Christians In The Baltics Watch Russia-Ukraine War And Fear For The Future
OGRE, Latvia — The Russian border is less than 200 miles from this small town in northern Europe.
It feels much closer on this gray, drizzly Monday afternoon.
Holding a red umbrella, Agra Vāvere unlocks the History and Art Museum in Ogre (pronounced “Ogg-ray”). It’s not open most Mondays, but Vāvere agreed to give The Christian Chronicle a quick look at the museum’s newest exhibit, “Testimonies from Siberia.”
Dark brown planks of wood, held together with steel bolts, line the back wall of the museum’s ground floor. In dripping white paint are the letters CCCP and the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union. An overhead projector shows footage of fast-moving scenery as speakers play the distinctive click-clack of locomotive wheels.
It’s a re-creation of the crude boxcars that carried more than 15,000 of Latvia’s intellectual, economic and military elite into Russia during a mass deportation in June of 1941. The lucky ones went to work camps in Siberia. Hundreds were executed.
Less than a month later, Latvia fell to the Nazis, who carried out purges of their own. About 12,000 political prisoners languished in what the Nazis called a “police prison and reeducation through labor camp” in the community of Salaspils. Epidemics and heavy labor killed about 2,000 prisoners — more than a fourth of them children.
After the Soviets retook Latvia, deportations resumed. In 1949, soldiers loaded more than 44,000 Latvians into boxcars and sent them to collective farms in Siberia.
“In order to subjugate a country and its people, the conqueror must break them,” read the words that introduce the exhibit. “Latvia’s Soviet occupiers tried but failed.”
Vāvere, one of a handful of Church of Christ members in this Baltic republic, works for the Ogre Cultural Center, where she catalogs thousands of donated paintings, photos and letters that tell the city’s history, much of it under the thumb of dictators.
She remembers the jubilation that followed independence in 1991. The 1.8 million souls who lived here were a mix of indigenous Latvians and Russians whom the Soviets imported in an effort to create a unified, communist culture. Both ethnicities were happy about the USSR’s collapse, Vāvere recalls.
Thirty-three years later, she and her countrymen anxiously watch Russia’s war with Ukraine. Should Russian President Vladimir Putin succeed there, the Baltics could be next, they fear.
She has nothing against the Russian people, Vāvere said. The Latvians of Russian descent are good neighbors. She’s traveled to Russia and found its people friendly and welcoming. But Putin reminds her too much of all the would-be world conquerors who came before.
She prays “that the Ukrainian war would end, that the Russians would be defeated — that Putin would be defeated.”
Draped in Ukrainian flags, young men in Riga’s Old Town seek to raise awareness among Latvians about the war in Ukraine. (Photo by Erik Tryggestad)
Years of labor and lies
In Latvia’s capital, Riga, Ukraine’s blue-and-yellow flag is easier to spot than Latvia’s own banner of carmine red and white.
On a Sunday afternoon, young men wrapped in Ukrainian flags walked the cobblestone streets of Riga’s old town, near the Museum of the Occupation, asking tourists for donations to help refugees.
A few blocks away, five Christians gathered around a table in a fifth-floor apartment for Sunday worship. Minister Victor Barviks led songs in Latvian and offered prayers for the Lord’s Supper. Others, including Agra Vāvere in Ogre, joined the service via Zoom.
Ivars Landorfs, 81, has been a part of the small Church of Christ for at least two decades. As a child, he spent time in Siberia on a collective farm with his family. The backbreaking work wasn’t the worst part of it, he said. It was the lies — the constant lies he heard that things were going to get better, that prosperity was on the way.
“In the Bible, private property … it is holy,” Landorfs said, mustering as much English as he could rather than asking Barviks to translate. “I am Christian (because) I like honest people, not liars!”
Two of the five at the Sunday table, Ēriks and Inguna Rozalinskis, were formerly part of a Pentecostal church and are learning about Churches of Christ. Inguna had family among Latvia’s intelligentsia — dentists, engineers and physicians. They were deported in 1949. The Soviets killed Ēriks’ great-grandfather, he said, and one of his grandmothers died in Russia.
“If they come to Latvia,” Ēriks said of the Russians, “they’re gonna get their nose broken!”
Landorfs wasn’t as confident. He remembers the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Though they ultimately withdrew, the Soviets fought for 10 years. About 2 million Afghan civilians died.
Not ‘if’ but ‘when’
To Latvia’s north, the former Soviet nation of Estonia also shares an eastern border with Russia — and Churches of Christ there share the concerns of their brothers and sisters to the south.
“For Estonians, it has never been a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’ about a war or a threat to their freedom,” said Hope Goode, a U.S. Christian who works with a congregation in Tartu, about 35 miles west of the Russian border. She’s part of a team that graduated from Sunset International Bible Institute in Texas. Like Agra Vāvere in Latvia, Estonian Christians bear no ill will toward Russians, Goode said.
“In our spring countrywide church retreat, it was beautiful to see Ukrainians, Russians, Estonians, Americans and one Egyptian all worshiping together,” she said.
Unlike Ukraine, the Baltic nations — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — are part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The political and military alliance has 32 members, including the U.S. Article 5 of the treaty states that an attack on one NATO member is considered to be an attack on them all. A Russian incursion into the Baltics could result in a disastrous global war.
NATO member Germany is sending troops and tanks to Lithuania — the country’s first deployment outside its borders since World War II. And Western European countries are building factories and moving workers to the region, said Ilia Amosov, who ministers for the Klaipeda Church of Christ on Lithuania’s Baltic Sea coast.
“I personally do not think that Putin wants to invade the Baltics,” Amosov said, “and I hope I am not mistaken.”
He cited Ecclesiastes 3:17: “God will bring into judgment both the righteous and the wicked, for there will be a time for every activity, a time to judge every deed.”
As they wait for God’s justice, Christians “have the Kingdom of God,” Amosov said. Those who worry about a possible invasion “lose their peace.”
Randall Dickey echoed that sentiment. An American sponsored by the Westbury Church of Christ in Houston, he also works with the mission in Tartu, Estonia.
“I can’t speak for all Christians here,” Dickey said, “but I can say that I’m not worried because God is ultimately in control.”
Ukrainians serve in Estonia
In Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, a predominantly Russian-speaking Church of Christ ministers to some of the 60,000 Ukrainian refugees who have come to their country. Recently, Ukrainian minister Oleksander Piletsky and his wife, Irina, moved to Tallinn to assist in the work.
A little more than two years ago, the couple crouched in the hallway of the Mariupol Church of Christ with more than 30 other Christians. They sang hymns and read Psalms as artillery shells obliterated the city. The church members spent 51 days trapped in the building before they were offered safe passage through Russia to Estonia. They took refuge with a Church of Christ in Sopot, Poland, before returning to Estonia.
Oleksander Piletsky wears the scars from a bullet or a piece of shrapnel that struck his head during the siege of Mariupol.
The Piletskys and 11 other Ukrainians who escaped from Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine now worship with the Church of Christ in Tallinn, said minister Nikolai Vasjutin.
“We constantly support and help those in our community,” Vasjutin said, “as well as, to the best of our ability, our brothers in Ukraine.”
In an email to The Christian Chronicle, Oleksander Piletsky said, “The general atmosphere in Estonia is calm. This is reminiscent of the situation in Ukraine in 2021, when no one fully realized what a tragedy awaited people in 2022.
“I understand now that the fate of the Baltic countries is being decided by the war in Ukraine. The Estonian government is aware of this and helps Ukraine in every possible way.”
Estonian church members, including Vasjutin and his wife, Olga, provide “an atmosphere of God’s love and care,” Piletsky said, as he and his wife pray for their daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren in Sumy, Ukraine. Sumy is near the Kursk region of Russia, which the Ukrainian army invaded in August.
The Piletskys recently received a message from their daughter.
“Right now in Ukraine missiles or bombs can fly everywhere,” she said, “and only God can protect.”
“We pray and thank God for his love, mercy, care for us,” Oleksander Piletsky said, “and we rejoice in every day that we can spend in serving him and his church and when we can talk about his love to the people around us.”
This piece is republished with permission from The Christian Chronicle.
Erik Tryggestad is president and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact erik@christianchronicle.org, and follow him on X at @eriktryggestad.