The Gates of Hell

An Untold Story of Faith and Perseverance in the Early Soviet Union

Matthew Heise

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781683595984
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

The gates of hell shall not prevail. Decimated by war, revolution, and famine, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Russia was in critical condition in 1921. In The Gates of Hell, Matthew Heise recounts the bravery and suffering of German--Russian Lutherans during the period between the two great world wars. These stories tell of ordinary Christians who remained faithful to death in the face of state persecution. Christians in Russia had dark days characterized by defeat, but God preserved his church. Against all human odds, the church would outlast the man--made sandcastles of communist utopianism. The Gates of Hell is a wonderful testimony to the enduring power of God's word, Christ's church, and the Spirit's faithfulness.

1

A WORLD IN FLUX

War, Revolution, and Reformation

Lutherans worldwide had been eagerly anticipating the year 1917. Celebrations marking the four hundredth anniversary of the Reformation had been in the planning stages for several years, and now, despite the cataclysm of a world war, they would be observed with fervor. One of the American planning committees had been formed as early as 1914 and had united representatives of the General Council, the General Synod, and the United Synod South. Another committee, the Reformation Quadricentenary Committee, was led by two Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod pastors, Otto Pannkoke and William Schoenfeld.1 The Missouri Synod was in the process of commissioning a new translation of the Book of Concord that would ultimately be released in 1921.2 The Missouri Synod’s publishing arm, Concordia Publishing House, also printed a book on the Reformation in all its aspects, edited by William H. T. Dau and entitled Four Hundred Years.3 An ocean away, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Russia was similarly compiling a set of articles into a book edited by Theophil Meier entitled Luther’s Heritage in Russia. The book chronicled the almost 350-year history of the Lutheran Church in Russia, the authors solemnly reflecting not only on the joys but also the persecutions of the past.

In St. Petersburg, the heart of the Lutheran Church in Russia, many events were scheduled to celebrate. At St. Peter’s, the largest church in the center of the city, three evenings were planned. On the first, Rev. Wilhelm Kentmann presented on the basics of the Augsburg Confession, and during the following two evenings he read Luther’s work on “The Freedom of the Christian.” These were followed on Reformation Day by a morning service led by Pastors Kentmann, Paul Willigerode, and Karl Walter. There was also a celebration for the youth of St. Peter’s Lutheran School (called the Peterschule), with Principal Erich Kleinenberg and his assistant, Alexander Wolfius, presenting, and the girls’ choir performing. The day ended with a church packed full of all the German-speaking Lutheran congregations in St. Petersburg robustly singing the hymns of the Reformation.4

In Moscow, a fifteen-minute walk from the Kremlin at Sts. Peter and Paul Lutheran Church, Rev. Meier spoke of the dangers threatening Lutherans in Russia: “But has not much of our sacred heritage been born in the sounds of the Reformation? Thanks be to God, the echo of revolution is silenced in our hearts by the echo of the Reformation!” The congregation followed Meier’s stirring words with the singing of “A Mighty Fortress.”5 Those words of Meier would sound a theme repeated by others in the coming years: the spiritual theology and musical strains of the Reformation versus the worldly politics and atheistic anthems of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The tragic events taking place on the battlefields of Europe that Reformation Day in 1917 would soon result in a peace that would allow the Lutheran churches of Russia and America to establish more intimate contacts. The Lutherans of both nations had much in common. Questions about the loyalty of ethnic Germans in Russia and America led to suspicion among those considered more “native.” Due to the very language they used in their worship services, both groups were accused of being sympathetic to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s imperialistic ambitions.

But now that the “war to end all wars” had exacted destruction on an unprecedented scale, the interest of American Lutherans was drawn to the shattered lives of their brothers and sisters beyond their borders. The fact that many immigrants from the Volga region had resettled in the American Midwest virtually compelled Lutherans to take an interest. They retained contact with their families overseas and would act on the consciences of their fellow Lutherans in America in the future. So as a result of the war, American and Russian-German Lutherans began a partnership that would only take on added meaning as the Bolshevik Revolution began its assault on religion and the Lutheran Church in Russia later that year. American Lutherans would come to appreciate the deeper meaning behind the biblical phrase, “my brother’s keeper,” and a remarkable man would soon step to the forefront and keep the plight of Russia’s Lutherans foremost in their minds for many years to come.

As the Great War wound toward its conclusion, the European continent was reduced to a vast cemetery. British historian Michael Burleigh cited the plethora of cenotaphs, memorial arches, crosses, and obelisks that proliferated throughout the European landscape and reasoned that the loss of nine million men would force future archaeologists to ponder what had led Europe to such madness. Poets and writers like Rudyard Kipling, Karl Krauss (The Last Days of Mankind), and Erich Maria Remarque speculated on what it all meant, lamenting this “Lost Generation.”6

In America, sympathetic Lutherans had already been coming to terms with the pressing needs of their own parishioners serving in the war. On October 19, 1917, the Lutheran Commission for Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Welfare was established. Its primary task was to provide spiritual succor through the employ of Lutheran chaplains at training camps for the army and navy. Along with its concomitant “seelsorger” activity, the existence of such an organization went a long way toward ameliorating the suspicion other Americans had regarding the loyalty of German-Americans.7

Due to the positive results of cooperation between American Lutheran church bodies, pastors Lauritz Larsen and Frederick Knubel felt compelled to create a more permanent inter-Lutheran cooperative agency.8 This commission soon took the form of the National Lutheran Council (NLC), founded on September 6, 1918, in the Auditorium Hotel in Chicago.9 At its April 15, 1919, meeting, the NLC described itself as representing the majority of Lutheran churches in America: “the United Lutheran Church, the Norwegian Lutheran Church, the Augustana (Swedish) Synod, the Joint Synod of Ohio, the Synod of Iowa and other States, the Buffalo Synod, the Suomi Synod, the United Danish Church and the Lutheran Free Church.”10

As a national organization, the NLC sought to establish representation within the halls of government in Washington, DC, to facilitate its work overseas. As they became increasingly aware of the great suffering among European Lutherans, American Lutherans could no longer ignore the cries for help. Writing to US Secretary of State Frank L. Polk, NLC Secretary Lauritz Larsen pleaded for permission “to send a commission of not more than six members to bring greetings to the Lutherans of Europe, to study ecclesiastical conditions among them, and to give such moral, spiritual and financial assistance as may be found necessary to aid them in the rehabilitation and reconstruction made necessary by the destructive influence of the great war upon their church work.”11

In reply, William Philip, Assistant Secretary of State, recommended that three representatives be sent to France, and then only temporarily. Afterward, dependent on conditions on the European continent, they might be allowed to expand their work and visit other countries. The three chosen by the NLC were Dr. John A. Morehead, Dr. Sven G. Youngert, and Rev. G. A. Fandrey. Morehead, the president of Roanoke College in Virginia, was the chairman of the commission. His assistant, Youngert, served as a professor at Augustana Theological Seminary in Rock Island, Illinois, while Fandrey was a pastor in the Iowa Synod.12 Summing up his perspective on his new duties, Morehead said, “I have felt compelled to respond to the call of the Council as the call of God.… I am heart and soul in sympathy with your instructions for the pure faith of the Gospel as laid down in the Augsburg Confession.”13 Morehead and his colleagues soon received visas to visit Lutheran churches in Europe and begin reconstruction work. Most of the initial work of the NLC was focused on the Lutherans in European nations severely affected by World War I, ranging from France to Poland.14 Despite that massive undertaking, though, soon events of an alarming nature would draw the NLC eastward.

Morehead was by all accounts a quiet, mild-mannered Southern gentleman, a scholarly type who had limited experience overseas. He had a knowledge of German since he had taken graduate studies at Leipzig University for one year, but the task of helping restore to life the Lutheran churches in Europe would be a formidable venture. His biographer, Samuel Trexler, put it this way: “The Europe which Morehead did so much to feed after the World War was as remote to him in his early life as Mars.”15 But Morehead was not entirely unaccustomed to the concept of reconstruction. Having been born in southwest Virginia in 1867, he grew up on a farm under the trying circumstances of a nation reeling from a devastating civil war. Soon enough, Morehead would see firsthand the destruction wrought by another civil war, this one taking place in Russia amid the conditions of a horrific famine.16

Indeed, over the next sixteen years Morehead would develop such an intense friendship with the bishops and pastors of the Russian Lutheran Church that he would do all in his power to keep it alive despite the severe persecutions of the Communists. His health would suffer as a result, but he would use all of his contacts and resources, including a United States president, to keep a seminary functioning and pastors serving their people. Through his leadership of the NLC and the Lutheran World Convention (LWC), these two organizations would become powerful sources of financial support for the decimated Lutheran churches of Russia after war and revolution had driven them to the brink of despair.

2

“THE CHURCH IS SEPARATED FROM THE STATE”

The Bolsheviks Take Power

How did the Lutheran Church appear in a land that had been so closely tied to the Russian Orthodox Church since Vladimir the Great adopted Christianity in 988? In the sixteenth century, desiring to modernize his country, Ivan the Terrible (1547–1584) carried on the tradition of his father by inviting educated and skilled European tradesmen into Russia. Lutherans were among these tradesmen, and as they began to settle in Russian cities and villages, they asked to build their own churches. Being theologically curious, the czar asked for a statement of what they believed. The Lutherans presented him with the Augsburg Confession, which the czar rejected violently.1 Nonetheless, since European Lutherans were essential to the workforce, Ivan allowed them to live in the Nemetskoe Sloboda (German Settlement), an area just outside the Moscow city limits. In 1576, the czar permitted the first Lutheran church, St. Michael’s, to be built in Moscow.

However, four years later he reneged on his permission, calling for St. Michael’s to be burned down.2 Thus began the precarious existence of the Lutheran Church in Russia. In future years, succeeding czars would be at times repressive or favorable to the Lutheran Church. Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, for example, were more than agreeable to the presence of the Lutherans, advocating for the benefits that they could bring to Russia. Catherine would submit a manifesto on July 22, 1763, inviting Germans into Russia to settle the land of the Volga River valley. As a result, fifty-nine Lutheran churches, thirty-three Roman Catholic, and twenty-three Reformed churches were built by the settlers of the Volga.

Although Germans would constitute the bulk of Lutheran believers in Russia, the remainder of Lutherans would come from various ethnicities: Finns, Swedes, Estonians, Latvians, even Armenians. (Ethnic Russians would not be allowed to leave the state Orthodox Church and become Lutheran until political reforms secured freedom of conscience in the early twentieth century.) Extending their influence throughout the Russian Empire, Czar Alexander I (1801–1825) invited German Lutherans to settle in what constitutes modern-day Ukraine and Georgia. His brother and successor, Nicholas I (1825–1855), brought the Lutheran Church under the state’s more formal control when he signed a document making him titular head of the Church, much like the King of Great Britain at the time, William IV, was considered the head of the state Anglican Church.3

Russian czars, many of whom had partial German ancestry, respected the role that Lutherans played in civil society, from their schools with strong academic credentials to the service they provided in governing Russia. Famed Russian conductor Modest Mussorgsky was among the many notable citizens who graduated from St. Petersburg’s legendary Lutheran school, the Peterschule.4 A further example of Lutherans’ positive influence can be found in Sts. Peter and Paul pastor Heinrich Dieckhoff, who was renowned for founding schools for the deaf and blind in Moscow in the latter half of the nineteenth century.5 The Lutheran Church was also admired for other charitable institutions, such as homes for widows and orphans, and aid they procured for the poor and destitute. The outbreak of World War I, though, caused some Russians to doubt the loyalty of Russian Germans, leading to violence. Eighty-four Lutheran pastors were imprisoned, some exiled to Siberia. Nevertheless, in 1917 there were still 3,674,000 Lutherans and approximately 1,828 churches and prayer houses scattered throughout Russia.6

Shortly after the anniversary celebra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chronology
• Abbreviations
• Prayer for Martyrs
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: A World in Flux: War, Revolution, and Reformation
• Chapter 2: “The Church Is Separated from the State”: The Bolsheviks Take Power
• Chapter 3: “Any Proof of Brotherly Love”: Finding a Way to Aid Russia
• Chapter 4: A Powerful, Invisible Hand from the Dark: The Malevolent Might of the Cheka
• Chapter 5: The “Religious NEP”: The Departure of the ARA and the NLC’s Struggle to Continue
• Chapter 6: A Fir Tree with Two Peaks: The First All-Russian Lutheran Synodical Convention
• Chapter 7: Servants in His Vineyard: A Bible School Is Born in the USSR
• Chapter 8: “Hold Fast What You Have”: The Status of the Lutheran Church in 1926
• Chapter 9: “Unbelievable Elasticity”: Managing Relations with Church and State in 1927
• Chapter 10: “They Would Not See His Face Again”: A Last Synod and Mission Festival
• Chapter 11: “A Declaration of a Relentless Struggle”: The Battle against Religion Is Joined
• Chapter 12: “He … Shall Think to Change the Times and the Law”: Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan Gets Underway
• Chapter 13: “Faithful to Him to the Grave”: Inspiring a New Generation of Believers
• Chapter 14: A Somber Christmas: Arrests and Interrogations
• Chapter 15: The Church Is Broken: The Koch Trial and the Decision in the Hansen-Muss Case
• Chapter 16: Sheep among Wolves: The Servant of the Church as Enemy of the State
• Chapter 17: “Stand and Eat, You Still Have a Long Way to Go”: Words and Prayers of Encouragement
• Chapter 18: “Stuck Deep in Snow and Ice”: The Spiritual Life of the Church in Late 1931 and Early 1932
• Chapter 19: A Sad and Muddled Affair: Conflicts in the Church as OGPU Pressure Intensifies
• Chapter 20: “Harvest of Sorrow”: Seminary Struggles, Famine, and the Recognition of the Soviet Union
• Chapter 21: “A Martyr to the Cause”: The Tragedy of the Meiers
• Chapter 22: “A Small Crowd Armed with Courage”: More Arrests and the Closing of the Seminary in 1934
• Chapter 23: The Pulse of the Church Grows Weaker: The Kirov Terror and the Most Difficult Year since 1929
• Chapter 24: They Could Do No Other: The Closing of Jesus Christ Lutheran Church
• Chapter 25: “Fellow Citizens with the Saints”: The Death of John Morehead and Departure of Arthur Malmgren
• Chapter 26: “Thousands of Seeds … Cast to the Wind”: Shadows of the Great Terror
• Chapter 27: The NKVD Big Lie: Linking the Russian Lutheran Church to Hitler
• Chapter 28: “Blessed Are They that Suffer Persecution for Justice’s Sake”: The Great Terror and the Destruction of the Lutheran Pastorate in the USSR
• Chapter 29: Heroes of Faith in the Gulag: Re-Arrests and Deaths in the Camps
• Chapter 30: Last Christmas in Leningrad: Erasing Three Centuries of Lutheran Presence
• Chapter 31: Under the Watchful Eye of the NKVD: Being German Proves Fatal
• Epilogue: The Gates of Hell Shall Not Prevail against the Church
• Acknowledgments
• Photo Gallery
• Bibliography
• Archives and Libraries Used
• Subject Index