‘We will act as if we are free at all costs’

“For many years dissidents in Eastern Europe met in secret, used code words, avoided public telephones and published pseudonymous essays in underground papers. In the mid-1970’s however, these dissidents began to realize that their double lives had cost them dearly. By working in secret, always with a nervous glance over the shoulder, they had succumbed to fear, the goal of their Communist opponents all along. They made a conscious decision to change tactics. ‘We will act as if we are free at all costs,’ Polish and Czech dissidents decided. They began holding public meetings, often in church buildings, despite the presence of known informers. They signed articles, sometimes adding an address and phone number, distributed newspapers openly in the street corners.

In effect, the dissidents started acting in the say they thought society should act. If you want freedom of speech, speak freely. If you love the truth, tell the truth. The authorities did not know how to respond. Sometimes they cracked down- nearly all the dissidents spent time in prison- and sometimes they watched with a frustration bordering on rage. Meanwhile the dissidents’ brazen tactics made it for easier for them to connect with one another and the West, and a kind of ‘freedom archipelago’ took shape, a bright counterpart to the darkling ‘Gulag archipelago.’

Remarkably, we have lived to see these dissidents triumph. An alternative kingdom of ragged subjects, of prisoners, poets, and priests, who conveyed their words in the scrawl of hand-copied samizdat, toppled what seemed an impregnable fortress. In each nation the church operated as a counterforce, sometimes quietly and sometimes loudly insisting on a truth that transcended, and often contradicted, official propaganda. In Poland the Catholics marched past government buildings shouting, ‘We forgive you!’ In East Germany, Christians lit candles, prayed, and marched in the streets until one night the Berlin Wall collapsed like a rotten dam.” 

Philip Yancey

"For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." Galatians 5:1