Are you tempted to stream the Sunday service when you could attend in person? Do you want to skip home group because it’s inconvenient? Let the stories of prisoners who found joy beyond words in discovering just one or two coreligionists in their camp renew your commitment to meet regularly with fellow believers.

Living in Russia at the end of the 1990s, a handful of years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, was both an eye-opening and heady experience for a young Christian historian like me. The archives had opened in many places, yet archivists struggled to manage the flood of declassified documents along with the increasing number of nosy Western PhD students who wanted access to them.

As a Christian growing up in the latter part of the Cold War, I was intrigued by the idea that one could speak openly about religious faith and even worship publicly without fear of repercussion in the formerly closed society. Many of us had viewed the Soviet Union as intractable in its denial of economic and religious freedom to the millions of citizens living behind the Iron Curtain. Post-Soviet research has shown, however, that in many areas this denial was far from monolithic. In the 20th-century Soviet Union, as in every age and place, human agency and the human spirit survived and asserted themselves in some of the least likely places.

In his recent book Finding God in the Gulag: A History of Christianity in the Soviet Penal System, Jeffrey Hardy, associate professor of history at Brigham Young University, takes a personal approach to history. One of his previous works, The Gulag After Stalin, tells a more official story of the Gulag’s transformation under Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. But Finding God delves into the personal hopes, dreams, and spiritual experiences of the prisoners who lived in the Gulag throughout most of the 20th century. These stories deserve a historical account of their own.

Personal Experience vs. Official Policy

One challenge Hardy faces is identifying an overarching theme that melds prisoners’ personal stories with the Soviet government’s official penal policies. Soviet policy existed in two spheres: official codes on paper and the implementation of those codes by inconsistent human beings. Such is history because humans are the main actors.

According to surviving documentation from 1918–19, inmate worship protocols were matters of improvisation and local initiative rather than predetermined policy. In the early days especially, Soviet officials allowed some leeway concerning whether inmates could worship, how often and if church property such as icons—especially that which remained in the case of a monastery turned prison camp—would be confiscated or left for prisoner use. Hardy tells us, “Given the lack of clear direction from central penal authorities . . . it is no surprise that religious life flourished in some Soviet prisons and concentration camps” (27).

Religious life? Flourish? In concentration camps? Those concepts seem contradictory.

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