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Stalin's purges killed the readers and shelved their books inside Lefortovo. Decades later a new prisoner opened them and found the one thing the KGB could never confiscate.
I suffer hardship to the point of chains as a criminal. But God's word isn't chained.
2 Timothy 2:9
On September 4, The Free Press published Natan Sharansky's account of the best library he ever found in the Soviet Union. It was inside Lefortovo, the KGB's most notorious prison, where he endured 16 months and more than 100 interrogations awaiting trial for treason.
The shelves were Stalin's work. The purges killed the Moscow intelligentsia; the state confiscated their books, inked out the owners' names, and shipped the libraries to KGB institutions. Classics had been the safest books to own under censorship, so classics were what the murdered owned. The regime shot its readers and accidentally archived their words inside its own fortress.
Forty years later, the words went to work on the next prisoner.
In his cell Sharansky reread Plato's Apology: Socrates on trial for his convictions, refusing to buy his life with them. At 15 he had collected its brave lines to quote. Facing his own trial, he finally understood them. The philosopher walked him to the dock. The Psalms his wife gave him went the rest of the way. He waged hunger strikes to keep the small book, and at his 1986 release he refused to cross Glienicke Bridge until it came back, stooping into the snow to retrieve it.
Paul would have recognized the accounting. Writing from Roman custody to the young man inheriting his work, he conceded everything the empire held and boasted about the one thing it didn't. He had tested the claim before, in a Philippian cell.
Acts 16:25But about midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them.
The KGB ran the finest reading room in Russia and never understood the transaction. Guards can seize a book, and they did, more than once. What a man has already taken in sits outside every jurisdiction. Sharansky was free years before anyone released him. Everything that freed him is still in print.