AFTER eight years' enforced absence from Russia I find myself, not without some trepidation, in an old Russian monastery, that of the island of Valaamo on Lake Ladoga. It is shut off from Russia now. Tens of thousands of pilgrims used to visit it; none come any more. The old monks die; no young ones come to take their place. Twelve hundred have become four hundred. 66 Many died in the famine time; others were sent away by the Finns ", one Father explained. Only two candles burning on Sunday at the altar of the cathedral church-but crowds of visitors, Finnish picnickers. There is a curious note of reproach in the voices of some of the monks, when talking about God, as if they felt that God had let them down. They amble in the woods with their grizzled old locks hanging about their shoulders, the gracious stoop of benign old age lending sweetness and dignity to their movements. They stand and stare with sunken eyes over the silver and grey levels of Lake Ladoga-to the side whence no boats ever come any more. For the lake has ceased to be free; enemies live on opposite shores of it, and little Finnish flotillas of motor-boats with machine-guns police the waters. No Russians may come from the forests of the eastern shore or from “Leningrad" and Schlusselburg and the thickly populated regions in the south. Valaamo belongs to the Republic of Finland. Formerly, how the pilgrims swarmed; but now not a pilgrim! Lam told that even if Russians were allowed to cross the lake few would now come to pray. For pilgrimaging has been stopped in Russia. You may tramp to seek work; you may not tramp to seek God. The Russian National Church only continues on sufferance of the Soviet Government, which, being militantly atheistic, works necessarily for the destruction of religious habits. The great shrines of old Russia are now under governmental boycott. There are no peasant pilgrims at Jerusalem and Mount Athos. Their chorus of praise is missing at SergeTroitsky. Solovetsky Monastery on the White Sea is used as a convict settlement for Russian business men. Novy Afon, after being looted, has become merely a communal farm. The great days of Kief are gone. St. Seraphim at Arzamas lacks sound of praise and intercession. It is not surprising, therefore, that the religious life of Russia does not reach Valaamo on Lake Ladoga, and that the poor old Fathers are left alone to save their own souls because there are no others to save. The Finnish picnickers prattled to them in broken Russian, trying, I thought, to ingratiate themselves a little, but without much success. The old fellows were very humble and sweet in their answers, but they knew the Finns, owing to their own Lutheran religion, were out of sympathy with the monastery and its former life. In the old days, before war and revolution, there used to be many Finnish visitors to Valaamo. But they did not look with sympathy upon the monastery with its asceticisms, its rituals, its ikons, its hermits. It seemed to them then, as it does now, entirely foreign to the spirit of their D |