So let us ask: who behaved better under pressure, imprisoned Bolsheviks or religious believers? Materialists or those who acknowledged absolute standards of good and evil? Who acted nobly and who behaved like a scoundrel?
To the astonishment of Leninist materialists like Evgeniya Ginzburg, believers in God passed the test that others failed. They cared about other people. Ginzburg describes how Lydia, a German whom Ginzburg describes as “a fanatical Seventh-Day Adventist,” comforted her when she felt intolerable guilt “as though in the grip of some incarnate Evil, almost mystic in its irrationality.” Lydia showed “ordinary human kindness,” the pity that, according to Soviet morality, was so much counterrevolutionary nonsense. “She stroked my head and repeated several times, in German, the words of Job: ‘For the thing which I greatly feared has come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come upon me.’ This broke the spell.” Ginzburg then “fell to sobbing in the arms of the strange woman, from a world unknown to me. She stroked my hair and said again and again in German, ‘God protects the fatherless. God is on their side.’ ”
No matter the consequences, believers whom Ginzburg met simply would not do what they regarded as wrong.
–Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty:
Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter
