RUSLAN, 33: HE BELIEVED IN
GOD AFTER SEVEN YEARS
BEHIND BARBED WIRE. IS IT
SINCERITY OR A GAME?
Passions are running high today in Ukraine on the eve of the visit of Pope John Paul II. The confessions are discussing the event and arguing, trying to prove they are right and rejecting the reasoning of their opponents. Sometimes the debate is reduced to the lay level, sometimes it comes to everyday life. It is not a pretty picture.
Knowing that correctional facility No. 62 near Cherkasy (the village of Khutory) has at least two churches, Orthodox and Evangelical Baptist, peacefully coexisting, I took a photo correspondent, got in the car, and drove to the prison camp. I thought I would just conduct some brief interviews: let the prisoners tell me where the truth is, let them judge whether it is politics or religion, whether or not Ukraine needs the Pontiff’s visit. They, of all people, will not lie.
Despite the pressing nature of this subject, I began to wander off the topic as soon as I talked with the inmates for 15 minutes.
“I THANK GOD FOR LETTING ME COME HERE”
There are almost three thousand of them — murderers, rapists, thieves — here. They were isolated from society, depending on the offense they committed, for 5, 10, or 15 years.
While they are here, their sons grow up, their mothers grow old, their wives fall in love with others, and their souls sink into despair. Some of them, bearing a grudge against the whole world, have repudiated freedom, had their skin tattooed, as befits a true jailbird, and consider the prison camp their true home. They need no one. They don’t need themselves. They live like machines: you eat, sleep, do some work, so the day has passed. What then? They know not and do not want to know. There is no way out for them.
But there is a way out. I saw it with my own eyes. It is Vasyl KOLODCHYN, chief of Penitentiary Facility No. 62, himself who showed it to me.
Fear not, all prisoners are in their places. But I saw people in prison fatigues going freely through all the checkpoints to freedom. Oddly enough, they later return back some time later.
“Paradoxical as it sounds, I thank God for letting me come to this camp,” 33 year-old inmate Ruslan confessed.
“You killed a man. Do you thank God for this, too?”
“You know, perhaps for this, too. Otherwise my soul would still be raging in chaos. But now I know the way out.”
Looking at Ruslan, I was thinking that in a few hours I would be at home, kissing my beloved wife, talking to my son, having dinner. I will be able to do everything I want: go fishing in the evening, sit up late in front of the television, or go to bed earlier. I also seem to have a way out. I seem to be a free individual, I have the right to do what I want, say what I want, and go wherever I want. But I can’t do things Ruslan can: go at once through three stone walls, a hundred locks, a dozen armed guards, barbed wire with 10,000 volts. And I will hardly ever be able to unless I get into this camp as a prisoner...
“I KILLED A PERSON WITH THESE HANDS, NOW I HOLD THE BIBLE WITH THEM”
“I was cool, as they put it,” Ruslan tells me. “I could afford everything. Just imagine: Kyiv, the early nineties, chaotic development of business, no clear laws, so life seemed a bed of roses. I could stay away from home for weeks, going on a binge, because I had lots of money and no brakes. Police? Screw ‘em! Security service? Up theirs! Organized crime squad? My sweet petunias! I was once summoned to the organized crime police unit, so I was trying to show off my cool and thought up this: I put on Bermuda shorts, sunglasses, a cork helmet, got into a open-top jeep, came around and shoved into the office of a lieutenant-colonel. His eyes flung wide open. How I loved myself! Was I flaunting my own brazenness! In a word, I felt no limits. In the long run, things went so far that I could come up straight to a man at a bus stop in broad daylight and fired my pistol in his head.”
Ruslan and I are standing in a church officially named the Freedom Evangelical Christian Baptist Church. The spacious room can contain up to 400 parishioners at a time. The sermon sound is amplified with powerful microphones and accompanied with music (there is an electric organ and an acoustic piano here). There is stained glass in the windows, lights on the walls, and flowerpots on the windowsills.
“Here our newly-converted brethren receive baptism,” Ruslan says, lifting a heavy lid in front of the priest’s rostrum.
Indeed, there is a small (2x3 m.) tiled pool built into the floor.
“On August 7 this year we will celebrate the seventh anniversary of the evangelical church in our penitentiary,” Mr. Kolodchyn says. “At first, believers had to huddle in a 15 sq. m. room turned prayer house. Then, two years ago, assisted by the Annunciation Mission, the prisoners built a new spacious temple with their own hands.”
Ruslan has belonged to this church since 1999. After taking a human soul in 1993, his own soul wandered in darkness for another six years until it found the light. Now Ruslan, who is entitled to a long (72 hours) visit by his family once in three months, spends most of this precious time reading aloud the Bible to his wife and the 13- year-old son Oleksiy.
“ORTHODOX, GREEK CATHOLICS, ROMAN CATHOLICS ALL COME TO OUR CHURCH”
There is also an Orthodox church in penitentiary No. 62. It is much more modest that the Evangelical church, with a narrow room hardly allowing forty persons. The church dean, Father Oleksandr, comes here every week. On other days, the temple is looked after by the 40-year-old S exton Mykola (in for major embezzlement of public property) and the 72-year-old church warden Vasyl (for murder).
“Papal visit to Ukraine?” Mykola shrugs his shoulders. “This seems to be politics, and prisoners don’t go in for politics. I’d rather tell you about life here. Yes, we know there is one more, Evangelical, church on the territory of our camp. But we do not rival each other. God is one. By the way, our temple’s services are visited by one Roman Catholic and two Greek Catholics. And everything is all right: none of the Orthodox push them out — let them come! I think the same should be in society. Out there, you only live in turmoil and everyday chores. You sometimes don’t see truths in your daily routine. But we, deprived of the main thing, freedom, see everything from a somewhat different angle. We first of all choose the truth, and it does not matter much which way you go toward it”.
Waiting for Mykola in Odesa are his wife and two sons, Illia and Mykola. They will meet in three years and nine months. Mykola puts it a little differently: in 1365 days. This is very long. But he will live to see it.
The 72-year-old warden Vasyl will also see his day. They all will. For they believe in God, in people, in the truth.
THE POWER FIELD OF A PRISON PRAYER
They are just a few: 28 parishioners of the Evangelical and 12 of the Orthodox churches. In other words, there are 40 believers against the overall 2800 inmates. But Christ did not have a thousand apostles, either. They are suffering for their faith. All are not so righteous as they are. This is, after all, a prison camp for murderers.
Ruslan has been praying ardently, so he had six years remitted recently.
Penitentiary chief Mr. Kolodchyn says that, although his administration does not keep accurate records on this matter, the recidivism rate among those who were prison church parishioners is almost zero.
One more detail. A new Orthodox church, of the New Holy Martyrs of Cherkasy, is being built in the village of Khutory on the territory of which the prison camp is situated. Thus according to Sexton Mykola, many brethren among the released prisoners have put off their trips home and stayed behind to help erect the church walls. There are more than one such example. The power of prison prayer overcomes all obstacles, pierces the thickest stone walls, and turns on the light at the end of the tunnel.
But some do not understand this. A small but hurting thing: Mr. Kolodchyn received recently a letter signed by one Mr. Tertyshnyk, manager of the Cherkasy-based Ahroshliakhbud Company. The letter demands: pay UAH 37,500, otherwise we will dismantle our segment of the railroad (a one-way railroad track runs to the camp, with its middle segment belonging to Ahroshliakhbud). Penitentiary Facility No. 62 does not have such cash. Yet, it is not going to lose the railway track, for it is by far the only “window into the outside world:” it is by railroad that the penitentiary bring in foodstuffs and raw materials and ships the finished items.
“After all, we are a strategic facility,” the penitentiary chief says, “and we are not going to give up.”
“We pray that the dispute be settled in our favor,” the believers told me.
And I have no doubt that it will.
