Keys of This Blood (70 page)

Still more compelling for many were Gorbachev's pointed, off-the-cuff remarks after the earthquake that devastated Armenia later that year. Gorbachev cut short a visit to the United States to tour the stricken region. While there, he took the opportunity to blast his domestic opponents again in much the usual terms. “They're striving for power,” he grumbled. “They should be stopped by using all the power at our command—political and administrative.” But then he added a striking and unexpected dimension to his warnings: “Let God judge them. It's not for them to decide the destiny of this land…. This is the edge of the abyss. One more step and it's the abyss.”

In December of the same year, when Mother Teresa of Calcutta visited the Soviet Union to aid in the Armenian recovery efforts, she was
received in the Kremlin with all honor by Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov in the company of Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and the General Secretary of the Armenian Communist Party. Mother Teresa was assured in the warmest terms that the Soviet Union expected great things from the work of her Roman Catholic missionaries in the USSR's devastated areas.

Pope John Paul, his entourage and his Kremlin-watchers do not ignore such words and behavior on the part of Mikhail Gorbachev. On the contrary, this question of Gorbachev's relationship with God—with the God of his youth, with the God of history, with the God of divine grace and of man's salvation—is among the most important questions for John Paul to consider.

In fact—and notwithstanding the Pope's personal experience with the cold eye of Leninism, and his present intelligence information—a crucial dimension of the papal assessment of Mikhail Gorbachev in present-day geopolitical terms lies in the Pontiff's view of this particular Soviet leader as a special instrument of God. The question of Gorbachev and God, therefore—the question of a possible ambivalence in Gorbachev between the cold eye of Leninism and the eye of faith—is a crucial factor for John Paul in the millennium endgame. And for the believer John Paul is, these are not mere words. They are norms of thought and action.

That the West, as well, has become interested in, if not fascinated with, this question was underlined during a press conference Gorbachev held at the Elysée Palace in Paris on July 5, 1989. Asked if he had been baptized, Gorbachev answered almost breezily that he had, and that such a thing was “quite normal” in the Soviet Union.

Despite the General Secretary's easy reply, the fact is that neither baptism nor virtually any other facet of a Christian way of life is a “normal” element in a successful public career in the Soviet Union. Rather, such things are sure and certain obstacles even to obtaining entry to university studies. And they are absolutely insurmountable obstacles to entry—never mind advancement—in the Soviet Communist Party system. The documentation of that fact is far too extensive to allow for any dissembling.

An accurate judgment on Gorbachev in this matter must take into account the Leninist womb from which he, as a hard-core Leninist, has come. In 1905, Lenin echoed Karl Marx and said that “Religion is a kind of spiritual gin in which the slaves of capitalism drown their human shape and their claim to any decent human life.” In 1915, his tone was
more brutal. “All oppressing classes of every description need two social functions to safeguard their domination: the function of a hangman and the function of a priest. The hangman is to quell the protest … the priest reconciles them to class domination, weans them away from revolutionary actions.” In 1917, his pronouncement was horribly antihuman: “We must be engineers of souls,” and he went on to describe how his Bolsheviks were bound to destroy the traditional identities of all those human beings now in their power, and to reconstruct them as specimens of the “new socialist humanity.”

Given this ideological heredity coming to him through Joseph Stalin (“Kill the eunuch priests and you kill this Christ”) and Nikita Khrushchev (“Belief in God contradicts our Communist outlook”), John Paul has to consider closely the apparent contradiction between Gorbachev's position as General Secretary of the Soviet Union and his words and his permissiveness concerning religion. Just three alternatives suggest themselves; and, while the consequences of each alternative are fairly clear, the papal jury is still out on a final decision concerning which scenario the Pope is facing.

One possible God-and-Gorbachev scenario is that, in speaking of “God” and “wisdom” and the “abyss,” and the like, Gorbachev is using vocabulary and ideas emptied of all mystical or transcendental meaning, much in the way Hitler's elite SS troops adopted the motto
Gott mit Uns
—God with us. To be sure, that was monumental and self-righteous hypocrisy on the part of men bent on staining all God's creation with brutality and overkill; but it was credited by no one as an expression of believers.

If this is the case with Gorbachev, then his behavior in this regard is probably no more important than that of any man who uses certain ways of talking learned early in his family life to emphasize a point. As John Paul well knows, Russian is as rich in such expressions and images as Polish.

The second possibility is that Mikhail Gorbachev is the classic crypto-Christian: that he is a fully believing Christian of the Russian Orthodox variety, truly attached to Orthodoxy's fundamental beliefs, secretly worshiping in his heart, fully dependent in his prayers and hopes and career on the help and inspiration of God.

If this is the case, then Gorbachev would truly be God's “mole” placed at the pinnacle of the Soviet atheist system at a crucial moment of history. If this is the case, then Mikhail Gorbachev would be the twentieth-century man chosen by God for a most singular role and fate. And if this is the case, then the world has been assisting all unknowingly at the highest drama of our time, a drama that has only just begun.

The third possibility is that Gorbachev's story may be much more typically Soviet and “cold-eyed” than some would like to believe. It may be that within himself, and in his closely guarded relations with the Council of Elders, the General Secretary is a rabid Soviet atheist, a full believer with Lenin that “all religion is utter vileness,” a thoroughgoing Leninist of the classical vintage—but an extremely cunning one, who realizes that a certain level of convincing Christian lip service can still help to secure the deep and extensive integration with the West that is needed by the Soviet Union, of whose fate he is now the chief guardian and propagator.

If this third scenario is the true one, then it would have deadly significance for Pope John Paul and for the West. If true, it would mean that in the Soviet inventory of enemies to be penetrated, deceived, leavened and taken over, Gorbachev has put religion and formal religious organizations at the top of his list—just as Antonio Gramsci advised. If this is the true scenario, it would mean that Pope John Paul's Roman Catholic organization is the prime target. If true, it would mean that Gorbachev is the most dangerous Soviet leader the Church has faced, the author of the ultimate seduction, practitioner par excellence of KGB intelligence deception, and the coldest “cold eye” Leninism has yet produced.

There is only so much empirical evidence one can expect to uncover in assessing the real meaning of such unexpected behavior on the part of a supposedly atheist leader of a professionally and militantly atheist Party-State. And what evidence exists is so equivocal that it can be, and in some Vatican conversations often is, used to bolster opposing positions on the question.

All four of Gorbachev's grandparents and both of his parents were genuine believers in the Russian Orthodox faith. The familiar Russian icons of Christ and his Mother, Mary, were concealed behind the required portraits of Lenin and Stalin that hung in his paternal grandparents' house.

Born on February 2, 1931, Gorbachev grew up in the worst of Stalin's terror. We know that he was baptized; that his patron saint was solemnly declared to be the fierce defender of Heaven itself, St. Michael the Archangel; that he went to church regularly; that he participated with his parents in the liturgy—he sang the old Slavonic hymns, confessed his sins and received Holy Communion.

More, we know that all of this went on at the height of the Stalinist purges, the mock trials, the torture, the midnight interrogations and the sudden deportations and executions that decimated the Church of its
clergy and its pious laity. Even in the provincial town of Privolnoye, to practice one's faith as the Gorbachevs did in the thirties was an act of Christian heroism.

Did Gorbachev remain a hero, at least in his heart, as he grew to maturity? Or was the pressure too much for him? Or was faith not enough for him? Whatever the answer might be, at the age of fifteen Gorbachev was accepted into Komsomol—in effect, the “Little League” of the Communist Party. No one known to be an active believer could have managed that. Komsomol indoctrination requires not only formal denial of religion, but formal profession of the atheism officially propagated by the Party-State. Gorbachev must have passed the basic requirements.

From that time on, in fact, he must have paid his Leninist dues all along the line. For he was not merely accepted; he flourished. He went to university. In 1952, he joined the Communist Party. And he set out on a career so distinguished among his fellows that he came to the particular notice of the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, who became nothing less than his mentor. And, having passed every test and challenge, he came finally to the peak of Soviet success as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Given three such contradictory scenarios, how is Pope John Paul to read such a history?

If Gorbachev has been a crypto-Christian all along, then his motivation must have been extraordinarily pure to remain intact for so long, and in such alien and personally dangerous circumstances. More, his faith must have been nothing less than heroic in its profundity and reach, because the only aim of such an exercise could have been to go as far in his career as God would make it possible for him to do, with the intention of liquidating the official atheism of the Party-State.

When seen in those terms, the first or third alternative—either a benign or a deadly turning away from faith—seems more likely. In both of these scenarios, despite the early exposure of the young Gorbachev to all the “furniture” of Christian thought within the intimacy of his family life, by the time he joined Komsomol—and certainly by the time he graduated from university and entered the Communist Party—he had renounced the Christianity of his family.

Perhaps the objective reasons were fairly ordinary. The all-enveloping materialist and atheistic outlook that surrounded him away from home and hearth; peer pressure; Party pressure; the pressure of personal ambition; the doctrine and motivation as he moved along in Stavropol University, in Moscow University, in the Communist Party. All of this would have led Gorbachev away from Christian belief and worship.

That road is not such an extraordinary one these days. In fact, it is more or less the same road followed by so many like-minded people in the West that they have been given a special name. “Anonymous” Christians, they are often called. What then, fundamentally, would be the difference between Gorbachev and Nikita Khrushchev, who avowed in 1958, “I think there is no God. I freed myself long ago from such a concept.” Or between Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping's son Pufong, who told Mother Teresa some years ago that “we start from a different standpoint, but we are doing the same work…. I myself am an atheist.” Or between Gorbachev and U.S. historian William Shirer, who admitted to a reporter in 1989 that “my father was an orthodox Presbyterian and I'm sure he believed in heaven and hell and that sort of thing. For me, all that is gone.”

If, like Khrushchev and Shirer, Gorbachev is an “anonymous” Christian, he has ceased to believe in the spiritual importance of organized and formal religious practice, and in the truth of Church teaching about the supernatural. But neither, in that case, would he be an enemy dedicated to the final death of all such practice and belief. Indeed, he might well retain some vague idea of a redefined and benign God. And whatever anybody else believes would be fine by him, and fine by the benign God he vaguely acknowledges.

After all, when speaking to the Central Committee on February 5, 1990, he called for a wide range of measures “to enrich the spiritual world of people,” especially on the educational and cultural levels. “Industrial growth figures,” he asserted, had obscured “human values.” In this age of information, he went on, “we are nearly the last to realize that the most expensive asset is knowledge, the breadth of mental outlook and creative imagination.” While this is not religious language properly so called, it is language of the spirit—such words would never pass the lips of a Stalin or a Lenin.

If Gorbachev is that low-grade specimen of anonymous Christian, there is always the chance that, now or later, Gorbachev may “revert to type.” Faced with the ultimate in dilemmas, he may reach for that source of salvation and solution of all problems he sang about in those old Slavonic hymns and learned at his mother's knee to acknowledge as the real governor of man's fate. Perhaps there was even a glimpse of such an attitude when Gorbachev spoke so unexpectedly in earthquake-ravaged Armenia of “the edge of the abyss.”

On the other hand, perhaps—after the model of Stalin—the third possibility is the real case for Gorbachev. If he has renounced his faith, how likely is it that the reasons were not ordinary or benign at all? How likely is it that, carried by his own gifts and by the invisible hand of
destiny to the highest position in the Soviet Union—the nation and the system—he has simply understood in his penetrating and no-nonsense way that he could not go on behaving as his six predecessors did, and approaches the Pufong model?

Surely Gorbachev is more sophisticated than Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, with their ready stock of lavatory jokes about religious believers. It was not unusual for them to wine and dine their honored guests in the magnificent Granovitaya Palata of the Kremlin. Completed in 1491 by Czar Ivan III to memorialize his bloodiest victory over Russia's greatest enemies, the Tatars, the Palata is decorated from its ceilings to its floors with Master Andrei Rublev's priceless icons of Christ, his Mother, the angels and the saints, all dominated by a giant fresco of the Last Supper, meant to remind everyone who ate there that we are intended to partake finally of the Bread of Angels and the Blood of the Lamb.