At the Good Friday service in Jerusalem in the final days of the Carmel and Jerusalem events the prophecies of Haggai and Hebrews were being reviewed. The whole company had already received the prophecies concerning the great shaking of the nations that had been foretold at Mt Carmel. During the service one of the leadership team added a further prophecy saying that the first nation to be shaken was going to be the USSR.

USSR

This was received quietly and no doubt with some hesitation because the Soviet Union was at the height of its power. The Cold War between East and West seemed to be never ending and the USSR ruled over the Warsaw Pact countries covering the whole of Eastern Europe.

The power of the Communist Empire seemed unbreakable and the tensions between the USA and Russia were as great as they had ever been. Both countries were fully armed with nuclear weapons capable of devastating most of the Northern Hemisphere if an armed conflict should develop.

Chernobyl

Just three weeks after that prophecy was given in Jerusalem, the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Soviet Union blew up scattering radioactive dust over a wide area of Europe, as far west as the Welsh mountains. Many in the West saw this as an act of judgement because “Chernobyl” in the Ukrainian language meant “wormwood” or “bitterness”.

Christians remembered that 'wormwood' is mentioned in the book of Revelation:

The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water – the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter. (Rev 8:10-11)

Jewish Pogrom

It was recalled that Chernobyl was a town where a large number of Jews lived before the Communist era but in the 1930s when the Nazis were murdering Jews in Germany the Russians did the same and at Chernobyl there was a massacre. The Communists dug a mass grave and buried those whom they had slaughtered in the pogrom.

After the Second World War when they were looking for a suitable site for a nuclear power station they decided to build it directly on top of the Jewish burial ground. Chernobyl became doubly bitter for the Jewish population in the Soviet Union and the springs and rivers of the whole area did indeed become wormwood.

Far-Reaching Effects

But the fallout from Chernobyl had much wider and far-reaching effects.

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster had widespread social and political repercussions throughout the USSR and Eastern Europe which would redraw the map of Europe and change the history of the world.

Chernobyl was near Kiev in the Ukraine. That area was known as the breadbasket of the USSR. It was badly polluted: food could not be produced here. It was just at the time when the Soviet armies were being withdrawn from Afghanistan and there were many more mouths to be fed. The Communist Government faced famine and had to buy grain from the USA, which required dollars. This in turn meant establishing friendly relations with the West and appealing for the cooperation of their own citizens at home.

This led to major changes on the international political front and on the domestic social front. The key words introduced at that time by Mikhail Gorbachev were ‘Glasnost’ and ‘Perestroika’, ‘Openness’ and ‘Reform’. Gorbachev became President of the USSR in 1985, inheriting a struggling economy and a range of social problems at home due to weak leadership from ageing senile leaders in the Kremlin.

Mikhail Gorbachev

Looking back on the Chernobyl power plant disaster, Gorbachev saw it as the single most significant event that led to the end of the Communist Empire in Eastern Europe. He wrote:

The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later. Indeed, the Chernobyl catastrophe was an historic turning point: there was the era before the disaster, and there is the very different era that has followed...The Chernobyl disaster, more than anything else, opened the possibility of much greater freedom of expression, to the point that the system as we knew it could no longer continue. It made absolutely clear how important it was to continue the policy of glasnost.¹

George Kennan

A similar view was expressed by George Kennan who was the American Ambassador to the USSR in 1952. He was one of the architects of the U.S. strategy in the Cold War. Kennan wrote that, in reviewing the entire "history of international affairs in the modern era", he found it:

hard to think of any event more strange and startling, and at first glance inexplicable, than the sudden and total disintegration and disappearance…of the great power known successively as the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union.²

But the downfall of the USSR is only inexplicable to those who have no concept of God’s sovereign power over history. The new phase of the great shaking of the nations began in April 1986 just three weeks after the word of the Lord went out from Jerusalem. It was 70 years after the Bolshevik Revolution that established the USSR and began the Communist era.

"The downfall of the USSR is only inexplicable to those who have no concept of God’s sovereign power over history."

Many of those who were at the Jerusalem event remembered how God had said through the Prophet Jeremiah that when 70 years were completed for the Babylonian Empire he would destroy Babylon because of their bloodshed and cruelty and all they had done to his people Israel. Was God using Chernobyl to say the same for the Communist Empire?

End of European Communist Era

Major political changes quickly followed the Chernobyl disaster and the shockwaves ran right across Eastern Europe shaking the shackles that bound the satellite nations of the Warsaw Pact together. Internal revolutionary forces were let loose in each of the nations that led to the collapse of the Communist Empire, the fall of the Berlin wall, and the opening up of the Eastern European nations to the Western world.

Thus ended the Empire of the most monstrous malevolent cruelty in the history of the world. Between 1917 and the end of the Communist era the USSR killed 69,700,000 of its own citizens in successive political purges. In addition, at the end of the war in Europe in one year, 1945 to 1946 the Russians killed 2,923,700 German civilians as they wreaked revenge for the invasion of Russia.³

Back / Next: The Lord's message: Israel and the Church

References

1 Quoted by Vidal, J. The long shadow of Chernobyl, The Guardian, 4 July 2014.

2 Quoted by Aron, L. Everything you think you know about the collapse of the Soviet Union is wrong, Foreign Policy, 20 June 2011.

3 All statistics published in: Hill, C, 1982. The Day Comes, London: Fount Paperbacks, p184