Millions of people watch them. Soap operas have been the steady fare of daytime entertainment even before the invention of television. The titles, it seems to me, as an expression of the perspective of so many people, are a useful jumping-off place for this year’s High Holyday sermons. Tonight’s installment: The Secret Storm.

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I had lunch in Joseph Stalin’s bunker. I almost have to pinch myself when I say it, but it’s true. Just a few weeks ago I was sitting with our tour group having lunch – a terrible lunch of soup meat and boiled potatoes, by the way – in the hideout of the most murderous tyrant in human history. How many did he kill? Millions. Ten million? Twenty? We’ll never know for sure. Even the two thousand men who built the bunker were killed so they couldn’t tell anyone where Stalin was. The floors are fine wood inlay, the ceilings are adorned with beautiful plaster scrollwork, and the many marble columns are polished to a glistening sheen. It’s a beautiful bunker.

As beautiful as the bunker is, that’s how ugly life was for those caught in Stalin’s grip. The Russians were such brutal masters that in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, we learned that when the Nazis invaded during World War II they were welcomed as liberators! Anything was better than the Russians. (Sorry Sergei, but most of the really bad stuff happened before you were born.) When the Nazis were defeated and the Russians came into Tallinn once again, they arrested the teachers, politicians, intellectuals, artists – all the leaders of an entire generation. Some were killed outright, some were sent on starvation journeys to Siberia, some were broken physically or mentally by the secret police.

In Vilnius, the Lithuanian city we Jews know as Vilna, we saw the building that used to house the KGB, the secret police. Like Stalin’s bunker, it’s a beautiful building. From the street you’d never know what went on inside. There’s a rectangular air vent on the side of the building, just like you might find anywhere. But this one is different. It’s a guard post where the soldiers on duty can secretly watch the street.

The cells don’t look so bad. The severe overcrowding with nowhere to sleep but on the cement floor, the torture, the broiling heat and numbing cold, the sleep deprivation, the powerful drugs injected into the prisoners to produce psychosis aren’t visible anymore. The KGB tried to scrub it all away, fix the bullet holes, cover the walls with paint. The most heavily “sterilized” room was the execution chamber, where so many lives ended with a bullet to the back of the head. It too, is a beautiful building -- where unbearably ugly things took place.

Yet all the while there was brewing, as the soap opera title has it, A Secret Storm. Where it couldn’t be seen, often couldn’t even be spoken of, there was still a boiling gale, a tempest, a storm of desire to be free. Some, like Chris, a German man who did our plumbing, fled East Berlin clinging to the underside of a moving car with his back just inches from the ground. People dug their way into the subway tunnels to try to jump onto the roofs of trains moving at 40 – 60 miles an hour -- so precious was freedom!

There’s an incredible place in Lithuania that’s not on the tourist maps called the Hill of Crosses. It’s exactly what it sounds like – a hill filled with crosses. The reason they’re there is somewhat vague, perhaps having something to do with a little girl’s recovery from a severe illness some two centuries ago. Or maybe not.

I can barely describe to you what that hill is like. There are large crosses and crucifixes, and small ones, and smaller ones on the smaller ones. There is no plan, no arrangement. They’re just there – hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them. Even for a non-Christian it was a powerful and awesome place.

The atheistic Soviets had a habit of turning synagogues and churches into museums and civic buildings, and sometimes stables. The Communists bulldozed that hill and tried to turn it into a swamp. The people would sneak back in the middle of the night and rebuild it. Three times this happened. Today it is still there and the Communists aren’t, a wonderful monument to the human desire for the free expression of faith.

There came a time when things began to change:

In 1988, the Soviet Union showed signs of cracking and the all-pervasive sovietisation was coming to an end… night after night… 300,000 Estonians (more than one-fifth of the population) [gathered] in Tallinn to sing the forbidden national songs…

On August 23, 1989 about two million people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania stood on the Vilnius-Tallinn road, holding hands across the three countries, protesting Soviet policies. The unprecedented living chain measured nearly 600 km [360 miles] in length. [Can you imagine such a thing??!!!]

In 1991, as Soviet tanks were rolling throughout the countryside in an attempt to quell the Singing Revolution [as it came to be called], the Estonians proclaimed the restoration of the independent State of Estonia. They stood as human shields to protect their [newly freed] radio and TV stations from the tanks.

As a result of the [singing] revolution, Estonians won their independence without a single drop of blood being shed! [Wikipedia, Singing Revolution] 

Then the storm of freedom really started to gather force. Marian and I saw the very beginning of this when we were in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1992. The Soviet Union had just become the Former Soviet Union. The first MacDonald’s had just opened in Moscow and people were waiting in line for hours to spend a significant part of their weekly income on a hamburger, or the MacDonald’s equivalent thereof.

But not much had changed yet. The streets were grey and largely empty. There were no traffic jams because there were very few cars. The stores were empty. The only place you could buy anything was at the kiosks on the street. The famous state department store, GUM, had stall after empty stall with salespeople who had nothing to do.

The ruble was relatively worthless. Fifty dollars in American money produced a stack of rubles over a foot high. People were hungry. Outside the Hermitage in St. Petersburg a man tried to sell us his army coat literally right off his back. At a flea market outside of Moscow people were trying to sell the faucets from their bathtubs, their old books, their meat grinders, their used clothes – anything to make a few rubles.

There was a sense that law and order were breaking down. The leader of our group was in St. Basil’s, the multi-colored mushroom-domed church in Red Square. A man asked him if he was an American. When he answered yes, without another word the man punched him in the face and broke his nose.

When I came back to the States I told people that I’d just been to Dodge City with fur hats.

But when we went back there this August, it was as if we were in a different country. So much had changed! Moscow was a little like Las Vegas. There were casinos, neon signs everywhere, stores filled with anything you could want to buy, the streets booming with busy, well-dressed people.

Except for the strange alphabet it was like any major city in the US. Now there were traffic jams and cars everywhere. GUM was filled with boutique after boutique, every expensive brand you’ve ever heard of. But don’t shop in Moscow. The prices are better here. It was much the same in St. Petersburg. So now I can tell you I’ve been, not to Dodge City but to Las Vegas with fur hats.

It’s been only been 12 or 13 years, folks. The transformation in the Baltics and in Russia has been unbelievable. It seems as if every other building is under renovation in Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius as well as Moscow and St. Petersburg. You want a really representative souvenir from these countries? Get a piece of that green mesh netting they drape over buildings that are being worked on to keep debris from falling on pedestrians.

To get to Stalin’s bunker (remember Stalin’s bunker?) you have to negotiate an impossibly crowded street that runs next to a huge open-air shopping area. Right next to the bunker of this Communist tyrant there is a veritable bee hive of capitalist activity.

Who could have imagined this? In spite of terrible setbacks and reverses along the way, evil, horrific ones like the Holocaust and on a lesser scale, the plague of terrorism infecting our world – in spite of all this, people are winning the struggle to be free. There is truly a not-so-secret storm that blasts open oppression’s gates so that freedom rushes in. As in the Former Soviet Union, it may take a while but eventually the good will win. It will win in the Arab world. It will win in the pockets of religious fanaticism. It will win wherever there is oppression. The question is not if, but when?

You and I are part of the “when.” That’s what this holiday is all about. Rosh Hashanah, “the beginning of change” is one way we can translate it. If good is to triumph over evil we need to be an active part of that change. A teacher says:

“On the street I saw a small girl, cold and shivering in a thin dress, with little hope for a decent meal. I became angry and said to God, Why did you permit this? Why didn’t you do something about it?”

For a while, God said nothing. Then God replied quite suddenly, ‘I certainly did do something about it. I made you!’” [Anthony de Mello, [Sunday Sermons, Voicings Publications, Vol. 25, No. 4, July/August, 1995.] 

That’s why we were made: to be the beginning of change. It is up to us to be part of the storm of freedom. It is up to us to help see to it that is no longer a secret storm but a reality for all of God’s children.