This book was so interesting! Considering the topic, it was not too hard to read or anything like that. I like that Ciszek wrote another book after this one because this one ended so suddenly. This man had such an amazing life. 400 pages flew by!

Fr Martin’s epilogue tells me that the book that I should have read is He Leadeth Me. I just thought that I book titled With God in Russia would have had more God and introspection.
Indeed, Fr Ciszek says rote prayers, including the Mass (sometimes with no congregation, an act I thought was forbidden, as Communion is communal), but he hardly ever tells us of the internal graces those external professions stirred.

He writes,
Yevgeny had been baptized a Catholic, but he hadn’t practiced his faith in so long there was little left except these superstitious externals. (215)
Sounds familiar.

For a book that is titled With God, it’s vexingly political. Now, I am not against political screeds against Communists: I read Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire and rated it 5 stars.
But Fr Ciszek was not as evenhanded in his diatribes. When he talks of the Nazis, he writes,

At the end of the book, however, was an essay, purportedly written by a member of the Orthodox hierarchy, which was an outright attack on Fascism written in such a way as to arouse hate and revenge. The piece so shocked me when I read it that I was sure it could not be authentic. I simply could not reconcile the ideal of the priestly vocation and a priest’s training in the central theme of Christianity — “Little children, love one another” — with the hate-mongering in that essay.

(107)

This was written in the 1960s, after the world found out for certain most of what the Nazis did. Yet this passage was purposefully left in. In the introduction, Fr Flaherty writes how he cut 1000 pages from the manuscript to appease the editors. But that passage was saved and published.
This sympathy for Fascists has shades of Charles E. Coughlin (I will not allow him his title) and is distasteful to me.

The alternate title to this book could be "How to eat soup in a Russian prison"