Something terrible is happening
My first visit ‘behind the Iron Curtain’ was in 1970 with the Netherlands-Soviet Youth Friendship Society, a communist front group. I had just joined a small band of Bible Smugglers led by a daring young Dutchman named Brother Andrew. We were given VIP treatment and listened to propaganda explaining why there were bread lines but no cars.
For the next twenty years we ministered to what was called the “underground church”, expanding our ministry to discipleship and later to evangelism - always under the eyes of the KGB.
Imagine then what we felt when we began to hear the words, “perestroika” and “glasnost” being spoken by the new Soviet leader, Gorbachev. Events began to explode all around us. And then the wall fell!
One day in late 1989 we drove across the border from Austria into Czechoslovakia. After stopping to pray our usual prayers before the border, we then slowly drove to the border control. We stuck our passports out the windows for the officer. He just smiled at us and said, “Today, you do not need passports. Welcome to a free Czechoslovakia!” We drove on to a country delirious with freedom. People were climbing on statues in Wenceslas Square. Flags were flying, horns blowing and people danced in the streets. It was an incredible experience.
“Today, you do not need passports. Welcome to a free Czechoslovakia!”
In August 1991, I arrived in Moscow by train from Kiev with my wife and two small daughters in the early hours of the morning. We did not then know, but at the same hour tanks were encircling the Kremlin. At a friend’s house early that morning, she turned on her television for the latest news. Music from Swan Lake was all that she could find. “Something terrible is happening”, she said. “They only play this music when there is some major happening.”
Over next few days we gleaned news from this lady and her upbeat young Russian friends. We learnt that hard-line communists had arrested Gorbachev. A coup was in progress. Finally, the coup leaders appeared on television to explain that they had taken control over the land. Watching these very old men whose voices and hands trembled as they spoke, our friend remarked, “Is this what we have been afraid of all these years?”
The next day Yeltsin made his famous stand against the coup leaders. The military refused to obey orders, the coup collapsed and the Soviet Empire became history. In the morning we headed into the city on the metro. As our train came up to street level, everyone gasped at the sight of the white, blue and black Russian flag flying for the first time since the Revolution.
From that time on we went on to experience miracle after miracle in country after country. In Albania a huge banner across the main square declared, “God loves Albania.” We preached in a stadium with the new government leaders sitting just below the platform listening to the gospel for the first time in over forty years. In Bulgaria at a Jesus Festival in the main park, the city mayor said, “People, listen to the message these people have brought us. We have not heard this for many years. They have come to tell us about Jesus.
The Deputy Minister of Religion for Russia invited us to pass out Bibles to every school in the country. Russian soldiers were brought in to help us unload the trucks. “Seventy years ago we made a mistake,” he said. “We took God out of our country. Look at what it has done to us. We must bring God back and we need to begin with our children.”
Every day we would wake up and pinch ourselves and say, “Can this really be true, is this really happening?”
Al Akimoff
Al Akimoff’s grandparents and parents left the Ukraine in Stalin’s time and travelled across Siberia to China where Al was born. Raised and based in the US, Al worked extensively across the Soviet Union for over 40 years as director of YWAM Slavic Ministries.