My name is Alexandra Strapko. I am a junior majoring in Biology with a minor in Russian Studies. On campus I am involved in Orthodox Christian Fellowship and am a TA in the Biology department. I am from Rochester, NY and I am one of six children in my family. I have three sisters, two brothers and a cat, Machu. I also have two nephews that I love dearly. I enjoy spending time with family and friends, singing, reading and baking in my free time.
I found the readings this week to be quite insightful for me, especially with everything happening in the world today. I will touch particularly on some key pieces from Witness that I really resonated with and would like to expand upon. I found Chambers’ description of Communism extremely telling. He stated that the Communist vision is a vision without God (pg. 56). I would have to agree completely with this statement. Growing up in a home of Russian descent I was constantly reminded of the terrible things the Soviet Union had done to the Russian people. My own grandparents were driven out of their country in search of a place where they could believe what they wished to believe without fear of being taken and sent to concentration camps in Siberia. The Soviet regime was a system based on the fact that man knew better than God and that it could support/control the Russian people solely based on Earthly constructs and rules. Without God the Soviet people were shackled to Earthly materialism and power with the fear of death constantly looming over them. This was another point made by Chambers, that Communists are always under the sentence of death (pg. 51). Death is the only real threat to people who do not have faith in God because they believe their only purpose is to live a moral life on Earth and once that life is over you cease to exist. For an Orthodox Christian, as many Russian people were at the time, the soul lives on after death of the body and reaches salvation when they live by God’s Law, so the idea of death is not as crippling to think about.
I found Chambers realization and personal accounts of what he went through eye-opening. That he was able to overcome the fear of himself and his family being killed and to leave the Communist organization because he knew it was wrong is courageous and commendable.