Seeing rural Russia today
like paying visit to the 1940s
By BILL BARTLEMAN - the PADUCAH SUN
Copyright - 1995, Paxton Media Group
Bill Bartleman has been a reporter for The Paducah Sun
since 1972 and has covered government and politics since
1975. The following contains his opinions and observations.
VYBORG, Russia --Visiting Russia is like traveling 50 years back in time.
The technology and modern conveniences that we take for granted in the United States are only dreams for the citizens of Russia.
I spent two weeks in Vyborg as part of a 19-member mission team that was sponsored by the Kentucky Baptist Convention. The delegation was led by Calvin Wilkins, a former pastor and mission director in western Kentucky. We split into groups and went to different villages in the St. Petersburg region.
I was part of a four-member team from Reidland Baptist Church, of which the others were the pastor, the Rev. Paul Blizard, and fellow deacons Gene Rowland and Del Pruitt, all of Paducah. Vyborg is a city of about 70,000 in northwestern Russia near the Finnish border.
We visited schools and hospitals in Vyborg and traveled to nearby villages to pass out Bibles and spread the Gospel.
Each day we had experiences that will be ingrained in our minds and hearts for a long time. I'll mention some of the experiences here, but in the next week or two, I'll prepare a series of detailed stories about the visit and our work.
By our standards, people here are very poor. We met a doctor whose salary is $50 a month, teachers who earn from $35 to $60 a month and retirees whose pension is only $10 a month.
Most people live on potatoes and soup. There is very little meat, because people can't afford it. Some food prices are comparable to prices in the United States. We went to a children1s hospital where syringes are used several times before they are discarded. Patients are crammed into small rooms. The care is poor, at best. We went to visit a 10-year-old patient, but he was not in his room. After a search proved fruitless, a nurse said he must have run away. She didn't seem concerned. "The police will find him and bring him back," she said. The boy was homeless.
We also visited a sanatorium for children who had tuberculosis. It was way out in the country and rarely visited. There were 110 kids ages 3 to 12 who slept in three rooms. Boys and girls shared the same rooms. Beds were only a foot apart. The administrator told us the government had stopped sending fruit and juice a couple of months ago because it couldn't afford to do it.
We also visited a former secret military base that was closed about 18 months ago. Military personnel had moved out, but the government left civilian workers because there was no place to send them and no jobs. The people were very poor and depended on the government for food and housing. A woman there cried with joy that we would come to her community, preach and pass out Bibles.
We went to another village of about 9,000, and there were no churches and no pastors. Most people there had never seen Bibles or heard the Gospel.
We also met a man who had been a Christian for 49 years. He talked about the difficulties he had in practicing his faith under Communist rule. Until a few years ago, he had to travel for six hours to attend a church service. He started his own church and was its pastor.
We went to a bus station and passed out 80 Bibles in four minutes. We also went to a train station and passed out hundreds of Bibles. Some people wept as they accepted the gift. One man was so grateful that he went to a nearby market and bought us apples. Another gave us candy.
In one school, a little boy showed his appreciation by giving Paul and me each the equivalent of 2 cents in Russian rubles. To him, it was a lot of money. To us, it is a memento that we will cherish.
At a vocational school, 124 students volunteered to come hear us speak and to get Bibles. One young girl cried as she clutched the Bible in her hands and held it over her heart.
In Vyborg, we distributed 3,001 Bibles, passed out several thousand tracts and left 1,000 Bibles for members of a local church to distribute.
The military was everywhere in Vyborg. You couldn1t go down a street or alley without passing a military vehicle or soldiers on the streets. We saw three generals come out of what appeared to be a warehouse carrying briefcases. We never figured out why there were so many military men and women. We knew it was better not to ask questions. We also were told by some of the residents here that the KGB is still active, only under a different name.
We found the people to be very friendly and hospitable to us. One surprising thing we learned is that the people weren1t as scared of us as we were of them. Many seemed surprised when we told them we always feared them and thought we would fight a war against their country someday.
One woman told us that she had always been taught by her parents and grandparents that Americans were good people because they helped Russia during World War II. If it hadn1t been for the Americans, she said, more Russians would have died in the war.
The most startling realization is that most people here don't own Bibles and never heard the Gospel. Vyborg, a town equal in population to McCracken County, has only three churches. McCracken County has more than 120.
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