but not your last one. If you accept the invitation, all the other
satellite countries will fall in line. These things are interwoven.
No Moscow, no satellite countries.”
But Billy’s friend, Vice President George H. W. Bush, called him
to tell him the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union did not want
him to go. Billy was torn by compelling arguments on both sides.
Finally, he decided to accept the invitations, and his ministry in
Russia turned out to be remarkable. Baptists and Pentecostals and
Orthodox all welcomed him. He presented the gospel clearly and
without restriction in his preaching and in private conversations.
Two events, however, tested his patience, courage, and diplo-
matic skills. At the infamous peace conference, one of the speakers
railed on and on that the U.S. was the sole cause of the world’s unrest
and nuclear threat. The speech’s length and one-sidedness eventu-
ally prompted Billy to remove his translation headset in protest.
Also, when Billy visited the dissident “Siberian Seven,” Pente-
costals who had sought asylum in the U.S. embassy, becoming a
worldwide symbol for religious freedom, many anti-Communists
criticized Billy for not denouncing the Soviet Union on their behalf.
Throughout the trip, Billy’s comments, meant to be gracious and
evenhanded, were interpreted as naive. Back home in the U.S.,
the media was sharply critical.
The Baltimore Suneditorialized, “Billy Graham has a God-given
right to make a fool of himself in Moscow. He’s doing a pretty
good job of it while attending a propaganda show... .”
Political cartoonists depicted Billy abandoning persecuted
Christians, many of whom labored in Siberian work camps like
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn before them. Even his hometown news-
paper, the Charlotte Observer, posed him in a cartoon next to a
Soviet-looking Julius Caesar and remarked, “Billy Graham never
met a Caesar he didn’t like!” The rhetorical firestorm triggered
Christianity Todayto observe, “Never before in all his career has
the evangelist faced such condemnation from the American press
and from evangelical leaders.”
Because he moved on to England after his trip to the Soviet
Union, Billy remained largely unaware of the tumult back home.
The Leadership Secrets of Billy Graham