I wrote yesterday about the importance of truth and suggested that one of the ongoing issues of our day is the Russian government continuing to lie to the Russian people. I just finished a novel, A Train to Moscow, set in the Soviet Union from just after World War II (in Russia, the Great Patriotic War) through the late 60s. The protagonist, a young girl who becomes an actress can’t figure out the discrepancies between what her grandfather hears on the daily radio news and real life. If we’re harvesting record crops, why is none of it in our city? Here is a particularly poignant section:

In the summer of 1959, her first summer in Moscow when she was admitted to study at the drama school, a miniature America sprouted up in Sokolniki Park outside the city, the American National Exhibition that Sveta and Sasha waited three hours to enter. They had already read what Khrushchev said to the US president three weeks earlier, when the Expo opened. In another seven years we will be on the same level as America. When we pass you along the way, we’ll wave to you. With the rest of the curious crowd, they gawked at the world they were promised in only seven years: cars laden with chrome, cameras that dispensed instant pictures, films that were not banned, stainless steel refrigerators, robot vacuums, and a machine that washed your dirty dishes in less than thirty minutes… they stopped in each of the four model kitchens to watch a baking demonstration and then, when the American women in aprons, whether by accident or by design, turned their backs on their plates of finished little cakes called brownies, they grabbed as many as they could, like everyone else around them, and, their hands sticky with chocolate and sugar, raced to the next exhibit.

…When we pass you along the way, we’ll wave to you. Well, two years have passed since we were supposed to overtake America, and she hasn’t seen one dishwasher or a single brownie. – Elena Gorokhova. A Train to Moscow: A Novel (p. 288, 289). Lake Union Publishing. Kindle Edition.

This world of lies still exists, and Monday, March 14, someone decided to do something about it.

A television producer at the Kremlin’s flagship network Channel One, Ms. Ovsyannikova at first thought she would join antiwar demonstrations on the streets of Moscow. Her son, fearing she would be arrested, hid her car keys.

Then she settled on a more audacious plan. As the evening news broadcast was starting on Monday, Ms. Ovsyannikova got up from her desk. Flashing her ID badge she passed through two security checkpoints and breezed past a final guard at the studio door.

Bursting into view behind the show’s anchor, she shouted, “Stop the war, no to war.” Before the camera cut away, she flashed a poster, before millions of viewers. It read: “No war. Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They lie to you here. Russians against war.” – Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2022

Courage. There’s no other word for it. Courage to stand for truth. My friend, the Russian-born mathematician Dr. Alexander Soifer, said something like “Don’t judge people by their passports. She is an example of a courageous Russian standing for truth.”

It’s not likely that the brave lady is a Christian believer, but God bless her! And God bless the courageous people of Ukraine who are standing up to Russian aggression. More about that from Hebrews 11 tomorrow.

Who through faith…quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. (Hebrews 11.33, 34, ESV)