Of all the events that have shaken the Soviet bloc in 1989, none is more fraught with history -- or more implausible -- than the polite encounter that will take place this week in Vatican City. There, in the spacious ceremonial library of the 16th century Apostolic Palace, the czar of world atheism, Mikhail Gorbachev, will visit the Vicar of Christ, Pope John Paul II. Before delivering formal speeches in the presence of their entourages, the two East Europeans will sit down alone to chat in Russian without interpreters.
The moment will be electric, and not only because John Paul helped inflame the fervor for freedom in his Polish homeland that has swept like brush fire across Eastern Europe. Beyond that, the meeting of the two men symbolizes the end of the 20th century's most dramatic spiritual war, a conflict in which the seemingly irresistible force of Communism battered against the immovable object of Christianity.
Until recently, the battalions of Marxism seemed to have the upper hand over the soldiers of the Cross. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Lenin had pledged toleration but delivered terror. "Russia turned crimson with the blood of martyrs," says Father Gleb Yakunin, Russian Orthodoxy's bravest agitator for religious freedom. In the Bolsheviks' first five years in power, 28 bishops and 1,200 priests were cut down by the red sickle. Stalin greatly accelerated the terror, and by the end of Khrushchev's rule, liquidations of clergy reached an estimated 50,000. After World War II, fierce but generally less bloody persecution spread into the Ukraine and the new Soviet bloc, affecting millions of Roman Catholics and Protestants as well as Orthodox.
The violence did not cease with Stalin's death in 1953. In 1981 Pope John Paul barely escaped assassination. It is believed in the highest circles of the Vatican that Gorbachev's Kremlin predecessors were the masterminds, though the Soviets deny this. The reason for the attack, claims a ranking official of the Holy See, was that the Polish Pope refused to accept the division of Europe into East and West. "The East bloc," says this official, "realized he was a destabilizing factor."
That he was. While Gorbachev's hands-off policy was the immediate cause of the chain reaction of liberation that has swept through Eastern Europe in the past few months, John Paul deserves much of the longer-range credit. His triumphant tour of Poland in 1979, says a Polish bishop, altered the "mentality of fear, the fear of police and tanks, of losing your job, of $ not getting promoted, of being thrown out of school, of failing to get a passport. People learned that if they ceased to fear the system, the system was helpless." Thus was born Solidarity, backed by the church and led by such friends of the Pope as Lech Walesa and Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who subsequently became the Soviet bloc's first Christian Prime Minister.