Dissident for Life: Alexander Ogorodnikov and the struggle for religious freedom in Russia
Koenraad De Wolf
Eerdmans £18.99
(978-0-8028-6743-8)
Church Times Bookshop £17.10 (Use voucher code CT152)

AT LAST we have a biography of one of the many 20th-century Russian Christian heroes, Alexander Ogorodnikov, who endured a form of living martyrdom in the Soviet gulag (1978-87) and emerged still resolute, never to compromise his principles. May more of "so great a cloud of witnesses" from the Soviet Union find biographers.

The author of Dissident for Life, Koenraad De Wolf, was deeply impressed by Alexander Ogorodnikov when he met him in 2007, and, although no Russian specialist, decided to embark on the daunting task of writing his life against the backdrop of contemporary Russian social and political developments. 

This biography is divided into three parts, covering, first, Ogorodnikov's early years; second, his years in prison; and, third, his life up to the present. Sasha, as those of us at Keston College (now Keston Institute) who publicised Ogorodnikov's case called him, was converted when, as a student at Moscow's Institute of Cinematography, he saw Pasolini's film The Gospel according to St Matthew. He later founded a network of study groups - all branches of what became known as the Christian Seminar - in different parts of the Soviet Union for people who were searching for Christian faith.

This was an extaordinary feat in a political system that allowed the expression of religious faith only within a tightly controlled structure, in official churches that were strictly limited by Stalinist laws passed in 1929, and watched closely at all times by the government's Council for Religious Affairs. For demanding greater religious freedom, Sasha was eventually arrested and imprisoned.

De Wolf unfortunately sometimes gets his facts wrong: Fr Dudko did not serve in the church on Preobrazhensky Square, in Moscow, which was blown up in 1964, but in St Nicholas's, in Preobrazhensky Cemetery; the unofficial Baptists had more than one secret printing press; the KGB's Fifth Directorate was set up in 1967, not 1969; the ancient city of Pskov is hardly "a village"; Keston was commissioned to report for the WCC not on all the countries that signed the Helsinki Agreement, but just on the USSR; and the greater part of Keston's archive has not been in boxes at Baylor University since 2007, as the many who have explored its treasures will testify.

The names of some well-known Russian public figures are wrongly spelt: Shalatin should be Shatalin; Batakin should be Bakatin (he was Interior Minister, not Foreign Minister); Sobshak should be Sobchak; and Zhuganov should be Zyuganov.

Far more important, however, is De Wolf's subject - Sasha himself. His witness and participation in the suffering of Christ overshadow the book's deficiencies. It is wonderful to have a record of Sasha's profound spiritual experiences in prison: the physical warmth that he felt when wearing thin clothes in a punishment cell where the temperature was well below zero, thanks to worldwide intercessory prayer; the miracle of the cigarettes thrown into his cell when his fellow-prisoners demanded this as a proof for God's existence; the small woollen cross made by a prisoner after unravelling his sock, and blown, with the help of a rolled-up piece of paper, through a hole in the ceiling of his cell to land in Sasha's lap, after Sasha's cross had been brutally ripped from his neck.  t is sad to read of Sasha's continuing struggle to help the poor and outcast without any official support from either Church or State in Russia today. A refuge that he has built in the countryside some miles from Moscow still has no electricity; he continues to be banned from the media; and his own personal pilgrimage through intense physical suffering, degradation, and despair has never been honoured by his own Church's leadership, the Russian Orthodox Church's Moscow Patriarchate, which ignores the struggle for religious freedom of Christian dissidents from the Khrushchev period up until the reforms brought in by Gorbachev.

Xenia Dennen is a Russian specialist, and chairman of the Keston Institute, Oxford.