Today, the day before Pentecost, is a Soul Saturday in the Orthodox Church, a time for prayers for the departed. It also marks this year the anniversary of the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941 as 3 million German and Austrian troops engaged in a surprise attack.

June 22, 1941, 4:00 in the morning… The Great Patriotic War has begun. Artist Valentin Papko.

Although the brutal totalitarian dictator Stalin in a secret pact with Hitler had precipitated the start of World War II, Hitler’s racist ideology included a plan to eradicate or enslave the Slavic peoples from the start, and both regimes essentially were anti-Christian. By the end of the war, an estimated 20 to 27 million Russians had been killed or were missing from the combat, many or most civilians. Compare this with an estimated 500,000 U.S. deaths and missing from the war. That’s not to denigrate the contributions of our “greatest generation” at all but shows the scale of the “war in the East.” Stalin’s Communist regime (like Lenin before him) relentlessly had persecuted the Church in Russia while also seeking to turn its remnant into a Communist-shaped new “Living” or renovationist Church. But the “Catacomb Church” persisted underground along with the faithful in the few surviving parishes and secreted monastic communities.

Andrey Lysenko. Blessing of Soviet troops in Stalingrad in 1942.

During the German invasion, Stalin (an apostate former seminarian in his youth) turned to the Church for prayerful help, arguably a political move but perhaps hedging his bets, so to speak. The prayers of the faithful, the processions with holy icons (sometimes in airplanes above battle lines at crucial moments), and the renewed worship of the people helped turn the tide, even though persecution and attempted corruption of the public Church would continue again after World War II. Some faithful out of resistance to the regime even sought refuge temporarily in supporting the Nazi invasion, which had brought for a short time a reopening of closed Churches. Most must have felt in part caught between two hostile ideologies, as they supported the “Great Patriotic War” effort. My Matushka’s grandmother earned a medal as a nurse in combat for the Red Army, although she also in private held to her Christian faith. Average Russian soldiers rejoiced to greet American soldiers as the two armies met in victory, despite all the brutalities and the Cold War to come. May the memory of those faithful, who pouring out themselves in Christ from love of country and neighbor sought God’s help despite the persecution of godless leaders, be eternal!