What caused the iron fist ruling Eastern Europe to rust?
November will mark 30 years since the Berlin Wall crumbled, unravelling communism in Eastern and Central Europe and hastening the end of the Soviet Union.
A whole generation has been born and raised since then with no living memory of those events.
The string of people’s revolutions in country after country recall the euphoric sense of witnessing the end of a system we had feared would be around for ever and ever. We had prayed for an end to the oppression and persecution characteristic of those regimes in the communist world as they sought to shut down the church and other movements they disapproved of and feared.
So what caused the collapse of a system that had controlled with an iron fist and attempted to wipe out any dissent, particularly religion and especially Christianity?
Some said Gorbachev, Reagan and Thatcher were the key players. Others looked to the diplomatic impact of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act and the resulting Charter 77. For yet others it was inevitable given the technological and managerial backwardness of the command economies. Others, like Francis Fukuyama, claimed that the West had won because it was ‘on the right side of history’ which favoured the market economy and democracy.
While each of these may have played important roles, none really explains why it was at this particular time that this revolution of the human spirit was able to triumph.
Several writers at the time, for example Weigel (The Final Revolution), Michael Bordeaux (Gorbachev, Glasnost and the Gospel) and Barbara von der Heydt (Candles behind the Wall) pointed out that by ignoring the reality of evil, secular interpretations fell short of understanding the deeper spiritual revolution needed to challenge
Marxism-Leninism as a doctrine and an ethic.
The essence of communism was its claim of human omniscience and omnipotence, with a millennial hope of establishing heaven on earth and offering salvation in a political movement. This utopian ideology, they said, had to be confronted with spiritual truth, not merely a secular politics which had forgotten its own moral presuppositions. They were among those who pointed to the spiritual roots of the peaceful revolution that toppled communism, and the key role of the churches.
Some of those spiritual manifestations included the amazing story of the pan-European picnic which took place on the border of Austria and Hungary, the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland under the leadership of Lech Walesa.
Add the story of the hill of the crosses in Lithuania where the human spirit stood in the face of atheistic oppression; the Singing Revolution in Estonia and the Baltic Way, the human chain formed right across the Baltic states to declare about their annexation by Stalin’s Soviet Union.
In the St Nicolas Church in Leipzig, where JS Bach had once been choirmaster, the Prayer for Peace movement demonstrated that the soft powers of peace, truth, love and prayer could overcome violence and lies.
The People’s Revolution in Romania began in Timisoara when the congregation of a Reformed pastor formed a protective circle around his house to prevent his arrest, an action that swelled into a city-wide revolt against the authorities and culminated in a crowd of thousands kneeling on the frozen city square chanting, ‘God exists! God exists!
The election of a Pope who had experienced communism firsthand and whose inauguration address in 1978 carried to the populations in the communist world the message, ‘Be not afraid!’, struck fear into the hearts of communist leaders whose whole system was built on the politics of fear.
When Czech playwright Vaclev Havel called for ‘politics of truth’ and urged his fellow citizens ‘not to live the lie’, he inspired a resistance movement to an edifice of falsehood before Gorbachev, Reagan and Thatcher entered the world stage.
Havel was a founding member of the Charter 77 movement whose motto was: ‘Truth prevails for those who live in truth.’ Imprisoned multiple times for his stand on truth, Havel drew on a long tradition of dissent dating back to the 15th century Christian Czech reformer and national hero, Jan Hus.
He repeatedly declared Hus’s words, ‘‘Truth prevails’’, later making them his presidential motto. Repeatedly in his campaign against falsehood and oppression, he declared that ‘truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred’.
Havel recognised that truth and love had transcendental origins.
He said if democracy was not only to survive but to expand successfully, it had to ‘renew its respect for that nonmaterial order which is not only above us but also in us and among us and which is the only possible and reliable source of man’s respect for himself, for others, for the order of nature, for the order of humanity, and thus for secular authority as well.’
Although not an active church-goer, he decried the ‘great departure from God’ in our world unparalleled in history. The world’s crisis was rooted in the spiritual condition of modern civilisation, the loss of an experience of the transcendent.
‘As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything,’ he wrote in Disturbing the Peace, ‘the world began to lose its human dimensions, and man began to lose control of it.’
I wonder how the past might inform us as we think of Hong Kong. I wonder whether we might one day all rise up sick of truth being established by popular vote or media avalanche and seek truth and reality that exists in its own right.