Burton’s Missionary Tales

Posted By burtons on September 9, 2009

Since June, Sister Burton and I have been serving as coordinators for the Young Single Adult family home evening activities here in Moscow. One evening we happened to mention that we were traveling to Samara (a city several hundred miles east of Moscow) during the week ahead to work with the humanitarian missionaries there. As we were cleaning up after our FHE activity, a lady approached us. Through an interpreter, she told us this story:

Her grandfather was a well known Russian artist and musician whose early training had been in a highly regarded school for the arts located in Moscow. His work had been well received, and he had earned a good income that provided well for his family of ten children. They lived in a large, beautiful home, and he taught art and music lessons throughout the region of Samara and beyond. He was at the peak of his career when Stalin came to power. In the months and years that followed, he and other well known intellectuals and local leaders were ordered by the regime to renounce their Christian beliefs and proclaim themselves to be atheists. This he would not do, and as a result, he was executed by the state, and his works were stolen. Only a few of his pictures have reappeared, and they were recently featured among the works of other artists who suffered a similar fate during a showing in Moscow.

The family was not allowed to know where their father was buried, and his records have been sealed until recently so that even now, his granddaughter has been unable to find information about him. She has not been to Samara, but she asked if we would try to find someone who might be able to help her learn more about him. The lady who is the Director for Public Affairs for the church in the Samara mission is also an avid family history person. We requested her help in finding some information about this good man.

“Where would we go to find such information?” we asked. “The government records office is just a few blocks away”, she said. Since we had some time in our schedule before the next appointment, we tramped down the street to the office she indicated. She and our interpreter took our request to the clerk at the window where they spent some time in conversation while we waited to see what they could learn. As they turned from the window, a woman appeared beside us who introduced herself as the assistant director of the record repository. She invited us upstairs to her office where she offered refreshment and spoke for some time with the two Russian sisters about records and procedures.

About this time, the Director of the Samara Region Records Office entered the room and joined the conversation. They talked about his concern that many of the records he was charged with safeguarding were becoming old and deteriorating. He wished that he might have the ability to back them up in some kind of computer database. There was discussion of how the church copies records all over the world and maintains them under optimal storage conditions. There were a few minutes during which I thought he might be requesting help from the church, but in retrospect, I think he was simply introduced to the idea that the church knows how to preserve records. A few minutes later, we left the office, but a new relationship has been formed between the church director of public affairs and the Director and his assistant for the Samara Region Records Office.

As we walked back to catch our ride to the next appointment, we talked of the miracle in which we had just participated. Who would have ever believed that a simple request for information about a revered grandfather would land a delegation of missionaries and local church members in the office of the director of the very government institution responsible for records? Who, other than God himself, could have engineered an introduction and warm discussion between local church members and family history enthusiasts, and the directors of the most important record repository in that corner of Russia.

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Tags: Archives, arva burton, Atheists, Burton, Christian Beliefs, DeVere Burton, Evening Activities, Family History, Family Home Evening, Government Records, Granddaughter, Interpreter, LDS Church, Missionaries, Missionary Experience, Moscow, Public Affairs, Russian Artist, Stalin