What Went Wrong in Russia?

In the fall of 1991, I received an invitation signed by the two most powerful men in Russia. Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin were asking a small delegation of American Christians to visit their country in order to “help restore morality to the Soviet Union.” The government would host us in a luxury hotel owned by the Central Committee of the Communist Party and would pay all other expenses.

A few weeks later I boarded a plane for Moscow, unsure of what I might find. I grew up during the frostiest era of the Cold War, when Nikita Khrushchev was aiming nuclear warheads at the US and threatening, “We will bury you!” The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the official end of the Cold War, but I wondered how much had really changed. As a journalist, I braced myself against the propaganda we would no doubt hear on a state-sponsored junket.

The Soviets fulfilled their promises, lining up appointments with the Supreme Soviet parliament, the newspaper Pravda, the Academy of Social Sciences, the Journalists’ Club, the Ukrainian Embassy, and even the notorious KGB. Each day seemed like an episode from Twilight Zone. A bus would transport us to a palatial office where our impeccably dressed hosts, looking dazed and bewildered, would confess the failures of communism and beg for help in finding another way forward. These, the leaders of the largest country on earth, had no clue where to lead it.

More than thirty years later, certain scenes from our trip stand out, such as our visit to the headquarters of Pravda. From my days as a magazine publisher, I felt right at home in their offices. The editorial staff met with our delegation around a large conference table, in a room with layout sheets taped to the walls and the smell of rubber cement in the air. In two years this iconic newspaper had seen its circulation plummet from eleven million to seven hundred thousand, and the editors were desperately attempting to regain their readers’ trust.

An earnest young editor said to us, “We were trained in the best Marxist schools. But we have seen the catastrophic results. As communists, we shared many of your Christian values. You oppose racism; we oppose racism. You work against poverty and injustice, so do we. And yet, in seventy years communism has produced the greatest monstrosity the world has ever seen—killing sixty million of our own people, as Solzhenitsyn has shown! Where did we go wrong?”

On the return flight to Chicago, that editor’s face and his anguished question continued to haunt me. Back home, I cleared everything from my calendar and wrote a short “instant book” (Praying with the KGB) recounting some of our experiences. The world was changing fast, and that book became outdated almost upon publication. One by one, member nations withdrew from the USSR, leading some observers to joke that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was becoming the Union of Fewer and Fewer Republics (UFFR). Less than two months after our visit, the USSR ceased to exist.

During the next decade I watched from a distance as Russia lived through crisis and chaos. President Yeltsin consolidated power by firing rockets on the Russian parliament and purging communists from the government. Western economists, summoned to reshape the centralized economy, had mixed results. The ruble dropped to historic lows against the dollar, and senior citizens found their pensions virtually worthless. Meanwhile, a handful of oligarchs gobbled up the rights to exploit Russia’s vast natural resources.

True to his invitation letter, Yeltsin welcomed spiritual help from the West. Early in his term he passed laws to protect basic human rights, especially the freedom of religion. Soon, as many as 7000 missionaries flooded in, mostly from the US and South Korea.

Everything changed, however, when an obscure former KGB agent named Vladimir Putin became president in 2000. He called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century,” and set Russia on a new course. Over the next few years Putin tightened restrictions on missionaries, labeling them “foreign agents” and banning them from the country. His rhetoric against NATO and the US grew increasingly shrill as he revived dreams of a Russian empire.

Out of the blue one day in 2019, I got a call from a publisher. “We’re interested in reprinting your book Praying with the KGB,” he said. “You witnessed one of the great events of modern times, the collapse of the USSR, and we think the story deserves retelling. Do you control the rights to that out-of-print book?”

“Yes, I do,” I answered. “But that’s ancient history now. There was a window of opportunity, a gust of freedom, but it didn’t last long. Putin is taking Russia down a very different path.”

The publisher and I had a few more exchanges, and each time I gave the same answer. Then February 24, 2022 happened. After months of denial and outright lying, Russia launched an all-out attack on their largest neighbor, Ukraine.  The world watched in horror as missiles and bombs targeted apartment blocks, hospitals, schools, and kindergartens. Within weeks, savagery not seen since World War II descended upon Ukraine. Still, two years later, the war grinds on, with incalculable damage to Ukraine.

What went wrong, both politically and spiritually? In future years, historians will sort through the various reasons for Russia’s about-face away from the West. Secular media tend to focus on economics, tribalism, and history, overlooking the powerful forces of religion and culture. For example, I have seen little about Putin’s dream to restore a Russian world (Russkiy mir). His goal of capturing the holy site of Kyiv, where Vladimir the Great first adopted Christianity a thousand years ago, has roused a quasi-religious crusade. Putin’s odd alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church led directly to the brutal invasion of Ukraine, which had opted for freedom and democracy.

As I listen to news reports from Russia now—fleeing émigrés, assassinations, mass arrests, press clampdowns, war crimes, nuclear threats—I keep replaying the gripping scenes I witnessed in 1991: dazed Pravda editors grasping for truth, peasants standing in a packed chapel, journalists applauding prison ministries, and even KGB agents issuing a public apology. It seemed as if an entire ideology had melted around me. Instead, it went underground, only to reappear in a more sinister form. Sadly, the war in Ukraine is all too typical of Russia’s current modus operandi.

I finally agreed to the publisher’s request to write about Russia—not simply reprinting the account of my 1991 visit, but explaining what has happened since to create the current global crisis. I’m a journalist, not a Russia expert, and so I turned to my friend John Bernbaum as a coauthor. A PhD in European and Russian history, John was also one of the nineteen “Guests of the President” on our 1991 visit. He served with the US Department of State until joining the Christian College Coalition, where he developed a Russian Studies program. Later, he accepted an invitation from Russia to establish a Christian liberal arts college in Moscow.

For three decades John commuted back and forth between Moscow, Kyiv, and Washington, D.C.—more than 110 trips in all. The Russian-American Christian University, which John founded and led, stayed open for fifteen years, until the U-turn engineered by Putin. During those years, John witnessed firsthand the thawing, then freezing, between Russia and the West as he dealt with government bureaucrats, contractors, and students. This book relies heavily on John’s observations and insights.

The title and subtitle say it all: What Went Wrong? Russia’s Lost Opportunity and the Path to Ukraine. Other books have analyzed the economic and social dynamics in Russia and Ukraine after 1991. This one chronicles a neglected story: the role religion played in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the rise of a newly autocratic Russia, and the emergence of democracy in Ukraine. What lay behind the radically different paths chosen by two former Soviet republics?

We are living at a hinge moment of history, in which democracy and freedom are at risk around the world. What, if anything, can we do about it?