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eBook details

• Title: Through the Seams of the Iron Curtain: Clandestine NGO Support to Christian Religious Minorities in Communist-Controlled Eastern and Central Europe, and Russia, 1960-1989, Bible Smuggling Operations
• Author : Progressive Management
• Release Date : January 03, 2018
• Genre: Christianity,Books,Religion & Spirituality,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 396 KB

Description

This report has been professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction. In the same Cold War context in which the CIA's Book Program covertly sent Western literature behind the Iron Curtain into the Communist world, Christian missionaries also used covert (and some overt) methods to smuggle Bibles to the Underground Churches of the Eastern Bloc. This thesis describes the main smuggling routes and locations and consolidates several privately published, first-hand accounts of retired Bible smugglers, with academic works providing additional insight. It follows the timeline of events leading to the greatest expansion of smuggling operations in the 1960s through the 1980s, and it examines the methods, effects, extent of success, and motives for smuggling this contraband—Bibles—which many Soviets considered dangerous to the stability of Communism. After outlining the activity in individual Eastern Bloc nations, this thesis draws parallels between Ashutosh Varshney's use of the theories of instrumental and value rationality and the internal motivations that drove most Bible smugglers to their work—even in the face of great personal loss. Finally, this work draws a connection between the covert actions of the Underground Church and Bible smugglers and the Soviet and satellite governments' loss of legitimacy in line with Sabrina Ramet's assertions in Social Currents in Eastern Europe.

It is almost unnecessary to explain why some smugglers have maintained their cover to this day: The East has opened, but some of these men and women still have a criminal history on the record books of the nations within which they were caught smuggling. Not every legal battle became moot when the Berlin Wall fell—at least some prior smugglers felt this was the case based on their secrecy in recent printed accounts. Because of the sensitivity of the topic, some authors published using pseudonyms in order to maintain anonymity for those in the account. Nevertheless, several of the personally published accounts represent oral historical accounts of participants that provide unique first-person perspectives on the operations, the successes and failures, and the value of the work of smuggling Bibles into closed countries. Aside from the primary source books and the few scholarly articles, current articles about social currents and religious trends will help to establish the currency of the social concerns such as freedom of religion, legitimacy of government, and authoritarian oppression addressed here.

Undisputed is the secularization forced on Eastern European nations under Communism. The Soviet system was built on an institutional atheism, in which children were forcibly indoctrinated so as to separate them from the "superstitious" faith of their families—occasionally separating them from the families themselves. Christians were arrested, imprisoned, fined, tortured; they lost their jobs, their titles, and sometimes, even their lives, if they would not denounce their faith in favor of atheism. The first-hand accounts also give a picture of the communist mindset in Poland and Czechoslovakia early in the Cold War beginning in the decade before the focus time-period. They seem to make up the main body of primary sources that tell these stories—and, importantly, they overlap with and mostly complement each other on many points, as will be discussed shortly between Henderson, Brother Andrew, Wurmbrand, Heinila and Babcock, especially.

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