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In Lubianka’s Shadow chronicles the extraordinary life of a young American Catholic priest, Father Léopold Braun, who, as pastor of a small Catholic church near the Lubianka political prison in the heart of Moscow, witnessed Stalin’s purges, the Soviet government’s campaign against organized religion, and the destruction of World War II. These memoirs, recently discovered in the archive of Fr. Bruan’s Assumptionist order by Soviet scholar Gary Hamburg, offer an intimate account of Fr. Braun’s valiant effort to uphold Christian worship in the only Catholic church allowed to operate in Stalin’s Moscow.
Posted to Moscow in 1934 as chaplain of the United States embassy, Father Braun served the embassy staff and local parishioners in the Saint Louis des Français Church at a moment when Stalin’s anti-religious campaign was reaching a crescendo. He describes the Soviet government’s intimidation and arrest of his parishioners, police surveillance of the church building, and personal harassment designed to force him out of the country. Father Braun’s responses to these pressures—sometimes amusing, sometimes heart-rending, but always intelligent and soulful—tell us much about the capacity of ordinary people to respond to extraordinary circumstances. Under his pen, Soviet society comes alive, with its citizens’ poverty, cynicism, humor, and courage on full display.
Accompanying the memoirs is an introductory, historical essay by G. M. Hamburg. In Lubianka’s Shadow is required reading for anyone interested in modern Russian history and for those concerned about the survival of religious faith under political assault.
“The Assumptionist priest Léopold Braun . . . was right about Soviet responsibility for the Katyn massacre, Soviet post-war intentions and the squalid realities of a police state . . . in some passages-the desecrations, meetings with implacable secret police and an obtuse American ambassador, a soldier's wedding deep in the forest, and a visit by General de Gaulle (for which the church was repaired, properly lit and heated for twelve hours)—he shows us a strange, distant world.” —Times Literary Supplement
Father Marie-Leopold Braun (1903-1964) was a member of the Assumptionist order in the United States. G. M. Hamburg is the Otho M. Behr Professor of European History at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author of numerous books, including Boris Chicherin and Early Russian Liberalism, 1828-1866.