The Easter Procession

Every Easter eve a vigil far older than Russia begins in the Church of the Transfiguration of Our Lord, located in the village of Peredelkino, a residence of the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. At midnight the clergy and members of the congregation walk in procession around the church and enter through its main doors to celebrate the Resurrection. The Soviet authorities discourage religion, but they tolerate this rite--after a fashion. Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes the vigil at Peredelkino in the following story. It is published here in translation for the first time.

WE are told by experts that, when painting in oils, we should not represent things exactly as they are: for this there exists color photography. We must, by means of broken lines and combinations of square and triangular planes, convey the idea of the thing rather than the thing itself. I can't for my part see how color photography could make a meaningful selection of figures and compose into a single image the Easter procession at the Patriarchal church in Peredelkino as it is held today, half a century after the Revolution. Yet that picture would explain a lot, even were it painted by the most old-fashioned methods and without the use of triangular planes.

Half an hour before the chimes begin, the scene outside the railings of the Patriarchal Church of the Transfiguration of Our Lord is like a wild party in the dance hall of a remote and dowdy workers' settlement. Shrill-voiced girls in brightly colored scarves and slacks (admittedly a few wear skirts) stroll about in threes, in fives, push their way into the church. But the nave is crowded. The old women took their places early on Easter eve. They snap at each other and the girls come out. They circle around the courtyard, shout insolently, call each other from afar, and inspect the small green, pink and white flames lit outside the windows of the church and beside the tombs of canons and bishops. As for the boys--tough and mean-looking--all have an air of victory (though what victories, except perhaps knocking a ball through a goal, have they won in their 15 or 20 years?). Nearly all are wearing caps (the few who are bareheaded haven't taken theirs off here). One out of four is tipsy, one out of ten is drunk. Every other one is smoking, and so disgustingly, with his butt stuck to his lower lip! So that long before the incense--in place of the incense--gray pillars of cigarette smoke rise from the church courtyard, with its electric lights, toward the Easter sky with its brown, motionless clouds.

The boys spit on the pavement, dig each other in the ribs; some whistle shrilly, others swear obscenely and several tune into dance bands on their transistors. They hug their girls on the processional path and pull them from each other's arms and look them over cockily. At any moment you expect them to draw knives: first against each other, then against the believers. For the way these youngsters look upon believers is not as juniors upon their elders, not as guests upon their hosts, but as lords of the manor upon houseflies. Still, it doesn't come to knives. For decency's sake, three or four policemen are patrolling here and there. Nor are the obscenities roared across the yard, but merely shouted, as in hearty Russian talk. Legally there is no breach of public order for the police to see, so they look with friendly smiles upon the rising generation. You can't, after all, expect them to snatch the cigarettes from between their teeth or the caps from off their heads. The place is a public street, and to disbelieve in God is every citizen's constitutional right.

Pushed against the railings of the churchyard and the church walls, the believers, far from objecting, look around nervously for fear of getting a knife in the back, or of having their watches stolen--the watches on which they keep track of the remaining minutes before the Resurrection of Christ. Here, outside the church, they, the Orthodox, are much fewer than the grinning, milling rabble who oppress and terrorize them more than ever did the Tartars. The Tartars, surely, would have let up for Matins on Easter Sunday.

The legal boundary to crime has not been crossed, the banditry is bloodless, the insult to the spirit is in the bandit leer of those grinning lips, the brazen talk, the courting, pawing, smoking, spitting--two paces away from the Passion of Christ. The insult is the triumphantly contemptuous expression with which the snotty brats have come to watch their grandfathers re-enact their forefathers' rites.

Among the believers, one or two mild Jewish faces are to be seen. The Jews may have been baptized, or not. They, too, glance nervously around them as they wait for the procession. We all run down the Jews, the Jews are always in our way, but we'd do well to look: What kind of Russians have we raised? Look, and your heart stops still.

Yet these are not our shock troops of the '30s--those who, yelling like demons, tore the Easter cakes from the believers' hands--oh no! These are moved by intellectual curiosity, as you might say. There is no more ice hockey on TV, and the football season hasn't yet begun--they're bored, that's why they crowd around the candlestand to buy candles, pushing Christians aside like sacks of straw and swearing at what they call "church businessmen."

One thing is remarkable: none are from Peredelkino, yet each knows all the others by name. How can this be? Are they all, perhaps, from the same factory? Can it be that they sign on for these hours of duty as they do for volunteer police work?

The bell strikes loudly overhead--but there is something artificial about it: the strokes are tinny, somehow, not full-voiced and deep. The chimes announce the Easter procession.

But once again, the chief role goes, not to the believers, but to these same roaring youths. In twos and threes they burst into the yard, hurrying, yet not knowing where to look, which side to make for, where the procession will come from. They light their crimson Easter candles, and with the candles--with those candles they light their cigarettes, that's what they do with them!

They crowd and wait as though for the beginning of the fox trot. All that's missing is a bar, so that these curly-headed lanky youths (our race is as tall as ever) may blow white beer foam onto the tombs.

By now the head of the procession has moved down from the porch and turned into the yard to the sound of the carillon. Two businesslike men, who walk in front, ask the young comrades to make way a little. Three paces behind them an elderly processional personage, something like a verger, carries a pole topped by a heavy cut-glass lantern with a candle inside. He glances apprehensively up at the lantern, anxious to keep it steady, and as apprehensively from side to side. This--this is the picture I would paint if I knew how! What does the verger fear? That the builders of the new society will fall upon the Christians, that they will beat them up? The onlookers share his fear.

Trousered girls with candles, and boys in caps and unbuttoned raincoats, cigarettes between their teeth (there must be many faces in the picture, primitive, cheeky faces, with their ruble's worth of self-assurance and five kopecks' worth of understanding--though some are trusting, simple-mouthed) crowd around and watch a performance that no one can buy tickets to see. Following the lantern come two banner bearers. They, too, as though afraid, huddle together.

And behind them, in five rows of twos, come ten women with thick, burning candles in their hands. They too must all be in the picture. The women are elderly, with strong, dedicated faces, ready to die should the tigers be loosed. Only two are young--as young as the girls who crowd with the boys--but how innocent their faces and how full of light! Ten women sing and walk in serried ranks. They are as triumphant as though all around them were people crossing themselves, praying, repenting, bowing to the ground. These women do not smell the cigarette smoke, their ears are closed to the obscenities, their feet move across the yard not sensing that it has turned into a dance floor.

So begins the Easter procession. Something reaches out to the young jungle beasts on either side and they grow a little quieter.

Following the women come priests and deacons in pale chasubles--about eight of them. But how huddled together they are, crowding together, getting in each other's way, so that there is scarcely room to swing a censer. Yet here, if he had not been dissuaded, the Patriarch of all the Russias could have celebrated the liturgy and walked in the procession!

Close together, hastily, they pass, and after them--after them there's no one! That's the end of the procession! There are no worshipers, no pilgrims following the priests because, should they leave the church, they could not get in again.

There are no worshipers in the procession, but now--now the rabble breaks in. As though pouring through the smashed doors of a store, as though hurrying to grab the loot, to steal the rations, sweeping past the gate posts, whirled into the torrent, boys and girls push and jostle and shove their way --why? They themselves don't know. To watch the priests fooling about? Or just to jostle? Is that their assigned task?

A procession with no one praying! A procession with no one making the sign of the cross! A procession in hats, with cigarettes, with transistors slung around necks! The picture must include the front rows of the crowd as they squeeze through the railings--then it will be complete! One old woman, standing aside, crosses herself and says to another: "It's good this year--no hooliganism. Look how many policemen ..." So now we know. It was worse in other years.

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