The Russian Heartland is as much a metaphor of the Russian soul as it is a place. It is in this sense that Leningrad on the far western periphery of the country is often thought of as the heart of Russia while Moscow is the head. There is a magic, wrought through centuries of history and culture, that lingers in the air of such places and Russian lungs are filled with its intoxicating power. "Every Russian who looks at Moscow," writes the great author Lev Tolstoi, "feels she is his mother." The Russian Heartland conjures other images as well. Scenes like a troika gliding over a new snowfall; wooden izbas with their loose billows of smoke and intricately carved window frames; fishermen casting their lines into the waters of the meandering Volga River; smiles full of golden teeth; tables laden with bowls of hot borshch; strong Russian tea and black bread that, in the words of one visitor, "smells like a ploughed field after rain". The countryside has a timeless quality to it and it is here among the myriad stands of birch and pine trees that one will find clusters of picnickers, hikers and mushroom pickers on weekend leave from the cities.

Instead of offering dramatic scenery Russia's Heartland is a vast flatland of trees and rivers. It lacks the breathtaking grandeur of Switzerland, the warm, puzzle-piece coastlines of Greece or Yugoslavia, or the picturesque hedgerows and stone walls that give the English countryside its charm. Russia is plain, rambling, wild and undisciplined. Yet it is land that most Russians cling to with a fierce tenacity - a lesson that venturesome tyrants like Napoleon and Hitler learned too late. Former New York Times correspondent, Hedrick Smith, unexpectedly encountered this blood-and-soil patriotism in a little old doorman in the city of Murmansk above the Arctic Circle. "With his age-softened hand holding mine and friendly eyes relishing my attention, he related a mystic story about an ancient sage who advised Russians to take the good Russian earth and put it in their mouths, to eat it and take in its nourishment directly because the very soil was the source of Russian character and culture."

Another powerful influence in the Russian Heartland is the Orthodox Church. A part of their heritage, its rich, intoned liturgies, incense and candlelit icons all have an intense appeal for millions of Russians. Younger people in particular are attending services in increasing numbers. For many, the church serves to distinguish them from the larger, diverse Soviet population; reaffirming in the words of one dissident author, "the essence of Russianness". Similar notions have frequently emerged in the works of great Russian communicators like Lev Tolstoi and Solzhenitsyn.

As a people the Russians are truly a study in contradiction - "half saint and half savage" was the way the famous novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky put it. With a special flair for maintaining extreme and mutually exclusive positions, they are at once cruel and compassionate; tolerant, yet critical; callous, but sentimental; obedient and unruly - and the list goes on. Sixteenth century Czar Ivan the Terrible was said to have murdered his own son and then knelt in paroxysms of remorse; plundered monasteries and then given them funds. Russians continue, as Churchill once said, to be "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma".

There are many indications of a spiritual stirring among the forty to seventy million Russian Orthodox believers in the Soviet Union right now. PRAY that a deep and continuing work of God will cause the church to increasingly become an instrument of His glory.

PRAY
-that God will give the hundreds of registered and unregistered congregations of evangelical believers an increasing vision for personal evangelism, along with special wisdom for their leaders as they walk the tightrope between state and church.