QUESTIONING ATHEISM IN THE SOVIET UNION

Irina Ratushinskaya (1954-2017) was a Ukrainian poet who was tried and imprisoned during the 1980’s for anti-Soviet activity. Her crime was to write poetry from a Christian perspective. She was not raised as a Christian, and had no access to Christian literature or a Bible, but found her way to faith through her questioning the atheism taught in her elementary school. Her description of her questioning is instructive to those who face secular teachers.

“God doesn’t exist. Only silly, ignorant old women believe in Him. We third-graders sit in the school auditorium; this ‘truth’ has been drummed into us for the past hour. This is atheist instruction, and attendance is compulsory. Atheist instruction was quite fun at the start…but now it’s plain boring: talk, talk, talk….Why do grown-ups spend so much time talking about something that does not exist? You can’t help feeling suspicious. Yet one can’t help feeling sorry for God. He’s going to be left completely alone and friendless when all the believers die. He’s all by Himself, and everybody’s ranged against Him…They just don’t believe in Him, so they go around shooting off their mouths. Hang on, though, they’ve just said something about ‘unrelenting war’…So they mean making war on Someone who doesn’t exist?

Secretly, I talk to God. At first I only ask endless questions. On His side, God makes no attempt to appear to me personally in a blaze of light, or anything like that, or even answer my questions audibly. Yet the answers come, all the same: either a book with the answer turns up the next day, or I suddenly feel an inward certainty about the right reply to this or that question. The way I conduct my conversations with God has evolved into a form far removed from what is commonly described as prayer. There is no feeling of remoteness, no sense that He is God, an exalted being, and I am just one of His lesser creations, nor do I address Him with the kind of politeness demanded by adults. The questions I fire at Him are demanding and unceremonious. Is He kind, or not? – that is what I need to determine in the first place. If He’s not, then I don’t want to have anything to do with Him, even if He is all-powerful. So if He starts punishing me for undue familiarity or failure to observe some formalities of which I know nothing, then I don’t want to know Him. But He never punishes me. Naturally, I have my misfortunes, my childish disappointments, but I never feel that He has brought them down upon my head, even though it is well within His power to give a hint of displeasure now and again. On my own side, I consider it improper to ask Him for anything. After all, what have I done for Him, that I should expect any favors? Why should He intercede in our earthly life is we, the people, have decided that that we can manage without Him. After all, here I am living in an atheistic country and doing nothing about it, so how can I start demanding that God do this or that, or prevent something I don’t want from happening? For this very reason, the atheist’s favorite argument that if God existed, He would not let children die in wars, and suchlike, cuts no ice with me. If we the people start wars knowing full well that innocents will perish in them, what right have we to reproach God for granting us free will? If I am robbed and get my throat cut tomorrow, is it God’s fault? No, If He’s really kind and all-powerful, He’ll take me to Him, and I’ll be much better off than in school or on the streets. In fact, if I do have a complaint it’s that I don’t know what he wants from me. This is through no fault of mine, when all is said and done; I had no choice about where to be born. As it is, seeing He set me in this place and time, He could at least give me a clue about His view of things! Yet the moment I thought this, an answer came from within: don’t worry, you will find out what you need to know when the time comes. There was always a response of some kind.

But for the time being, none of us ten-year-olds give a great deal of thought to such matters. Later, this same generation was to turn to God, to the consternation of the Soviet authorities.”

(In the Beginning: The Formative Years of a Dissident Poet, pp.22-25. See also her remarkable memoir of four years as a political prisoner, Grey is the Color of Hope.)