Soviet Images in the White Night 7-4-9

St Petersburg, Russia

Here in the far north we are having what are called white nights; it never gets dark. At 1 AM the western sky has a hot pink rim and athletes can easily engage in sporting events and sports enthusiasts read box scores in the newspaper without benefit of anything besides the strange luminosity of Russian night. In this surreal pink midnight I am watching the proletariat manipulate the industrial output of the former Soviet Empire.

I am all by myself on a high place about 1 AM, some one hundred feet above a large expanse of concrete that extends a couple of miles in front of me. It is perhaps a third of a mile wide. It is forested with dozens of cranes that look remarkably like praying mantis. These green and blue ferrous creatures are quietly crawling around on tracks hauling all sorts of semi-finished metals - slabs of rusting iron plate, immense ingots of bright aluminum, and vast rolls of iron sheet. I almost expect to see these animated beings consume their various metallic burdens.

A container lift operator is hauling sea containers towards me and is building a temporary wall of these. These giant building blocks have a mixture of Cyrillic scripts and Chinese characters on them. Soviet-Sino relations are certainly different these days. About one hundred of these containers have been built into a wall four hundred feet long and thirty feet high. The operator has clearly constructed thousands of walls in the distant past. He stacks these corrugated steel bricks more precisely and easily than I ever arranged my toy wood blocks as a child.

On either side of my field of vision, ancient battered railway cars that might have once had more dubious uses, inch their way along sidings to disgorge their contents into the bowels of rusting ships. I wonder what is so important that it needs to be moved in the middle of the night. An ancient ship is slinking away into the night, as covertly as is possible to do when it is still daylight after the stroke of twelve. Shouldn’t the people animating this ferrous landscape be in their beds dreaming about something better?

The lack of night is disorienting in a very strange way, especially on top of eight time zone changes in ten days time. Perhaps after enough time one learns to find internal equilibrium and function independently of the cues given by night and day. I expect to flee back south to normal nightfall before I have a chance to find my own internal circadian patterns. I have enough challenges with normal sleep without night going away. Even more disorienting than the lack of night is the lack of spiritual points of reference that can keep us out of spiritual darkness.

The gospel of John warns us to not get lax lest darkness overtake us and cause us to lose our way for lack of light. The Soviet Empire has recently conducted a seventy-five year experience of wandering in the darkness. The spiritual laxness of the 18th and 19th centuries and the very early 20th century led to the vast abusive excesses that seeded the Bolshevik Revolution. Darkness overtook the Empire. For seventy two years official policy declared God dead and closed for business. Atheism was official national group-think. The world watched as one of the great superpowers struggled with rates of alcoholism pushing 50% and irrational central policies that squandered natural and economic resources, the environment, people, and their dreams. The collapse of authoritarian power in 1989 did not dissipate the shadows that had long hovered over the masses. Western free market dynamics and capitalism were not the panacea for the working classes or millions of pensioners long dependent on the cradle to grave attention given to them by an overbearing communist planned central economy. Some power brokers got fabulously wealthy but most people simply slid further down the economic scree.

What has been sobering is the persistence of negative attitudes towards God and spiritual life. As I have made visits to regions progressively further east in areas of the former Empire I have found increasing of evidence of a completely Post-Christian culture. It has been twenty years since the iron curtain fell off its tracks and melted down, yet most of the churches I have visited are maintained strictly as museums or music venues; devoid of any congregations or spiritual life. Most of them have been made into sources of desperately sought hard currency from the West. It cost me $229 because of odious bureaucratic red tape to gain access to two cathedrals for perhaps an hour of time - frantic time to try and photo-document the buildings - no time for meditation or contemplation. The fear that thrives in godless landscapes embraces bureaucratic power for an illusion of safety and control.

As I sit in the luminosity of white night wondering where experiments in communism, atheism, and free market enterprise have taken 300 million people, I can’t but think that God might actually be in business and have a better business plan. After all he does declare “I know the thoughts I have about you, thoughts for good and not for evil; plans that will give you hope and a future.” Perhaps one day these people will inhabit their own churches again and instead invite tourists to come to Sunday services and Wednesday dinner. The turnstiles will be taken off the front doors of the churches and the tired and poor will again be offered refuge.

Perhaps I will go home and have a greater appreciation for the light in which we still are operating in the West. But we better be paying attention. Spiritual night is a whole lot worse than polar night and it lasts longer.