Pulling Back the Iron Curtain: Stories from a Cold War Missionary

By Debby Thompson and Sally Clarkson

While the world was reading one story, God was writing another.

In 1977, amidst the bitterly cold days of the frigid Cold War, a young couple responded to God’s dramatic call on their lives to go and live covertly behind The Iron Curtain. Filled with faith and buffeted by fear, they left the familiarity of family and the security of NATO to locate behind enemy lines inside Communist Poland in order to establish a Kingdom beachhead of evangelism and discipleship. From award-winning author Debby Thompson, Pulling Back the Iron Curtain is a collection of personal and intimate stories revealing a firsthand account of that unique assignment. Now, with authenticity and vulnerability, this pioneer missionary makes known to the world the tender and dramatic workings of God even behind the Iron Curtain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Morgan James Faith
• Release date: Oct 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781631955204

Debby Thompson

In total, the Thompsons spent 33 years ministering in Eastern Europe, ultimately leading Cru's work in 20 European nations. Together with their three children, they were witnesses to a period of dramatic social, political, and spiritual change. Now living in Cincinnati, Ohio, Debby Thompson, an active grandmother of six, is also a sought-after speaker, writer, and mentor for women around the world.

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BACKGROUND: COLD WAR IN CONTEXT

by Matt Kavgian

For some of us, the Cold War, and terms like "the Iron Curtain," remain indelibly etched into our memories.

But for those of a younger generation, they may be simply academic or even wholly unknown concepts. For the sake of putting Debby Thompson’s stories into their proper context, a brief overview of the era is warranted.

What was the Cold War?

The devastation of World War II left much of Europe in complete shambles. While the United States of America (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) had collaborated to defeat Nazi Germany and its Axis partners, their uneasy alliance quickly turned into an open clash that spanned the globe for the next half-century. They viewed one another’s efforts to retain power in the wake of the war with deep suspicion and paranoia and quickly made efforts to attract allies to their respective sides to bolster their security. They also disagreed ideologically about how to put Europe back on its feet. This clash, which stretched from the end of the war until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, is called "the Cold War. The war was considered cold because the hostility between the two powers was ideological, economic, and diplomatic rather than a direct military conflict (hot war").

On May 6, 1946, in a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill characterized the new post-war reality in Europe by stating that from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.

The Cold War boiled down to some basic differences between the worldviews of the US and the USSR. Communist societies believed in redistributing wealth (taking from the rich and giving to the poor) and promoted workers and state-run economies. They also viewed organized religion as a dangerous delusion and actively sought to eradicate it from their societies. The US capitalist system let free markets determine the production and distribution of goods and promoted freedom of religion. Both sides also used propaganda to paint their rival in a negative light and sought advantages in nearly every aspect of human endeavor, to include arts and culture, sports, and science.

Three key elements defined the Cold War: 1) the threat of nuclear war, 2) competition over the allegiance of newly independent (post-colonial) nations, and 3) the military and economic support of each other’s enemies around the world. The US showed its global military dominance when it dropped two atomic bombs on Japan to end the war. This act prompted the USSR to seek nuclear technology to prevent the Americans from expanding their influence unchecked. The US held other advantages as well. Having entered World War II late in the conflict, it lost far fewer soldiers, civilians, and infrastructure. The USSR lost 8–10 million soldiers (25 million including civilians), but in comparison the US lost 300,000 in the war. While the USSR faced a devastating invasion of its homeland, most of the US emerged unscathed from the war. Finally, the US economy expanded during the war as it made profits and gained territory in exchange for providing weapons and supplies to the Allied forces.

Ideology—and military power—became progressively more important to both superpowers after 1947, when US President Harry Truman asked Congress for funds to support Turkey and Greece’s struggling economies in an attempt to contain Soviet influence. The Truman Doctrine, as it was called, was the first salvo in a decades-long containment policy in which the US supported and intervened in non-communist