Optina Pustyn

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8jYaL8M9oU

If you go to this link it explains below the  history of |Optina Pustyn from the book
Russka where the author got a lot of info from, as well as professors in the US
in eastern slavic studies.

There are 2 parts 1 and 2 This one is part 2 as the first part is basically birds singing and a new dawn rising
which is  rather nice since this seems to be a revival of what once lost in the USSR.

People who went to church didn't trust communist priests who they believed were part of the KGB.

I find all this very interesting even today.

I remember the movie Brothers Karamazov Where Ekatarina Ivanovna compares Dimitrii to Mother Russia
 herself. Wild . Deep.Uncontrollable.
It is something to have a wild stallion fall in love with you.
Actually Ekaterina doesn't depict in the movie, the explanation given about her as to why she behaved the way she did. Yes, pride had a lot to do with it but there was a lot more.
She wanted what Grushenka had but Dimitrii didn't love her and never pretended that he did.
He was pushed by her and towards her by his Father who wanted to keep his money.

Growing up, russian movies like Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Dr Shivago, and Brothers Karamazov with Yul Brenner were such romantic tragedies . I got caught up in them and carried away like in Gone With the Wind and read so many books by Tolstoy Dostoyevky and
Solszhenytsyn  .
 The First Circle was a real eye opener. I never knew things like that existed. Gulags.
Hitler was bad enough to know about.
 I couldn't understand how people made such an about turn to go against their soul into such cruelties
as was seen in the USSR back then. The old immigrants who ran away, were full of soul.

From the old authors you saw in Mother Russia not the cruel aspects of communism but the soul of the regular peasant people willing to love. I guess hunger and cold break the best of men.

In spite of everything , they were touched by God and morally saved.

Whenever you read about people turning to God, it is to be morally saved because you lose something of yourself, by not believing.

God is what keeps people human.
xoxoxox