Finding God in the Gulag: A History of Christianity in the Soviet Penal System by Jeffery S.Hardy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. 280 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978‐0‐19‐775167‐1

While research into the functioning and experience of the Gulag has flourished in recent years, its religious life has received relatively little scholarly attention until now. As Jeffrey S. Hardy’s lively account reveals, the Christian presence within the camp system was in fact extensive and complex, and often hard to pin down. The Soviet regime’s antireligious policies led to the arrest and incarceration of large numbers of clerics—for example, the infamous secret NKVD order no. 00047 of July 1937 specifically targeted “church officials and sectarians,”—but the number of lay believers arrested for their faith or for other unrelated offenses goes unrecorded in official documentation. Moreover, Hardy shows that religious convictions in the camp were fluid: faith provided some prisoners with spiritual sustenance in the most inhumane of times while others encountered new religious practices and experienced conversion. For others still, the unbearableness of their ordeal led not to resilience, but to a loss of faith: how could God let the Gulag happen? Hardy’s story begins on the Solovetskii Islands in the far northern White Sea. Here and in other parts of the Soviet Union, the early years saw monasteries turned into prisons. Often located in remote locations with a mix of cells and communal spaces and handily thick walls, these religious institutions were easily adapted to their new function. Their crosses, bells, and icons were removed and portraits of Lenin and Trotsky and socialist slogans were hung in their place. But in the first postrevolution decade, the religious was not entirely eradicated. Monks sometimes continued living there and were permitted to hold services. At Solovki, some inmates were allowed to wear clerical robes while carrying out the labor that was meant to “reeducate” them. Hardy shows that the notion of the prison or camp as a place of atheist reeducation developed slowly and remained contradictory. In the 1930s the most active measures were taken to eradicate religious practices and beliefs inside the Gulag—camp personnel were instructed to send any prisoners caught worshipping to solitary confinement—but camp newspapers still did not devote much space to the atheist issue and many prisoners never heard an atheist lecture. By the postwar years, other pressures weighed more heavily on camp officials and antireligious repression in the Gulag was still more “sporadic and uneven.” Moreover, the annexation of new territories on the USSR’s western frontier brought an influx of prisoners from a Christian background, and they contributed to the ecumenical melting pot of the camps. The picture that emerges in Finding God in the Gulag is one in which a relative vibrant Christian subculture survives, sometimes unnoticed, sometimes ignored; punishment could be extremely harsh, but it was not systematic. Prisoners prayed and sang hymns, met for worship in a corner of the barrack, secretly embroidered icons, made Christmas and Easter greeting cards from birch bark, and kneaded rosaries out of breadcrumbs. Gangsters and thieves sang ballads and inked tattoos on one another containing religious imagery. Even when the Soviet regime did try to tackle the problem of religious activity head-on, their initiatives were often counterproductive. Under Khrushchev, a section of the Dubravlag camp was set aside for believers, ostensibly to contain religious influences in the wider camp network, but it came to be perceived as a haven of sorts for prisoners who wanted to pursue a spiritual life. And when political dissidents, many of them interested in exploring Orthodoxy and other faiths, including esoteric traditions, found themselves in camps like Dubravlag, they too contributed to the religious culture of the Gulag. By the end of the 1980s, perestroika brought the impossible sight of missionaries and evangelizers, Orthodox and Protestant, entering the camps. By all accounts, they were more sustained and effective in their efforts to find converts among the prison population than their atheist predecessors. Finding God in the Gulag opens up an important and rich topic. Drawing on a rich set of memoirs, letters, oral history accounts, and physical artefacts, it traces the story of Christianity in the Gulag, primarily from the perspective of the prisoner. It deftly explores diverse strains within the Christian traditions of the camps, which included not only Russian Orthodoxy, but also Baptism, Seventh-Day Adventism, Pentecostalism, and Lutheranism. Future research might explore the presence and influence of non-Christian groups within the Gulag. Hardy’s book offers a new perspective, a clear argument, and a readable narrative that will be welcomed by researchers and undergraduates studying the Gulag or religion under communist regimes.