that Communist regimes inflicted upon people of faith. In this, he succeeds admirably.
Focusing on Catholics, ‘since only the Catholic Church was present as a single supra-national entity throughout Communist-ruled Europe’ (p. xvi), and drawing upon themes from his previously-published works, Luxmoore surveys Communist persecution of Christians from the advent of Bolshevik rule in Russia to the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, pointing out parallels to earlier oppression in the Roman Empire and during the French Revolution. The first two chapters in volume i describe selected historical precedents for state attacks upon the Church. The remaining seven chapters, covering the early 1900s to the early 1960s, present the effects of the Bolshevik revolution on the Catholic Church in the Soviet Union and, later, in Eastern European states when Soviet anti-religious policies were extended to the Baltics, Poland and, in the aftermath of World War II, the remainder of Eastern Europe. The seven chapters of volume ii move the narrative forward in this consolidated Soviet sphere of influence. Beginning in the 1960s, they consider the effects of the Vatican's efforts to address Communism, the emergence of dissidents and dialogue on human rights, underground faith communities, the significance of John Paul ii, the ultimate collapse of Communism and the complicated efforts to restore the Church in recent decades. A discussion of efforts within faith communities to confront or stifle the issue of Soviet-era collaboration within the post-Communist Church is especially strong. Interspersed with discussions of policy, politics and religion are the stories and struggles of dozens – perhaps hundreds – of Christians, from the well-known (for example, Archbishop Jószef Mindszenty) to the lesser-known (for example, the nuns Nijolė Sadūnaitė or Zdenka Schelingová). An epilogue suggests lessons to be gleaned from the Church's experiences and a call to preserve the memory of those who lost their lives because of anti-religious persecution. In the latter half of volume i and the entirety of volume ii, Luxmoore foregrounds the persistent dilemma faced by laypeople, clergy and the Catholic hierarchy in Communist regimes: resist and suffer or collaborate and survive. As befits the subtitle, both volumes highlight the harassment, persecution and physical punishment endured by countless people of faith, in nearly encyclopaedic fashion.
The contributions of Luxmoore's God of the gulag are many. First, it is the only comprehensive survey of Catholic persecution in Communist Europe available in English. For that reason alone, this work of synthesis is invaluable. Second, thanks to the author's background as a journalist covering religious affairs in Eastern Europe, he has been able to marshal a significant number of personal interviews for use in writing these books. Luxmoore's intimacy with the people and events described in the latter chapters of volume ii is obvious, particularly regarding affairs in Poland. Third, as the author points out, accounts of human misery attributed to other Communist-engineered tragedies, such as collectivisation or the terror, often eclipse the suffering of people of faith in Communist Europe. These books raise their hardship from obscurity, while placing it in the context of others. Even more important, the inclusion of so many varying examples emphasises the extraordinary ordinariness of such abuse for those who chose to stand for faith rather than atheism, conformity or indifference. The sheer volume of names and cases in The God of the gulag is overwhelming.
Given the ambitious task that the author undertook in investigating a Church spanning all of the republics of the former Soviet Union plus Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Albania and East Germany, some limitations might be expected. The two-volume study focuses heavily upon Eastern Europe (particularly Poland), the Baltics and Ukraine, with only occasional forays into the rest of the former Soviet Union. Granted, the majority of the Catholic population resided in precisely those areas, but previous studies from Dennis Dunn and Christopher Zugger remind us that Catholic communities were to be found across the Soviet empire. Luxmoore's non-English sources tend to be Polish, which explains the emphasis, and appear to exclude available state, regional and local archives in Russia entirely. Moreover, scholars will find frequent uncited references to ‘Soviet documents’ (p. 283), ‘church records’ (p. 95), or ‘research data’ (p. 166) frustrating. Similarly, a number of historical inaccuracies mostly unrelated to the central narrative mar the book: for example, Shostakovich was not a Soviet émigré as noted, the peak years of the League of Militant Godless are misstated as the mid-1930s, the number of Poles executed by the Soviets at Katyn is underreported as 4,421, and the number of fatalities in the 1956 uprising in Hungary is far too high. A tendency to rely on Courtois's problematic Black book of Communism for figures related to Soviet oppression may explain the latter, but is also indicative of research lacunae. Reading Dunn's work on the Catholic Church in the USSR alongside Luxmoore may resolve some of these issues. Finally, the publisher unfortunately chose to publish the two volumes without a bibliography or a comprehensive index, although there is an index of names and an index of places.
The God of the gulag raises a number of questions that demand serious scholarly attention. For example, what was the nature and frequency of interfaith assistance? What can be said about the rhetoric of resistance and collaboration used by believers? What was the role and nature of official and unofficial institutions, such as seminaries, house churches or study circles during this period? How exactly did anti-Communist and anti-clerical sentiment affect the post-Communist restoration of religious life? Most fundamentally, what do we know about Luxmoore's martyrs? Only a handful of scholarly biographies of important figures related to Soviet anti-religious persecution, such as Wallace Daniel's study of Aleksandr Men’, exist. And, as Luxmoore rightly insists, they deserve to be remembered.
