Wen 'soft powers' triumphed
Short memories breed short-sightedness. For my generation who witnessed first hand the momentous events of 25 years ago, it is imperative to tell the stories to a generation of Europeans too young to remember, and to reflect on their enduring significance.
This edition of Vista which I have been invited to edit gives glimpses of those heady and euphoric days, of the spiritual dynamics that led up to the events of late 1989 and of the consequences for missions and church planting.
What we witnessed a quarter of a century ago can be described as the triumph over tyranny of the ‘soft powers’ of love, truth and justice. Although the collapse came suddenly and unexpectedly, a longer process had been under way that reached a tipping point in 1989, as George Weigel writes in The Final Revolution. The Bible smuggling described by Al Akimoff and Ildiko Kovacs kept hope alive among believers enduring all sorts of persecution, some of which Mark Elliott warns is returning in Russia for the non-Orthodox. Weigel writes about the specific role that the Catholic Church and John Paul II played in promoting a moral and spiritual revolution at least a decade before that tipping point was reached.
When JPII was elected as pope, the KGB realised they had a serious problem. His message in Warsaw in 1979 to the million-strong crowd to ‘Fear Not!‘ was the signal for a revolution of the human spirit that spread from Poland to Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Romania and the Baltics. Lech Wałęsa’s independent trade union, Solidarność (Solidarity) was directly encouraged by the pope, and its members drew from personal wellsprings of faith. (When in May 1981 I found myself seated in a restaurant in Warsaw across the aisle from Wałęsa and his friends, I never dreamed I was looking at a future president of a democratic Poland!)
Elsewhere other brave and anonymous individuals were stirred to acts of courage and resistance. In Lithuania for example, during Stalin’s Soviet occupation, hundreds of thousands were deported to Siberia. In 1956, after Stalin’s death, returning Lithuanians erected crosses on a small hill in gratitude and to remember those who would never return. The hill became a place of prayer for those still suffering.
In 1961, the authorities bulldozed the Hill of Crosses, declaring it a place of ‘ignorance’. Somehow, new crosses kept appearing overnight. Attempts to flood the area, block the roads and turn the hill into an inaccessible island all failed over time. More crosses just kept appearing. Finally in 1985, the government abandoned their hopeless task. Today hundreds of thousands of crosses cover this 10-metre high hill; some even say millions!
“What we witnessed a quarter of a century ago can be described as the triumph over tyranny of the ‘soft powers’ of love, truth and justice. ”
In Leipzig, East Germany, the Nicolaikirche became the centre of the Prayer for Peace movement during the 80’s which swelled into street marches of 70,000 on October 9, 1989, demanding truth and justice. The marchers responded to armed and violent police provocation in a spirit of peace, love and forgiveness. One month later the wall was demolished.
The Pan-European Picnic that took place on the Austrian-Hungarian border on August 19th 1989, when 600 picnickers burst through a gate to cross over to the west, is seen as the ‘pin-prick that burst the communist balloon’.
The Velvet Revolution in Prague led by Vaclav Havel, and the sudden overthrow of the Ceaușescu dictatorship starting with thousands of Romanians kneeling in the city square to pray the Lord’s Prayer, and then chanting ‘God exists, God exists!’, are yet further examples of the triumph of the soft powers over the tyranny of communism.
In September 1988, one third of all Estonians participated in a massive song festival, singing forbidden national songs in what became known as the Singing Revolution. The following year, two million people joined hands to form the Baltic Way, a human chain 600 km long spanning the three Baltic states.
Four decades earlier, another event inspired by the ‘soft powers’ of Christianity, of forgiveness and reconciliation with one’s enemy and of love for God and neighbour, had led directly to the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community, and thus the EU. Robert Schuman’s announcement of his plan on May 9, 1950, is, in my judgement, the defining moment of post-war European history, more significant even than the events of November 9, 1989, when the wall came down. For the latter would not have happened without the former. The success and attractiveness of the European project gave hope and aspiration to millions of central and eastern Europeans.
This same dynamic of spiritual and moral revolution triggered Ukraine’s Orange Revolution and the recent Maidan protests. The possibiity that the Ukraine could play a similar role to that of Poland in inspiring faith, hope and vision among the post-Soviet republics is raised in our closing articles.
May this edition of Vista encourage us to continue to believe and pray for God’s kingdom to come in this part of the world.
Jeff Fountain, Director of the Schuman Centre for European Studies