In The Roots of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt characterized concentration camps of totalitarian regimes as laboratories, in which these regimes strove to prove their fundamental belief that human capacity for being motivated by values and not just by instincts is an empty illusion. People subjected to the ordeals of the Gulag, just as prisoners of the Nazi camps and other totalitarian punitive systems, were forced to realize that human beings, deprived of their moral agency and values, can be stripped of their humanity before they are physically destroyed. Yet this dark view of human nature, discovered in totalitarian camps and prisons, had its counterpart. While many survivors spoke and wrote about dehumanization, others described the dungeons as loci of moral and spiritual ascent. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn blessed his prison experience in The Gulag Archipelago, referring to the experience of Silvio Pellico from the 1830s. The tradition of incarceration viewed as spiritual ascent reaches back to Benvenuto Cellini, Richard Lovelace, Friedrich Schiller, Lord Byron, Victor Hugo, and others.

In Finding God in the Gulag: A History of Christianity in the Soviet Penal System, Jeffrey S. Hardy gives us a rich and thoroughly researched account of the long-lasting struggle between the Soviet totalitarian ambition of shaping and controlling human nature and the human resistance against this control. When we speak about the totalitarian assault against religion, we must be aware of specific characteristics separating the Nazi and Bolshevik systems. In the Nazi worldview, the Judeo-Christian notion of a human being created in God’s image was trumped by the “scientific” idea of race. Determined by implied racial boundaries, Nazi victims had no prospect of ascent or growth beyond these limits. In communism, however, religion must be defeated to be replaced by a new atheist quasi-religion that destroys and mocks the old faith and, at the same time, creates its own narrative of salvation dependent on a host of twisted religious motifs, themes, and structural elements.

Before focusing on the Gulag, Jeffrey S. Hardy refers to the pre-revolutionary Russian penitentiary system. In imperial Russian prisons, the Russian Orthodox chapel was usually at the center of the facility, clergy visited prisoners, and participation in organized prayers was encouraged. Prisoners were expected to atone for their wrongdoings and undergo spiritual ascent before rejoining the community. This fundamental idea of atonement was reintroduced by the Bolshevik regime in a new, twisted, anti-religious form as perekovka (reforging of people). Prisoners’ collaboration with the authorities and enthusiastic attitude to forced labor were viewed as the main measures of their readiness for being reforged and initiated into the new Soviet collective. At least in theory. This communist pseudo-religious initiation through forced labor was often performed in real churches and monasteries routinely turned by the Bolshevik government into prisons and camps. In these surroundings, prisoners were supposed to be converted into the new faith or at least pretend to do so. These pressures alongside physical deprivations created crucial patterns of prisoners’ resistance. The book explores the lives and fates of Christians of most denominations in the Gulag: Russian Orthodox, Ukrainian Greek Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, Seventh-day Adventist, Mennonite, Jehovah’s Witness, and so on. The author analyzes their behavior, the internal dynamics within each denomination, reactions to oppressive Gulag policies, as well as relations among different religious groups. Throughout its long history, the Gulag was an exceptionally multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multi-cultural place. Hardy’s study does not attempt to build theories explaining these complex realities. Instead, it constitutes the thorough work of a historian—a chronologically-organized study from which one learns a great deal of facts, details, and processes. The author illuminates his narrative with a wealth of documented events, situations, individuals’ stories, and testimonies.

Despite its title, Finding God in the Gulag does not end with the end of the Soviet Union. Just as the pre-Bolshevik Russian penal system had a strong religious component, so has the post-Bolshevik one. “To some extent,” Hardy writes, “Orthodox Christianity has become the functional equivalent of Marxist propaganda in the Soviet era, with neither the modern Russian regime nor the Soviet Union able to wield them effectively to re-educate their inmates” (226). Hardy’s book is a fascinating read for specialists and general educated readers alike. His compelling study of Christian experience in the man-made hell of the Gulag helps us to better understand what it is to be human.