The Damage Has Been Done

On Wednesday night, after Pastor Sasha Schmidt and I had arrived at the train station and bought our ticket, we had lots of spare time, so we went to a local restaurant for blineys, which are the Russian equivalent of crepes. After we ate, Sasha asked me what I would like to do: hang out at the train station, or perhaps take a bit of a walk around St. Petersburg. Of course, since I had never had any opportunity to see the see except from a bus, and since Sasha was an English speaking native of St. Pete, I thought that it would be nice to see a bit of the city.

Sasha's tour, as it turned out, was more informative than I expected, but not in the way I thought it would be. It was weird because we only walked a couple of blocks, but as we did it seemed like a broken record: "Here used to be where a church was, but now it is..." In the three short blocks, I saw a metro station that had been an Orthodox church, a large, rather unattractive theater which replaced another church, that had been razed so that the theater could be built, and finally, a previously Lutheran hospital that had been taken from them and was now government run. Sasha told me that only 5 of the once 30 Lutheran churches in St. Petersburg now remained, an amazing 80% loss.

In fact, I was shown pictures of St. Mary's church, which has now been restored, but for several decades was a public swimming pool. One of the pictures was quite eerie, for it showed a man who was dressed up as Neptune and was parading around the swimming hall. But, in the background, the pillars of the church and the area where the altar once was were still visible. It is amazing to think of the lengths which the communist system went to in order to discredit Christianity in the eyes of ordinary Russians. And, unfortunately, I would say that it did, in general, a successful job of doing so.