In the old days when watches and clocks were not in common use, people would determine time by various means, especially resorting to comparison with everyday actions known to everyone. Short spans were often compared to the space of a prayer. If something was to take the space of a prayer, it would last for a few or at most several minutes. Not particularly accurate measurement of time, but for all practical purposes useful and workable. Also changes of historical dimension can have a duration of the space of a prayer – of course in the figurative sense of the phrase.
It was in the years 1913 and 1914 that the crowned heads of Germany and Russia would pay mutual regular visits: the tsar and his family would come to Berlin, while the kaiser and his relatives would go to St Petersburg. They would exchange sweet little nothings, but at the same time they would reassure each other of their friendship and unwavering support. It was not infrequent that the tsar would don a German military uniform, and – the other way round – the kaiser would put on the Russian military uniform. They would address themselves ‘cousin’, and indeed they were all closely related by the ties of blood. Russian tsars and grand princes would regularly marry German princesses. Such visits would take place more or less regularly and the last of them were recorded in the lead-up to the First World War. Any observer of the political scene in 1913-1014 would have been impressed with the fraternity on display that bound tight Germany and Russia, Berlin and St Petersburg, the House of the Hohenzollern with the House of the Romanov. And yet, in the space of a prayer the two nations were at each other’s throats for the bloody four years.
Pretty much the same repeated itself before 1941. The Third Reich (a continuation of Imperial Germany) and the Soviet Union (a continuation of Imperial Russia) signed a non-aggression pact in 1939, a deal that shocked the then world and divided central Europe into the corresponding spheres of interests. Germany received from Moscow a free pass for its actions against Poland, the Soviet Union got a blank cheque for its plans concerning the Baltic States and eastern Poland. Indeed, Poland was gobbled up by the two signatories of the pact, while the Baltic States were soon incorporated into the Soviet Union. This détente between Berlin and Moscow had a duration of merely two years – which was the space of a prayer in historical dimensions – and in 1941 the two powers were at each other’s throat.
When communists took over Poland in 1944-1945, they were at first resisted, at times and places quite fiercely. For a couple of years the country was torn by fratricidal fights. Much political dust was raised and swirled before it settled. During the following decades Poland was in a firm communist grip, there was no resistance worthy of its name, while ever more people seemed to come to terms with the new reality and accept the new political system. How did it show? Well, more and more citizens would join the communist party. In a country of thirty odd million, the membership of the communist party piqued at three million in 1980. Three million – if you count out babies, children and adolescents – translates into more than every tenth citizen! The power of the communist party and its Marxist-Leninist ideology seemed unshakable. On Labour Day, May 1, 1980, Edward Gierek, the communist leader, would be greeted by hundreds of thousands taking part in the usual May Day parade. He was greeted by workers and technicians, by engineers and peasants, by doctors and nurses, by actors and writers, by soldiers and the police, by the old and the young, by men and women, by boys and girls. People would carry posters with big effigies of Marx and Engels and Lenin. The participants of the May Day parade would wave red flags (true, along with Poland’s national flags) and they would all rejoice as would the leader of the communist party and his right-hand men. And then, in the space of a prayer – merely four months later, in August the same year – the world-famous Solidarity Movement emerged, while the same people who took part in the Labour Day parade would massively join the movement. The three million members of the communist party would leave the party in flocks while the party’s leader would be toppled.
Nine years later the same fate would await East German communist leader Erich Honecker. On October 7, 1989, he celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the foundation of the German Democratic Republic – with great pomp – and he was toppled on… 18 October of the same year, eleven days later! The space of a prayer, indeed! The same story that played out in Poland repeated itself: the millions who chanted pro-communist slogans and the millions who were members of the East German version of a communist party did an about-face and spat on everything they apparently had believed in for the decades before.
Do we even need to retell how it all played out in the former Soviet Union? A superpower that posed the threat to the whole world – what with its nuclear arsenal, what with its highly disciplined society and dictatorial authorities – collapsed in the space of a prayer, without a single shot being fired! Where were the millions of the communists that made up the backbone of the Soviet Union? The Communist Party of the Soviet Union counted more than twenty million members! Overnight they turned coat and became capitalists or entrepreneurs or simply consumers of capitalist goods and services. The Marxist-Leninist ideology went up in smoke despite the fact that it used to be foisted upon the citizens day and night, at schools, through the media and entertainment. In the space of a prayer it was all undone – effortlessly and with no regret.
Just a couple of historical examples. Yes, we are pointing to these historical events with a reason. Also today we are living in a political system that foists on us certain ‘values’ and ‘convictions’. Also today people by the millions seem to identify with these ‘values’ and ‘convictions’, and also today it appears that the new normal is to stay for ever and ever and a day. And yet, you can rest assured that – in the space of a prayer – it will all collapse: ethnic replacement, rainbow sexuality, racism against whites, rabid feminism and, and, and. Just wait and see. It will happen in the space of a prayer.
