the failure of atheism and the triumph of faith in Russia. Atheism was the official doctrine of the Soviet Union. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the greatest Russian author and historian of the 20th century, catalogued how Russia fell into the hands of atheists to communism. When he was asked how is it that a small group of communists managed to seize the great Christian country of Russia, his answer was, we forgot God. You should know about the Russian Revolution. If not, it's a horrible story of how, during the First World War, the communists succeeded in overthrowing the long Russian dynasty of the Tsar and the Russian Orthodox Church and replaced it with atheistic communism. The Tsar of Russia, Tsar Nicholas II, and his entire family were overthrown by Bolshevik revolutionaries, but before that even, Kerensky leading the Duma, leading the Socialist Party in the Duma, the Parliament of Russia, overthrew the Tsar, and then along came Lenin and the Bolsheviks who overthrew the Duma of Russia. And Russia went into upheaval and turmoil such as the world has never seen. The Bolsheviks turned machine guns on the crowds in the streets in St. Petersburg, in Moscow. They mobilized the population to seize churches, destroy buildings, One of the worst events in the history of the world. They rounded up anybody who represented authority, anyone who represented the Church, and they had them shot, starting with the Tsar of Russia and his beautiful four daughters and son. The Bolshevik Revolution was vile, violent, destructive, beyond what most people are aware of. Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, the communist authorities vigorously enforced the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. Karl Marx had produced the Marxist Manifest in 1848. Karl Marx was a useless character who never did a day's work in his entire life and claimed to speak for the workers. His wife and two daughters committed suicide, so he must have been a bundle of laughs to live with. Another two of his children died of starvation while he was busy propagating communism. and never working a day. And that's Karl Marx, who people want to turn to for the economics. And Lenin was the mass murderer of mass murderers. And they violently persecuted Christianity, which has often been forgotten. Which is why I wonder why some people walk around with Vladimir Lenin t-shirts, or multi-tongue t-shirts, or Hammond Sickle, or Red Star caps. Why would they want to identify with one of the most violent, evil movements in the history of mankind? You might have heard of the Gulag Archipelago, that shorthand for the communist concentration camp system that destroyed 49,000 churches. That is, 49,000 church buildings and congregations were physically destroyed in the Soviet Union by the communists under that red star and Hammond's sickle. Including some of the greatest churches and cathedrals the world had ever seen. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn says, who speaks about the 66 million Christians killed in Russia by the Bolsheviks? The Holodomor of the Ukraine killed 7 million people alone. In the Katerin Forest Massacre, the Russians slaughtered all the Polish officers and non-commissioned officers. 28,000 Polish officers, the cream and leadership of Poland, shot in the head and laying in mass graves in the Katerin Forest. In the man-made famines in Ukraine, millions of people died in a place that used to export food. Now this is a communist propaganda. happy workers in flourishing fields and this is the propaganda pictures of these happy workers mobilized to go and work on the government lands. But the reality was Slavery on land that used to be owned by their grandparents, they now worked and everything had to be given to the state. And when they were withheld, the state came in and burned the forest, burned the homes, burned the crops, and millions died of starvation as a result. These things are probably not taught in our school textbooks right now, but they should be, because this is reality and this is history, and this is what happens when communism takes over a country. This is one newspaper back in 1936, speaking about the six million who had already perished from the Soviet famine, most of them in Ukraine, because the peasants' crops had been seized and their animals and themselves had died of starvation as a result of the communist de-kulakization or collectivization scheme. Leon Trotsky, the head of the Red Army, oversaw most of this mass murder. Professor R.J. Rummel of The University of Hawaii has documented death by government, he calls it democide. Also the Black Book of Communism, a 900-page doorstopper that you can drop on the foot of a liberal and it will make him limp for a while. Documentation taken from the communist-owned archives. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Their files were made available, and these communists, or ex-communists I should say, including Stephane Cotter, who'd been the editor of the Communism magazine, these ex-communists were so revolted by the facts that they discovered about their own system, they published this, based on their own archives, documenting 100 million people killed by communist governments between 1917-1991, and that excluded China because we don't have their files yet. But that's just the Soviet Union. 100 million people murdered by progressive socialist movements in the name of helping people. Most of them were killed in the 1,800 communist concentration camps, what we call the Gulag Archipelago. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a Russian soldier who was arrested for a private opinion he expressed to a friend about the failure of communism, and so he spent years working as a slave in Stalin's Gulag. The Gulag is and a term that is used to apply to the Soviet forced labor camp systems. This is the propaganda. This is the Soviet art. Happy workers, but this is the reality. Barbed wire, machine gun towers, in the snow belts, people regimented under brutal guards, working in the coldest conditions on earth, in some of the most vile conditions. Here you can see women, mothers, grandmothers, forced to dig canals like just slave labor. Here a woman being forced to pull the barges along the canals that they've just dug as though they are cattle. These are some of the few pictures we've managed to get that were smuggled out of the Gulag and document the brutal slave labor system which chewed up over 50 million Russians in these gulags. And unfortunately, our governments were aiding and abetting them, because we fought on the side of Joseph Stalin in the Second World War, saving Uncle Joe Stalin's Soviet Union from the oblivion they so deserved. And the documentation is there. In 1941, as the Soviets were preparing to invade Western Europe, they were counter-attacked by Operation Barbarossa. And they'd already taken Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, they'd invaded Finland, they'd taken Bessarabia, they'd invaded parts of Romania. They were a threat to all of Europe. And we came in and we supported the Soviet Union and tried to save them. And here you can see the British flag under which my father fought for six years in the Second World War. The American flag, which has always stood for freedom, apparently, right next to the Soviet flag, which is the most bloodthirsty, mass-murdering, anti-Christ dictatorship in the history of mankind. and we call this fighting for freedom. Though they promised them freedom, they themselves are the slaves of corruption. The worst dictator on the planet, the man who gets the Guinness Book of Records prize for being the biggest mass murder in history, Joseph Stalin, on the side of freedom and democracy. Or should we say freedom and democracy, represented by Churchill of England and FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt of America, helping Uncle Joe Stalin to not only keep his control over 280 million Russians, but get another 100 million Christians in Eastern Europe under his control, where he butchered and bludgeoned them into submission, destroying even more churches for another 45 years. When you go to Eastern Europe, as I have done, you find your Christian friends use the word Yalta as a swear word. It was the agreement, the meeting I've just shown a picture of, Yalta, where Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to give Stalin the whole of Eastern Europe. And it was Western aid, Western money, tanks, trucks, ammunition, bombs, that kept this brutal dictator Stalin in place. Don't expect to see any Hollywood films in it, because Hollywood's run by people in love with communism, and they wouldn't want to give you any bad impression about Uncle Joe Stalin. And of course we were always on the right side, so let's not give anything that'll show our crimes. But one book that I read when I was 14 years old, The Last Secret, gave the details about how at the end of the Second World War, which was meant to be for freedom, we handed over over two million Russians who were in the West, and we hand them across the Iron Curtain into the hands of the Soviets. Here in Austria, Russians who had fled Russia, many of them hadn't even been born in Russia, they were born in Western Europe, they fled off to the Bolshevik Revolution. to escape communism. But as part of the Alt Agreement, all the Russians and East Europeans who had gathered up and at bayonet points were forced by the British and American armies over into the hands of the NKVD. That's what later became the KGB, the secret police, who murdered them all. They went into the slave labour camps, brutal, in these dark areas that were the slave labour areas of the Gulag. up in Siberia in the Soviet Union, and I know people who suffered in these places. In fact, one of my uncles spent ten years as a slave in Stalin's gulags, lost his left hand to gangrene over there. A lot of our brothers and sisters in Christ suffered in these kind of winter hell holes. If you can think of hell as being a place of ice, that's what the gulag was. Today you can go and see these, they're like tourist sites. This is where the gulags were. This is what it looked like in summer, but it didn't look like this in winter. I mean, everything green was white in winter. It wasn't just in Russia, it was also in Romania. One of the good friends of my family, my wife grew up knowing the von Bruns' family friends. Richard von Brunt spent 14 years in a communist concentration camp under Ceausescu in Romania, tortured for his faith. He had scars all over his body. His wife, Sabrina von Brunt, spent five years in a labor camp for women, digging canals for the communists, because she was a pastor's wife, a Lutheran pastor. Richard von Brunt, in Tortured for Christ, says that cruelty of atheism is hard to believe. When man has no faith in the reward of good, or in the punishment of evil, there is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man. The communist torturers often said to us, there is no God, there is no hereafter, there is no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish. I have heard one torturer even say, I thank God in whom I do not believe that I've lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart. He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on the prisoners. I spoke with Prisoners who'd been in a communist concentration camp in Angola who said to me that at one point after all the torture had gone through, they said, why don't you just kill us and get it over with? And the communist concentration camp guard said to him, oh no, no, we don't want to kill you and send you to heaven with God, no. We want you to curse Christ and come to hell with us for all eternity. People actually said that. It's been documented. I'm not the only one who's documented that. Others heard the same words. There are people who used to be Gulag bosses who have documented. That was it. The slogan of the Soviet Union was, let us drive the believers from the earth and God from heaven. The Soviet Union was committed to the complete annihilation of all religious institutions and ideas. Militant atheism was central to the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. When people come to you and say, what about all the evil done in the name of religion? Agree with them. Because we know that atheism is also a religion. Communism is a religion. And the greatest evils in the history of mankind have been done by the religion of atheism, humanism. Evolutionism. Yes. Tremendous evils. These atheists often want to attack Christians for what happened in the Crusades and what happened in the Inquisition, but they are oblivious to their own crimes very recently done in the name of atheism. Do they want to take responsibility for all the evils done by atheists? Like Vladimir Lenin? The state-established atheism is the only scientific truth. Any criticism of atheism or the state's anti-religious policies was forbidden. You would go to jail, you would lose your job, you might lose your life if you criticised atheism. You could not criticise atheism, it was the state religion. It could lead to forced retirement, arrest, imprisonment, or death. Lenin declared that religion is an obstacle to the construction of a communist society and therefore the annihilation of all religion and the replacement of atheism, was the most important ideological goal of the state. Those people say, oh, you know, they weren't really atheists. Oh, yes, they were. There never has been a group more consistently, more devotedly atheist than the Soviet Union's Communist Party. And that's the kind of religious statues they erected. The new communist man, with a hammer and the sickle, reaching up defiantly with a fist in the face of God. we are going to annihilate Christianity. We're going to drive the clergy from the earth and God from heaven. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely and there's never been a more absolute power in the world than that seen in the Soviet Union. And this is the God of the communists. They have made such a cult of Vladimir Lenin, they built an Egyptian-styled tomb or pyramid-type structure over the grave of Vladimir Lenin. And for 70 years, atheists would line up, in the snow even, to walk past their god, Vladimir Lenin, in this phenomenal mausoleum, which was in fact a classical monument to the ancient Egyptian type of pyramids. And in this mausoleum with five pillars, the central focus was the corpse of this dead god, Vladimir Lenin. I mean, what a pointless exercise. And by the way, that wasn't really Lenin lying there anymore, because they didn't do a very good job of embalming him originally, and so his nose fell off, and his ears fell off, and his fingers fell off, and most of him was actually plastered Paris, kind of taxidermy things done in the end. Vladimir Lenin himself was obviously dead, but the body that they show you is, say, that's Vladimir Lenin. In fact, it's more like a plastered Paris dummy from Madame Massard's waxworks. But every May Day, one of Satanist's most important days is the 1st of May. And this Communist Party made the 1st of May their holiest day of the year, when they would all troop, all the new weapons and all the different units of the Soviet Army, the Red Army would come past Vladimir Lenin's tomb, and the leadership of the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, the Politburo would be lined up on top of Lenin's tomb. How symbolic can you get? I mean, this was a religion, a serious religion of atheism. Have you heard of, how many have heard of Solovetsky Island? Has anyone heard of Solovetsky Island? You should have. It should be in our school textbooks. There's Solovetsky Island. It's way up in the Arctic Circle. They get six months night and they get six months day. Way up in the Arctic Circle. In 1922, the first prototype Soviet concentration camp was established in his former Orthodox monastery of Solovetsky. In the middle of the White Sea, escape was impossible. I mean, where would you go? And so there, Solovetsky Island, which used to be this Christian monastery, became the death camp of death camps, the prototype concentration camp. In this monastery, they imprisoned the ministers, and they slaughtered the Christians here in phenomenal numbers. Today you can go, and it's a place of memorial for those who were killed there, eight metropolitans. 20 archbishops, 47 bishops of the Orthodox Church of Russia were killed on Solovetsky, including the metropolitan Tikhon of Moscow, who excommunicated the communists for their godless ideology. He was brave, but he paid the price first. 95,000 believers were executed by firing squad on Solovetsky Island. Why is it that there's so many Christians here in this gathering who haven't even heard of Solovetsky Island? Why not? What is the matter with our school textbooks, with our history channel, and with even our Christian media that this is left silent? In the first five years of the Bolshevik Revolution, 28 bishops and 1,215 priests were executed. That's what we got from the official records of the Soviet Union. Today you can go to Russia and you can see these icons which show Soviet concentration camp concentration camp NKVD guards shooting the priests and archbishops of the church. In 1922 another 8,000 priests were killed. All of this was carried out under Vladimir Lenin. Now many people try to make Lenin out to be the good guy who started a noble socialist revolution and Joseph Stalin was extreme and bad and he overdid it, but Lenin meant for well and Stalin is the one who corrupted communism. Not at all. Joseph Stalin killed more people in Lenin only because he lived longer. Vladimir Lenin killed millions in the few years that he was in power. During the purges of 1937 to 1938, 168,300 Russian Orthodox clergy were killed. That means ministers, pastors, bishops. pastors killed in less than two years, just in the Soviet Union. Of these, 100,000 were shot by the KGB, that's the secret police, shot. Not counting the ones that starved to death, working to death in concentration camps. You can today go to Russia and see plaques like this in their monasteries commemorating the different ministers, different nuns, Christians of different sorts, teachers and others, who were murdered. In this case, these were shot at the Petrovo shooting range near Moscow, by the KGB. And there are wars of these. And there are millions of names. And they wanted to replace all the churches. This is the Museum of Scientific Atheism. Obviously it was built for something else, but they turned it into the Museum of Scientific Atheism. Well there's an oxymoron. Scientific atheism. There's nothing scientific about atheism. They launched a group called the League of Militant Godless. How many of you have heard of the League of Militant Godless before? This was a very big group. This was meant to replace the church. It failed to receive widespread support from the public despite vast state resources to promote it. See, this is one of their magazines, The Godless Communists. This was the membership card that you carried. CCCP, that's the Russian for USSR, Union of Soviet Socialist Republic. This is your membership card that I belong to the League of Milton Godless. And this is one of their magazines, The League of Milton Godless. And here they can show a 1928 magazine cover showing communist workers smashing church bells and dumping Jesus with the garbage. That's the kind of unsubtle magazine covers they had. And here you can see a spontaneous demonstration of support for the one party dictator Joseph Stalin. Amazing, these people all had printing presses in their homes that they could each print an exact replica of Joseph Stalin's picture and they just all turned out at the same time. This obviously wasn't organised by the government, this must have just been a spontaneous reflection of the devotion of the public for their leader. And here you can see not only Joseph Stalin applauding himself, but there is Mounty Tun, and there is Khrushchev and Berea, a whole lot of interesting people there. There's Khrushchev. Khrushchev was the dictator of Russia in 1950s and 60s. But this is back still in the days of Joseph Stalin. They saturated Russia with communist propaganda militia. They were very evangelistic. They put up statues to this mass-murdering thug Stalin all over the place. They made a cult out of him. Worshipping the state and worshipping the state leader. And this was the thank you Comrade Stalin, my happy childhood poster. This poor kid's mother and father were both killed within the two years of this picture taken by order of Comrade Stalin. Communism was the real mind virus. that turned people into monsters. In 1959 Nikita Khrushchev closed 12,000 churches in a new wave of communist persecution. It's just extraordinary because Nikita Khrushchev was known as the man who was bringing peaceful coexistence. He was the one who did detente before even Brezhnev did detente. He was considered a reformer like Gorbachev. He closed 12,000 churches. and of course invaded Budapest, crushed the Hungarian revolt, invaded Czechoslovakia, crushed the Prague uprising. The communist attempt to establish a state church with houses of scientific atheism in Russian cities proved a dismal failure. People just weren't that interested. And so they tried to allow more freedom of expression. And Nikodem Khrushchev came promising freedom of expression, freedom of association, and before you know it, churches opened all over the place. And he was just preparing the harvest for a new cutting down, a reaping. By the end of the Khrushchev era, it was estimated that he had had another 50,000 ministers of the Gospel executed by the KGB. Another 50,000! And that's during an era of peaceful coexistence and detente, in the 50s and 60s. There's a lot of documentation, there's no question about this. By the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, 1917, there were 50,000 Orthodox churches, parishes, 1,000 monasteries, and 60 theological colleges in the Russian Empire. These are just of the Russian Orthodox congregations, which of course were the biggest. By 1941, there were not even 200 congregations left. In fact, there were less than 140 in the whole of the Soviet Union. Not one single monastery, not one seminary or theological college left. 1941, they had annihilated 49,000 churches already. The Orthodox Church in Russia has over 30,000 churches set up, parishes, 8,000 monasteries and 100 theological seminaries. There's been a tremendous resurgence of faith. And all over Russia you can see new monasteries being built to old monasteries being restored. Phenomenal. Where they had painted over the icons, they've painstakingly taken the paint off so that the people can again see the wonderful art expressing the faith. Where the crosses have been blown off, they've replaced crosses atop of their domes. They have built new churches in the classic Orthodox style. And St Basil's Cathedral in Red Square. outside the Kremlin is one of the classic symbols of the undying Christian faith of the Russian people. All over Russia you're seeing new theological seminaries and monasteries being established. This is a revival of Christianity in what was once the heartland of atheism. This is a really impressive, amazing thing, and it should be something that is taking our attention. We should be, in fact, trumpeting this victory over atheism, this failure of atheism, and this resurgence of faith. Here's, for example, the St. Petersburg Evangelical Theological Academy. These are some of the eparchies of the Russian Orthodox Church that have been re-established since the collapse of the Soviet Union. And we're not even talking here about the other denominations in the Russian Federation. In Operation World, they identify 74 Protestant denominations in Russia with 2 million members, 13 independent denominations, 22 other Orthodox denominations in addition to the Russian Orthodox, as well as Anglicans and Catholics. Symbolic of the failure of atheism and a triumph of faith in Russia is Christ the Saviour Cathedral. This is an inspiring story. This is a story you'll want to remember to tell others. This cathedral, Christ the Saviour Cathedral, was destroyed, dynamited in 1931 by order of the communist dictator Joseph Stalin. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on the northern bank of the Moscow River was built during the 19th century. It took more than 40 years to construct, which was in fact quite a record. Most cathedrals take three or four generations to build. They built it in just 40 years because the Tsar put massive amounts of money into it. But in 1931, this magnificent cathedral, the third largest cathedral in the world, was destroyed. by order of the communist dictator Joseph Stalin. And this demolition was supposed to prepare the way for the colossal palace of the Soviets, a Tower of Babel type edifice that would replace Christ the Savior Cathedral, so symbolic of the victory of atheism. And at the top of this ugly monstrosity was meant to be a huge idol of Lenin, with his fist raised towards God. This was the plan. The original church, Christ the Saviour Cathedral was the scene of the 1882 world premiere of the world-famous 1812 Overture. If you haven't heard the 1812 Overture by Peter Tchaikovsky, you need to hear it. It's one of the great classical musical pieces. Christ the Saviour Cathedral was constructed on the initiative of Tsar Alexander I upon the Russian victory over Napoleon Bonaparte, the French dictator, when he retreated from Moscow Christmas Day, the 25th of December, 1812. And so the 1812 overture was to celebrate the victory of the Russian Christian people against the French revolutionary forces of Napoleon and his disastrous winter retreat. The Tsar declared, to signify our gratitude to Divine Providence for saving Russia from the doom that overshadowed her, the cathedral was to be constructed as a memorial and a testimony to God's saving grace and His answer to prayer. The church was to be modeled on the Hagia Sophia, the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople, the greatest church in the world at that time. And Christ, the Saviour Cathedral, has much of the dome structure that the Byzantine Empire used in the Hagia Sophia. The cathedral was consecrated the 26th of May 1883, the day before Tsar Alexander III was crowned. And Zoe Alexander III is the one who set free the serfs, who liberated the feudal serfs in Russia. Joseph Stalin determined to demolish this iconic church. On the 5th of December, 1931, the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was dynamited and reduced to rubble. Absolutely tragic. They set up the cameras to film this because to them this was so symbolic. of the victory of communism and atheism over Christianity. Tragic. It took a full year to remove all the rubble from this site. Look at the magnificent size of the bells being brought down to be melted down. a year to remove the rubble from this magnificent cathedral, from the site. And Joseph Stalin determined to erect the Palace of the Soviets in this modernistic, buttress-tower-babel style on this site, supporting a gigantic structure of linen perched on the top of the dome with his arm and fist defiantly raised in the air in rebellion to Almighty God. But lack of funds. Problems with flooding that never happened before since, from the nearby Moscow River. The outbreak of war in 1941 prevented the project from succeeding. Under Nikita Khrushchev, this area was transformed into the world's largest open-air swimming pool. And this was how the site was for many years, decades. And communism passed at zenith, the evil empire started to fall to pieces, the Iron Curtain tumbled. Imagine a system so vile that it needs to build an obstacle course like this, stretching the whole length of Europe from Trieste in the south to Stettin in the north. of ditches and anti-vehicle traps and mines and electric fences and killer dogs and more barbed wire and machine gun towers and spotlights and motion sensors and automatic tripwire machine guns to stop people from escaping from the east to the west. This iron curtain stretching from north to south divided up Europe between slave and free. Here you can see the areas that were betrayed into the hands of the Soviet Union by the Yalta Agreement and by the Soviets being given all these areas with Western weapons at the end of the Second World War. That's over 100 million Christians betrayed into the hands of the Soviets through the Second World War. Here you can see the Soviet encroach on Europe. When we speak about Eastern Europe, that's not accurate. Russia's Eastern Europe. What we call Eastern Europe is really Central Europe. Czech and Slovakia and East German Poland, that's not Eastern Europe, that's really Central Europe. Here you can see how many Christians were martyred in the 20th century. Most of them by Stalin and the Soviet Union. And here you can see the red indicating where the communists took over. At one point, the high point, 1975, one third of the world's population, one third of the world's land service was under the Soviet Union and its empire. According to Professor Rommel and his book that deals with death by government, the communists are the world's unquestionable greatest mass murderers in all of history. Here you can see the rise of communist governments. On the left, the numbers of communist governments, going up to 48. And here are the years. 1917, there were no communist countries, but suddenly it rose and rose, and at the end of the Second World War, a massive amount of more countries betrayed into the hands of the communists. It kept rising, especially from 1975 on, but then the high point was in 1980, and then it just plummeted. 1989, many countries went free from communism. This just documents the dramatic era between 1917 and 1989. If you haven't seen the film In the Face of Evil, I recommend it. It documents a key part of how the Cold War was won and how the Soviet Union was beaten. I've been across the Iron Curtain. I've smuggled Bibles behind the Iron Curtain. I've worked everywhere from Poland and North through Czech and Hungary and Bulgaria and Romania to Albania and Yugoslavia and the South. My father-in-law has been smuggling Bibles into Eastern Europe since the 1950s. This symbolised the end of atheism, the failure of atheism, the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989, 25 years ago. The destruction of tens of thousands of communist idols. But one of the most significant victories was in February 1990 when the Russian Orthodox Church received permission from Boris Yeltsin to rebuild the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. This was a phenomenal victory. Donations were collected from 1 million Russian citizens who were poverty stricken. No government money helped build this, but Christ the Savior Cathedral was built in 10 years, what had taken 40 years before. And on 19th of August 2000, they reconstituted the cathedral. And you can see there's no prefab. This is a basilica. This is a cathedral. And the year 2000, the cathedral was the venue for the canonization for the Romanovs. Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, and children, his daughters and son, who were recognized as saints by the Russian Orthodox Church. And they were buried in the cathedral, after having been in the bottom of a mine shaft for many years. And today this is just one symbol of the victory of Christianity and the failure of atheism in Russia. This is Russia. This is where the Soviet Union had their headquarters. This is where communism and atheism thought they had triumphed. But now it is the gospel that has triumphed in Russia. But most people have missed this. They've missed the fact that atheism has failed so catastrophically, so monumentally, so abysmally in Russia and Eastern Europe. And yes, America is going into atheism and socialism. Yes, Western Europe is going into paganism, but Russia has been won back to Christ, and this is something that should make us rejoice and praise God. They've gone from atheism back to Christianity. The Orthodox Church is now Russia's largest, most important non-governmental organization. Church symbols, church rituals, moral values and teachings are playing a leading role in shaping national society, and this is why There's a lot of anti-Russian rhetoric in the media today. because they're becoming Christian, because they're against the homosexual agenda, because they're becoming more pro-life, because they are getting Bibles put into the hotels and into schools and into army bases. Today, about 80% of Russians claim to be Orthodox members and have been baptized, including Vladimir Putin, who says his mother, a secret believer, had him baptized as an infant without his father's knowledge, because his father was a Communist Party member, and he now wears the cross his mother gave him around his neck, and attends the church where he was baptized regularly on especially Christmas Day. The Russian Orthodox Church is building 200 new churches in Moscow alone. That is impressive. Some of the churches are small, some of the churches are ornate, some of the churches are phenomenal, but there is a dynamism to the Christian faith in Russia. Another example of the failure of atheism and the triumph of faith in Russia is the Tsaritsky Monastery in Moscow, founded in 1397 to commemorate the miraculous deliverance of Russia from Tamerlane and the Mongol invasion. So a very symbolic church again for another major victory in the history. This monastery was closed by the communists in 1925 and used by the secret police for imprisonments and executions. You might have seen this statue, it's of Dzerzhinsky. He was the dictator, he was the founder, I should say, of the KGB, what was then called the NKVD, the secret police. And his statue doesn't stand anymore, it was one of the first to be toppled in 1991 with the overthrow of communism in Russia. Today if you go to that site where the Zensky statue was, there's now a memorial for the Christians killed by the KJV. That is very symbolic. The rock. You see the symbolism of the stone? If you've read Daniel's vision, this great statue will be struck by a stone and it will crumble to dust and the dust will be blown away by the wind and that stone will grow to be a mountain that will fill the whole earth. The stone which the builders rejected as worthless has become the keystone. Is that not incredible? Today, the Serensky Monastery has been reopened. And it's again being used for the study of the Word of God, for devotions, for prayer. And its outstanding choir is now world-famous. Because this monastery choir not only tours the world, but they were selected to sing the Russian national anthem at the Winter Olympics in Sochi. And so, this again is a Christian choir being given such an opportunity. What a privilege! Did you notice, if any of you paid attention to the Sochi Winter Olympics openings, how much Christian symbols there were? The Russian, in fact, I read in the London Times editorial, how the British noticed that while the British were embarrassed about their Christian heritage, the Russians were not in their Olympic openings. When Britain hosted the Olympics, they were a bit backward in their Christian faith. They try to triumph socialism, national health service, multiculturalism. But the Russians celebrate their Christian heritage. The Archmandrate Tikhom, the head of Syretsky Monastery, is the author of Everyday Saints, a 600-page book which gives the testimony of his journey from Marxist atheism to Christianity. And he today is a best-selling author in Russia and he travels around the world giving his testimony. One and a half million copies of his book have been sold in Russia alone. Millions more in other languages worldwide. Vast amounts on e-books as well. Tens of millions by e-books, I believe. And he is the man, this Tikom, is the man who President Vladimir Putin turns to for counsel and who is accredited with a lot of the very pro-family policies of the Russian government today. Is Vladimir Putin a Christian? I wrote an article on it, you can look at that on our website, and it's published in JoinYork as well. Notice his boardroom. There's only one picture on the wall behind Vladimir Putin, and it's not of Vladimir Lenin, and it's not of Karl Marx. It's an icon of Jesus Christ in the Russian Orthodox Church style. Is that not significant? Do you know any leader in the Western world who has a symbol of Christianity on the wall behind the desk and nothing else? He regularly defers to the church. He claims to be a Christian. If you want to click on YouTube for Vladimir Putin's testimony of his conversion to Christianity, you're not going to get it on CNN or SABC. Vladimir Putin, I don't know what's in his heart. He's a politician. Politicians can say things for the voters. I don't know what's in his heart. But I do know this. Vladimir Putin is not a communist. He has met with and he has given awards to the most prolific anti-communist writer of the 20th century, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who has been the most severe critic communism has ever had. The man who has documented the atrocities of communism in the 20th century more than anyone else. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's books, The Gulag Archipelago, which opened up to the world the horrors of the Soviet concentration camp system. This is now a textbook for all Russian schoolchildren. Every schoolchild in Russia must read The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Dovenevich, and another title of Solzhenitsyn's, I'm not sure what the third one is, but Solzhenitsyn's written spectacularly good books, and they're all heavily anti-communist. How can Putin be a communist if he honours the greatest anti-communist, and he mandates three of his books to be separate books in the schools? But there's much more than that. He has given Solzhenitsyn great honours and awards, He met with him, he gave him national awards, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a revered person in Russia today. And here you can see Solzhenitsyn receiving an award from Vladimir Putin. I don't know how many of you have read The Gulag Archipelago or One Day in the Life of Alvin Dvinovich, but these are two of the most powerful books against communism when I met Nelson Mandela, I used this as examples to them and drew their attention to, of our present, to what Soltzhenitsyn had written. Today in Russia they are having schools again to teach young ladies and young men the arts of chivalry. Not exactly a communist way of operating. with the Russian government hosting an international conference on family and Christian values. In the Kremlin itself, a thousand representatives from a hundred countries in the world gathered this last year for consideration of family, family values, the threat to marriage, the attempts to redefine marriage, the importance of having large families, lots of children. Bear in mind, Russia is one of the largest Christian countries in Europe. Today there are more Christians in Russia than on any other country in Eastern Europe or in all of Europe. You find more evangelicals in Russia, Romania and Ukraine than you do in the whole of Western Europe. It's a lot for us to think about. Notice the Russian Navy is not marching under the Hammond sickle but St. Andrew's cross. St. Andrew has been declared the patron saint of Russia. As they fought under the St Andrew's flag before, they are again under the St Andrew's flag, patron saint of Russia. They're not flying the red flag of the Soviet Union anymore, but the white, blue and red. Chaplains have been reintroduced to the army. They're printing Bibles for hotels, paid for by the Russian government. The leadership of Russia, including Vladimir Putin, are tending services in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. How many leaders in the West are doing this? In fact, at this time, the Russian government is giving a hundred million dollars a year to rebuild churches in Russia. The leadership of Russia, the Prime Minister, the President, in church respectfully. I don't know how much of this is just done for the voters, but the fact is they are respecting and honoring and bowing to Christ. And that's more than what we've seen from the Prime Minister in England or what you've seen from the President of America. The point is, the atheist experiment in Russia is a failure, complete failure. Jesus Christ said, on this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. This is a PowerPoint presentation that you can access on our website if you go onto the ReformationSA.org. You can get this and 137 other PowerPoints. There's also a whole lot of audios, and you can get many articles on historical interest. ReformationSA.org. Whenever you're dealing with a history matter, you can find a lot of useful materials also on our Reformation 500 website. Our Facebook page for history is Reformation 500. I put some of our heaviest anti-communist, anti-Islam bashing material on Reformation 500. We've got church history manuals, audios. If you want to reclaim your campuses for Christ, then knowing a history is critical. So, any comments, any questions at all on what I've given tonight? Taryn? Can you just explain the difference between Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy? Yes, there is a huge difference between Catholicism and the Russian Orthodox system. Many people confuse the two. Now, I am 100% against Catholicism. I founded the Reformation Society and you can imagine, if you read the things we put out, we are against the papacy. The Eastern Orthodox are different. Yes, they cross themselves. They have some candles. But that's about it. They don't pray to Mary. They don't believe that there's any Pope or any Patriarch that's got authority over all of them. They're much more decentralized than the Catholic Church. They don't believe in papal infallibility or any of that nonsense. pray for the dead, they're not involved in baptisms for the dead or any funny things like that. There's no penances, purgatory or anything along that line. The Russian Orthodox Church is very much more orthodox in terms of the doctrine. Now they are very formal, they are a lot more ritualistic than we would like, they have icons, that's pictures, they don't have statues. such as the Catholics will. They do have icons. I'm not comfortable with icons. In fact, an Egyptian Orthodox, a Coptic minister that I know, a good friend of mine, John Banoop, I've ministered in his church, St. Mark's, a number of times. He offered me once a huge icon of Christ. I said, I'm sorry, I can't accept that. He said, why not? He said, I'm Protestant. We don't take great Banoop. I mean, it's blasphemous to us to have pictures of Christ. We don't know what he looked like, and he said, but you don't mind the Passion of the Christ film or the Jesus film? I said, no, but that's a film for evangelism or for education, but we can't put a picture of Christ or any depiction of the Trinity in our churches because that would be breaking the second commandment. It would be idolatry. I've got problems with Orthodox Church, but they are not like the Catholics. They are not into Mary worship and things like that. That's a good question. It's not what I would do. We have a Christian flag on a flagpole at our mission. We have a scripture clock at our wall. We have a cross, and we've got different Christian imagery in our mission, but you will not see a picture that's meant to depict Christ in our mission. We're Protestants. We're evangelicals. We do not express ourselves that way, and I'm uncomfortable with it. to see someone who is in the seat of power in what used to be the greatest atheistic country in the world expressing a Christian faith, even though it's not the way I would do it. It's a tremendous defeat for atheism and it's a victory for Christianity. Now, I'd like to see the Orthodox Church reformed and I'd like to see them phase out these pictures of Jesus, but you can agree it's a great improvement from having a picture of Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin on the wall. But yes, I would not have an icon of Christ in our mission, and I'm not comfortable even when Joy magazine puts artwork of Jesus on the cover. But even that's an improvement, because they used to put pictures of the actors who played Jesus in the films on the cover, and I had a fit over that. And they have put an artwork, which I think is better than having an actor's face on the cover, meant to be depicting Jesus at Easter and Christmas time. Joy magazine always puts a religious cover depicting the Lord. I'm more comfortable with artwork than I am with an actor's picture, but it's one thing on a magazine cover, it's another thing if you've got a picture on the wall. I've preached in churches, Pentecostal churches, where they've got artwork, not very good artwork either, of their depiction of Jesus looking like a Californian surfer on the wall, and that deeply distresses me, to preach in a church like that, because when people are praying and singing, it's like they're getting this image in their mind, and it's an autistic imagination, it's not a biblical depiction of Christ. So, yes, we are Protestants, we're not Orthodox, But we recognize they are brothers-in-law. Yes? I was just wondering, after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the pulling down of the statues of Lilo and Lennon, did they also destroy his royal grave that the atheists would often use? They wanted to get rid of it, and they were about to, and there was some objections made by city council. The fact is that as far as I know, Lennon's tomb is still there, but you don't get lines of people going to see it. It's just occasionally tourists coming in. It's not the focal point of the nation's events anymore, as it used to be. 1st of May isn't a big deal anymore. Unfortunately, it's still there. If I had my way, I'd bulldoze the whole thing, put a church on top of it, or something along that line. A Christian bookshop, maybe. A Christian library. Now we're talking. But at this moment, it's still there. I'm not suggesting Russia is perfect. I'm just saying they're going in a good direction. In fact, I think that if Ronald Reagan was to return today, and he'd see what's going on in the White House, and what's going on in the Kremlin, he would say, Russia is no longer the evil empire, America is. Because the US government is now exporting and bullying countries with the homosexual agenda, bullying countries, promoting anti-family agenda, and Russia is hosting pro-family events. It's bizarre. that at this moment Russia's looking more like the leader of the free world and America's looking more like the evil empire. And that's not to speak against the American people because just like we never hated the Russian people during the Cold War, we recognized that the Russian government was the enemy, the Russian people were the victims. But today it's just wonderful to see that the Russian people have more religious freedom than the American Christians do. The chaplains in America have more restrictions than the chaplains in Russia do. In Russia, they can speak openly in name of Christ, and they can speak on biblical marriage. In the American army, they're being court-martialed for praying in name of Jesus and for refusing to do a homosexual wedding. So you can just see the situation has so changed. So our old idea, most of my life, I fought the Russians, because they were the communists. And right now, I find it quite strange that I'm looking at them as our friends. and I'm seeing our governments are now more our enemies. Any other comments or questions? When the Catholics pray they are started in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. And they pray. And at the end they'll cross themselves again. And some people who may see it in movies even, Italians and others, they see a dead body, they immediately cross themselves, and they're afraid in a plane, the plane starts shaking, and they start to cross themselves. It's indicating a Catholic praying, because a Catholic can't think of praying without crossing himself, you see. Now, in the Russian Orthodox Church they do it too, but it's a physical sign to immediately show that you are praying to God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. And it's a symbol. Now, we Protestants don't do that. We don't like that. And we're uncomfortable with it. But again, you've got to understand that if that's the way some people have been taught, let's at least recognize that's a sign of faith. And for people coming out of a communist system, it takes courage for them to show a Christian image. For us, we might put a bumper sticker, wear a Christian t-shirt, put a cross on our lapel. I mean, that's the way we might express it. We bow our heads and pray. It's a different way of doing it. I just don't want us to be too judgmental. Even though they're doing it in a way that we wouldn't, let's remember at least it's a sign of faith. Was there another question? Yes. And about the Jesus School. Yes, there's arguments in the church. There are some strict Presbyterians who would be against any depiction of Christ even in a film. But most Christians have accepted, because church councils looked at it a long time ago, that while you cannot depict God, the Father, He is a spirit, it is permissible to depict Jesus in art, and this has been determined by church councils through the ages, including Protestant Reformed churches, because He came to this earth and He had a real face and a real body and He could be seen and He could be touched. And therefore it is permissible for us, reverentially and respectfully, to try to depict Christ in art. But you've got to be careful. But, while, you see, art has got three functions. It could be just for decoration, it could be for education, or it could be for devotion. We accept the first two, we reject the third. There's nothing wrong with art. God commanded all kinds of artistry on the Ark of the Covenant. God commanded very detailed artistry in the tabernacle and the temple. So art is not wrong even in the church, but art is to be used for education, art is to be used for decoration, but art is not to be used for worship. You see the difference? So I can use the Jesus form for education and evangelism, but I must not use it for worship. So if I put a picture of Jesus in the front here, and we required you, as you walk in here, to kneel down and cross yourselves as you bow towards that picture or that statue, that would be idolatry. And we cannot do that. We are steadfast against the Catholics and the Orthodox insofar as they have people bowing to an image to represent God. We don't want to do that. Because God is spirit and we must wish for the spirit and truth. deeply concerned about the trap of idolatry that a person could start to associate a cross or a crucifix or a picture or a statue as the focal point of their worship. And that's wrong. We do not worship any statue or picture. So that's the point. We use the Jesus form in a passion of the Christ for evangelism. We will not use it for worship. And we leave a warning to people, when you pray, don't try and visualize the actor's face. That's not idolatry. That's not the Lord. But it's useful for evangelism education, but it's harmful if it's used for devotion. What came to mind now is another way of Hollywood mixing up our mindset when it comes to worshipping God. Because you look in the movies whenever God is involved in a movie, and it's not a Christian movie, But a man or a woman goes into this church. And they go down like, why? They do the whole, I'll promise to do everything you want me to do, if you save me it'll matter, whatever. And just that whole scene of us seeing that and thinking, okay, so pictures of Jesus are okay. We now need to pray and imagine what Jesus looks like in order for us to get connected to him better. I was even at fault of doing that. I thought that's how I wait. So it's really great to see it like that. And you can see why they do it in the film, because films are visual. And so, how do they depict a person praying? in his heart to the Lord. Well, they've got to have him say it aloud, and so next thing you have them screaming, shouting, throwing things at the crucifix. You know, it's Hollywood, and it's not the way we've got to behave. So, what I've just given you tonight is how Christians have to stand for their faith in the face of death and torture by the Communists and the Soviet Union. And they succeeded in bringing down Communism. But today we are facing a more subtle threat to our faith, where you're being bullied in universities, in schools, in jobs, in governments, in the army, to keep quiet about your faith or to compromise. And we've all got to learn to stand for Christ and to confess the Lord before men. And then he promises to confess us before the Father and the holy angels. So there are different ways we've got to stand for our faith. I don't know if any of us will face violent persecution like the Russian Christians have to. But we all will face intimidation and bullying, and we must learn to stand for our faith despite all temptation. And when you think of what other people suffered, like the Richard Vaughan brothers and the George Vinzers and the Vaniers, if you've read their testimonies, who suffered in Russia, if they could suffer for Christ to that extent, then what is it for me to just be called names and miss out on that promotion and not get that job and Get somebody being nasty to me on Facebook. You know, is that really such a problem for me to make a stand for Christ? So, let's pray. Prophets 2 and 3 would like to thank the Lord for what he has done in Russia, pray for our brethren in Russia, and then we'll have tea, coffee, hot chocolate, and come right back for the film. Lord God, we thank you that you're building a church and on this rock Your church will stand and the gates of hell cannot prevail against it. We thank you, Lord God, that you are the rock, the stone that the builders rejected as worthless. You're the rock of our salvation, our mighty fortress. And we pray, Lord God, that your church in Russia would continue to be revived and reformed and become more biblical and evangelical and evangelistic, missionary-minded and effective. We pray, Lord God, that there would be a mighty force in it Missionaries would guard from Russia throughout all of Europe and the world. We pray, Lord God, that those who have gone through persecution and come through the fire shining. We pray, Lord God, that you would use them to strengthen and challenge our faith that our churches in the West might be refined and purged and purified and be more prepared to be more effective in your service. Help us, Lord God, to be faithful in the war against atheism and secular humanism. We pray, Lord God, that you'd deepen our faith and that you'd make us brave and bold for you. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.