BBC Gulag Film Shows Terrible Consequences of Trying to Kill God
By Julian Mann
Special to Virtueonline
www.virtueonline.org
Nov. 15, 2017
Would the general public in the West be so relaxed about State-driven de-Christianisation if they grasped its implications?
The terrible consequences of trying to drive Christ out of a society are depicted unforgettably in Angus Macqueen's 1999 film about Stalin's Gulag system (https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0077ss7/gulag), now available on BBC iplayer for a few weeks. Thanks to Peter Hitchens for drawing attention to Gulag on his Mail on Sunday blog (http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2017/11/available-for-a-few-weeks-only-the-antidote-to-the-stupid-trivial-film-the-death-of-stalin.html).
In case anyone doubts how purposefully anti-Christian the Soviet regime was, they should watch its 1928 propaganda film about the 1917 Bolshevik 'revolution' in Petrograd (actually it was a seedy coup) - October: Ten Days that shook the world - also now on iplayer.
This silent film proudly depicts the hatred the Bolsheviks had for the Lord Jesus Christ personally.
Gulag is a powerful evangelistic documentary. It vividly demonstrates that, though the monster thought the Bolsheviks had killed Him off, God was not dead during Stalin's terrors in the 1930s and 1940s. Three scenes featuring women who survived his hell-holes in Siberia demonstrate this.
First, one woman related how she was amongst a group of girls being marched through the main street of her town in Lithuania by soldiers with dogs. The girls were being taken to the railway station to be transported to Siberia. She recalled a priest blessing them from the window of the town's Church. That blessing stayed with her throughout her ordeal.
Secondly, another woman recalled praying the only prayer she knew to the God of heaven and earth. She prayed it while she was digging out ice in a deep hole in the ground and kept on praying it throughout her Siberian nightmare.
Thirdly, the film showed an elderly woman survivor at the Christian burial of her sister, also a victim of Stalin's camps, in the post-Communist Russia of the 1990s. The woman was shown addressing her dead sister as she lay, Russian Orthodox-style, in an open coffin with a Cross on the wall behind it.
The Lord Jesus certainly had the last word over Stalin.
The irrepressible good news from Gulag is that if the Marxists did get control of the West, the eternal Christ, who has defeated sin, death and hell through His death and resurrection, would have the last word over them as well. But they would try very hard to kill God and that would mean terrible suffering for many people made in His image.
If only the Millennial generation would get that.