A “Confessor” who Prevailed: Harlan Popov (1907–1988)

Written by Pastor Ryan Rindels

Early this summer, I read Richard Wurmbrand’s, Tortured Christ. First published in 1967, the book provides a firsthand account of Wurmbrand’s conversion, his ministry as a Lutheran pastor in Romania, and the years he spent in prison at the hand of Soviet authorities. 

For many in America, Wurmbrand’s story gave them firsthand knowledge of persecution that scores of Christians were subjected to in the mid-20th century. Tortured for Christ led to the formation of Voice of the Martyrs, an advocacy group whose primary goal is to draw attention to persecuted churches around the globe. 

Unlike most believers who suffered in subterranean prisons and gulags, Wurmbrand (1909– 2001) not only survived but boldly chose to reveal his experiences behind the Iron Curtain despite threats from Romanian Communists. Wurmbrand would testify before congress in 1966, publicly displaying scars inflicted from torture. 

Interestingly, Wurmbrand was not the only pastor to publish a memoir in English around the same time.  Fewer people know of Harlan Popov, a Bulgarian pastor who, like Wurmbrand, spent over a decade of his life imprisoned and in work camps. I first heard of Popov when Ray Van Neste, a professor at Union University, mentioned his name in a sermon at the California Southern Baptist Convention in October. 

Tortured for his Faith (1970) has thematic parallels to Wurmbrand’s own work. Both men were promised not to be harassed if they would comply with the terms set forth by Communist police. In Popov’s case, this meant becoming an informant. If he chose to comply and regularly disclose information about persons in his congregation, he could continue to preach. His resolute refusal to take this offer came at a great cost. 

Wurmbrand and Popov were both forcefully taken from their homes by the police without warning. Their families were given no knowledge of their crimes or the place of their imprisonment. Popov would see his wife once in ten years and be reunited with his two children after 13 years behind bars. 

Popov recounted the creative forms of cruelty the jailers applied to his body and mind: being forced to stare at a white wall for nearly two weeks and being beaten if he even blinked an eye, solitary confinement, and various “starvation diets.” These experiences led to the following assessment.  

For 13 years I lived with every day experience of how low men can sink without God. Man has the capacity to rise to the greatest spiritual heights but he also has the capacity to sink to the lowest, most vile levels. No animal has this “range.”  

After witnessing guards mercilessly beating an older inmate who had first caught and then eaten a rabbit in the field, Popov reminded his readers that “when man is without God, there is no limit to his depravity or to the depths which he will sink. These guards descended the ladder of humanity step by step until they had no humanity or kindness left.”

Like Wurmbrand, Popov fought against the impulse to hate the guards and, consequently, become like his abusers. Remarkably, both pastors resisted all attempts at Communist indoctrination. Popov emphasized that brainwashing, while insidious, was less plausible than to break one’s will. The authorities, he claimed, 

knew that after my will was broken and they had what they wanted from me, I would regain my will and come back to myself. Thus, their tactic was not to brain-wash me, but to so batter and drive me beyond human endurance that temporarily I would lose my will. Brain-washing calls for alternating between good and bad treatment. Destroying a person’s will is simpler—it requires only brutal, unrelenting beatings, starvation and torture building up to a rising peak and crescendo of horror where a person no longer has a will of his own.

Those whose wills were broken confessed to crimes they didn’t commit, became informants or denounced family members. Popov noted that some men would curse their wives and children and, just moments later, cry in shame at their actions. 

Popov believed that God’s presence and power strengthened him at crucial moments of desperation, notably when he was placed alone in a pitch-black pit, told by the guards that he would never see the light of day. With no means to discern space or time and on the brink of losing his sanity, he cried out to God. After which,   

something happened which has never happened before or since. A light glow began to shine and a warming sensation filled the cell and enveloped my weakened, starved frame. I felt strong arms around me, cradling me in the arms of Christ Himself…. Tears flowed down my cheeks as I was held in the embrace of Christ. I know some readers may think this extreme, but when I was at the point of madness and despair, Christ let me know He had not forgotten me there huddled in the blackness of a forgotten cell in the bowels of the earth. It was a beautiful loving embrace and a moment that made all the suffering worthwhile. How I love Him! If all men in the world could know this Christ in his beauty and love!

When the guards brought him out of the pit, he was told he had been there for 35 days. 

Tortured for Christ and Tortured for his Faith draw parallels between the underground churches and the early church. Wurmbrand and Popov acknowledged the purifying effects of persecution, the ardent faith and love that existed in those communities, and the insatiable appetite to memorize Scripture. Popov saw men converted to Christ in prison, even preaching to a prisoner over a period of days, tapping the wall with a primitive morse code. 

After being freed, both men immigrated to the U.S., where they devoted the remainder of their lives to supporting underground churches around the globe and drawing attention to the oppression wrought by Communist regimes. Interestingly, Popov and Wurmbrand both died in Southern California. 

The early church called Christians who were tortured but refused to deny Christ “confessors.” While confessors did not desire that such persecution come upon the church, they could not fail to see God’s good work in and through it. Reflecting on his clandestine ministry in Bulgaria, Popov said that he learned the following lesson:  

God’s word grows and spread most in a condition of suffering and privation. This is what made the spiritual harvest I was able to reap so abundant in communist prisons. 

His story and others like it remind us, in the words of the Apostle Paul, that even in the most dire circumstances, “the word of God is not bound” (2 Timothy 2:10).