Candles Behind the Wall: Heroes of the Peaceful Revolution That Shattered Communism

Giving credit to Gorbachev and other political and religious leaders for the end of communist rule in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, von der Heydt, a TV reporter on European affairs from 1984 to 1989, asserts that it was the power of ordinary people's Christian morality that ignited the peaceful revolution. Using interviews and a multitude of official documents, she shows a religious facet of events through more than 100 case histories of defiance undertaken to defend spiritual values against the ``moral poverty of communism.'' She introduces us to an East German evangelist, to a Russian founder of an organization called Christian Seminar, to underground groups that distributed Bibles. Each of these case histories is enriched with sketches of local background, religion and politics. Von der Heyt doesn't hold much hope for Western capitalism infected with consumerism and secular humanism, and places her faith, instead, in some hybrid of socially conscious, religiously motivated democracy to emerge from the embers of the Soviet empire. Her descriptions of the ``awakening of conscience'' are inspiring, but von der Heydt lacks sufficient acumen in sociology and psychology to argue convincingly that those who overturned communism won't now become willing captives of the consumer culture. (Nov.)