KARAGANDA, Kazakhstan - Like many of those who people
Kazakhstan's vast and inhospitable steppes, Emilia Kostyuk's family was
banished here against their will by the Soviet state in the 1940s.
Kazakhstan has a flock of Catholic believers estimated at 360,000, but
ministering to them is not the only reason behind Pope John Paul's September
22-25 visit. He comes to heal the wounds of Soviet oppression, and pay respect
to a departed friend.
"The Pope's visit to Kazakhstan is a visit to a sacred land, strewn with
bones of people of all nationalities and soaked in their blood," said
73-year-old Kostyuk as she walked to a modest Catholic church in this bleak
industrial city.
"I pray for the Holy Father's visit to this sacred land. With God's blessing, future generations should never see what we experienced," she added.
The Pope, who will say mass in the new capital Astana, is expected to pay
tribute to the hundreds of thousands who died in concentration camps and
millions evicted to the barren steppes under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in
the 1930-50s.
The Pope's friend, Father Wladislaw Bukowinski, provided consolation to those
repressed despite his own sufferings.
Karaganda Bishop Jan Pavel Lenga said the Pope's visit to Kazakhstan, his 95th
mission abroad, was likely to acquire a special meaning.
"Kazakhstan has the right to compassion," he told Reuters.
"The Holy Father has repeatedly said that he highly values those martyrs who sacrificed their lives doing good, those who did not become embittered and preserved their faith despite the tortures they had come through."
GREAT TRAGEDY FOR MILLIONS
"Many still wonder, why there are hundreds of thousands of Catholics in Kazakhstan," said Father Adelio Dell'Oro who runs a branch of the Catholic
charity Caritas.
"Obviously, all these people did not win a tour. Most of them came here against their will, and their fate is tragic."
Karaganda, a wind-swept region of coal mining and metallurgy that lies in the
heart of the sprawling country of 15 million, has probably witnessed most of
the suffering and grief that befell Kazakhstan during the last century.
More than two million people, including more than 900,000 ethnic Germans, were
forced to migrate to Kazakhstan during Stalin's forced collectivisation
campaign, his crackdown on Catholics and banishing of peoples seen as
"unreliable."
Historians say another 2.14 million people were sent to Karaganda's gulag
prison camps, where many perished from illness and hunger.
Karaganda, which means "black stone" in Kazakh and where temperatures
fall to minus 40 Celsius (-40 Fahrenheit) in winter, held nine of the 16 gulag
camps set up by the communist authorities in Kazakhstan.
Modest obelisks and wooden crosses dot the endless steppe, where crumbling
barracks and ramshackle watch towers are silent reminders of past atrocities.
LEGENDARY PASTOR BUKOWINSKI
Bukowinski, who died in 1974 and is buried in the wall of a local Catholic
church, is among the most revered pastors of a Catholic community in Karaganda
that survived decades of repression and militant atheism.
Born in the Ukrainian town of Berdychev in 1904, Bukowinski worked in the
Polish city of Krakow from 1931-36. In 1939 he headed the Lutsk monastery in
western Ukraine which was annexed by the Soviet Union from Poland later in the
year.
Preaching in Poland, Bukowinski made friends with a young priest Karol Wojtyla,
who was elected Pope John Paul in 1978.
In the 1940-50s, Bukowinski served three terms in prisons and labour camps
before he was finally released during Nikita Khrushchev's "thaw" that
denounced Stalin's personality cult.
"Bukowinski is a real martyr deeply respected by the Pontiff, and there
are plans to canonise him," Bishop Lenga said. "We are now preparing
his portrait as a present for the Pope."
The yellow, time-worn pages of Bukowinski's file compiled by the NKVD/KGB
Soviet secret police reveal the typical official attitude to Catholics in
Soviet times.
"Bukowinski inspired religious fanaticism and distracted youth from
communist upbringing," said one of the charges. "He praised
capitalist countries and the anti-Soviet policy of Vatican," said another.
Although the Soviet authorities freed him from prison, they did not offer
freedom of worship, and later in his life Bukowinski was forced to preach
clandestinely.
"We had real faith and devotion. It appears that those banished were the
best people in the former Soviet Union," said 75-year-old Sister Klara,
who was sent to Siberia and Kazakhstan from the Volga region in 1942 with other
ethnic Germans who Stalin feared might collaborate with advancing Nazis.
Today, Karaganda is a drab Soviet-style industrial city of 500,000, plagued by
street crime, AIDS and drugs, where whole residential areas abandoned by
tenants are being demolished, the bricks and concrete slabs sent to build the
new capital.
Catholic Church officials say the Pope will speak about moral rejuvenation and
spiritual values.
"There is a lot of poverty around, but what shocks me most is spiritual
indigence," Father Adelio said.