It is the time of harvest in the Ukraine. Like a vast golden carpet spread out to the horizon, the wheat and rye bow before the reapers. Like Elisha's twelve teams in echelon, but in this case of steel not oxen, a dozen monsters eat their way across the huge state farms.

The entire scene of apparent abundance hides a deadly, though invisible, curse. Long-lived radio-nuclides contaminate everything upon this rich, black earth. But the hungry people have little choice but to continue to reap – for tens of thousands of years the isotopes will be there, to blight, deform and debilitate generations to come.

In the Ukraine tragedy lies heavy. A few brief years ago, its fifty million people were a key part of a superpower covering a sixth of the earth, ruled by arrogant Communist Party bosses, utterly convinced that Marxism was truth and that, as it prophesied, they would one day rule the world. Now, instead, a desperately sick and bewildered nation struggles to rise from its knees.

The reality is terrible in this tragic country. The news on the television is read by a man who looks as if he has just had a bout of uncontrollable weeping; his face is contorted, and his voice gruff and unnatural. He is one of, by official count, at least forty million – and over vast regions that means everybody – who are deeply, often desperately, sick from Chernobyl radiation. Most people have lesions that do not heal, eyes that ache, heads that throb, and deep weariness that will not go away.

The 340-mile journey by car from Lvov in the western Ukraine to Kiev, the capital, is uncanny, unnerving. The Lvov-Kiev motorway looks like any other in the world, except that its four lanes are much wider and grander, as befits a superpower. But a chilling realization comes as to why for long stretches I am virtually alone on the road. The petrol stations are there, many newly built and brightly painted, but they are all empty. One attendant explains that she has had no petrol in her pumps for a month. In a whole week in Kiev, a city of five and a half million, I saw only one petrol station open briefly.

I spent the first night in the Ukraine in the drab, grim, dirty, industrial city of Lvov. I woke early. By 5 a.m. the city streets were already full of people. But they were not moving. They were waiting listlessly in long, snaking lines outside shops, queuing for food and other essentials. Lines of people everywhere, just waiting – a people nearly at the limit of endurance.

Here, I realized, is no 'king of the north' ready for military adventure, as a cloud to cover the Land. Here is a people, crushed for the present and foreseeable future by man-made disasters, desperately short of fuel, short of food, short of everything except the warmth of hospitality – and a hunger for the bread of life.

That warmth and hunger were overwhelming. I met our friend and fellow-preacher Victor Sluczewski in the hotel lobby in Kiev, a little man with the latent energy of a rocket ready for blast off.

Within an hour of my arrival in Kiev, we were on our way to the home of Anatolij and Zina Filipov. After Chernobnyl, their daughter had been evacuated to Bryansk, 270 miles away, and billeted with the Sluczewskis. But it had proved to be no help medically, for Victor's wife and son are themselves very ill. The Filipovs live in a satellite town near Kiev, where one hundred thousand apartments, in row upon row of identical high-rise concrete slabs, house 'the masses'.

If the social environment is faceless and inhuman, as Victor describes it, the warmth and affection of the Filipovs certainly is not. They lavished hospitality and care upon us such as I have never experienced in my whole life. They listened eagerly to this unfamiliar phenomenon called religion, and the strange book called the Holy Bible. After I had led one short devotion around the Word, with prayer to sanctify the occasion, Zina spontaneously expressed the deepest appreciation. She longs to know what the Bible teaches. We have nothing in Ukrainian, her language. We could leave nothing with her. Victor has translated one of our 16-page booklets from Esperanto into Russian, which she can read. More literature is urgently needed.

A great deal of Christadelphian literature was available in Ukrainian and Russian fifty years ago, including Christendom Astray, The Declaration, The Ecclesial Guide, and many others. It was all published by the zealous Christadelphian ecclesias which then existed in the Ukraine. But that was before Stalin's purges and the Great Patriotic War (World War II). What a wonderful thing it would be if even some of that literature has survived. What a help it would be to Victor in his efforts.

I knew where the publishing house had been in the 1930s, in the village of Chepeleff, a 300-mile round trip from Kiev. Victor's uncanny diplomatic skills provided petrol, and off we went.

In an early Bible Missionary magazine of many years ago, when Brother Alan Hayward was the secretary of the CBM, the following information appeared:

"[Brother Vladimir Doubrovsky] translated much literature into Ukrainian, and read most of the [Christadelphian] books then available. There was opposition: his log cabin was burned down one night, but he managed to save his precious books and manuscripts (especially valuable because the Iron Curtain was even then in operation) by dragging at the comers of the tablecloth on which his books were laid as he escaped through the window."

After Brother Vladimir's death in 1933, Brother Feodor Danilchenko became 'chairman' (the word they used to us) of the ecclesia. It is strange to think that this old ecclesial hall in a remote Ukrainian village is probably the largest meeting place of the Christadelphians in the twentieth century. It is certainly bigger than Adelaide Temple ecclesia in Australia. Now trees have grown up around it and partially hide it. The Communist Party turned the hall into a flour mill and grain store. It appears that, following Ukrainian independence, the Orthodox Church intends to reclaim the property, renovate the building and reopen it for their worship.

As for the Christadelphian members, we were told that "they all perished". Brother Vladimir Doubrovsky died in a Chernihiv hospital during the Stalin purges, his wife Sister Antonina and family in Siberia, while others died in slave labour camps in the Arctic. Sister Agafia Danilchenko was the last to fall asleep and that was in 1954. A son of the Doubrovskys, who attended Sunday School in Chepeleff, is believed to be alive somewhere in Moscow. We met two grandsons of Brother Feodor and Sister Agafia Danilchenko. Vasily's father Gregori almost certainly was a member, but he disappeared when Vasily was about six or seven. Regarding all the documents and literature, and the whereabouts of Christendom Astray in Ukrainian, they knew nothing.

We went to the town of Shchors and spent hours looking for a sister-in-law of Brother Vladimir Doubrovsky. We did not find her, but were welcomed by Natasha, a stunningly beautiful young relative of Vladimir. "Don't you notice her eyes?" said Victor quietly. I certainly did – Chernobyl eyes, disabled eyes, unspeakably sad. I will never forget Natasha's eyes as long as I live, intense and haunting as she leaned forward to catch every word as Victor told her about the Christadelphian faith. "I want to know about the faith that Vladimir and Antonina had. It must be something special".

Our last stop in western Ukraine led to one of those extraordinarily moving experiences that have occurred so often in my research into the history of the Truth. Victor and I were to part in the city of Lutsk, capital of the Ukrainian province of Volhynia. We spent the last hour or so at the Museum of the History of Volhynia. In the foyer was an exhibit about a great Ukrainian historian and writer who had kept the flame of independence and nationalism alight during the decades of Soviet domination. Just a political exhibition? Victor literally sprang across to the centre panel. "See here, a picture of the meeting hall in Kiselin! And the caption says it was the meeting hall of the Brethren, about whom this famous historian has written".

Then, at the very last moment, we learnt that Petr Nikolayevich Kralyuk, a professor at the new Teachers' College (it used to be the school for Communist Party cadres) had just discovered some old documents belonging to the Brethren in Christ and their doctrines and is preparing them for publication in Ukrainian.

One may perhaps venture to say: if you live in a place where you are used to having doors shut in your face and a look of scorn when you witness to your Biblical faith, then know for certain that it is harvest tune in the Ukraine.

The brotherhood has faced many challenges. It may have to face more before our Master comes again. This one is unexpected and a little unnerving. But it must be faced and answered by all.

As my plane cruises steadily westwards across the Atlantic at close to the speed of sound, Natasha's Chernobyl eyes and eager face haunt me over and over. They just will not go away. "I want to know more . . . it must be something special". I just pray and pray that young Natasha may come to know the special faith that sustained her relatives Brother Vladimir and Sister Antonina Doubrovsky through their unspeakable sufferings and martyrdom, before the terrible tragedy of Chernobyl closes her eyes for ever.

ALAN EYRE

THE BIBLE MISSIONARY No.127, January 1993, pp. 13-17