By Michael Bourdeaux

September 8, 1983, was a momentous day at Chequers. Soon after Margaret Thatcher’s second election success she summoned a group of eight academics and addressed them: “We have spent five years learning how to deal with the Russians: now I want you to tell me how to bring this inhuman system to an end.”

Mrs Thatcher asked Professor Archie Brown, of Oxford University: “Is there anyone in the Kremlin whom we should watch, someone who might be a bit different from these geriatrics in the Politburo?”

The answer came back: “A young lawyer, Mikhail Gorbachev.”

Amid the bilateral exchanges of the time a parliamentary delegation was due to visit the UK. Gorbachev was its leader, and Mrs Thatcher invited him to Chequers. They got on famously from the start.

In March 1985, following her unerring political instinct, she went to Moscow for the funeral of Konstantin Chernenko, a surprising mark of respect to a political nonentity. Almost immediately after the ceremonies Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR. Mrs Thatcher was still there — and the only leader of a Western democracy in Moscow. She naturally had a conversation with him and declared: “Here is a man we can do business with.”

The rest was not quite history. At the Chequers seminar my task had been to present a statement on the suppression of human rights and religious liberty. Mrs Thatcher showed immediate sympathy with the dissidents, realising that they represented true democracy, and she invited me to sit next to her at lunch and tell her more.

From that day she took a personal interest in the fate of Irina Ratushinskaya, the Christian poet, Valeri Barinov, the Baptist rock musician, and Alexander (“Sasha”) Ogorodnikov, the young founder of a “Christian Seminar” in Moscow, who established branches in several other cities. By happy coincidence, a biography of Sasha Ogorodnikov has just appeared.

A young Communist with brilliant prospects, he enrolled at the Moscow Film Academy. There he had private access to Pasolini’sGospel According to St Matthew, and his resulting conversion condemned him to the status of an outlaw. He founded the Christian Seminar with the aim of discussing his nascent beliefs with others, and the response among other young people was immediate.

He refused time and again to renounce his faith under interrogation, so arrest and imprisonment followed in 1978. When I told Mrs Thatcher more about Sasha, she said: “We must do something to change this.”

She commissioned me to keep her informed, which was possible through the determination of my colleagues at Keston College, a study group set up in 1969 to monitor the global position of religion within the Communist system.

Sasha’s utter refusal to compromise cost him education, marriage, early release from the gulag, constant beatings and consignment to the punishment cell. For example, in 1986 he went on hunger strike, demanding his right to a copy of the Bible. Never failing to influence those around him, both criminal prisoners and guards, he persuaded one of his captors to take the huge risk of smuggling a letter out and posting it to an address in Moscow. Two days later it was in London; the next day I delivered a translation to No 10 Downing Street and was ushered straight in to discuss it with Mrs Thatcher.

On February 14 the following year (1987) Sasha walked free, and Koenraad De Wolf informs us in his admirable biography that his relatives greeted him with the information “that his release had been brought about by the personal interventions of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan”.

I first met Sasha in 1988, the year that marked the millennium of a Christian presence in Russia. He was ebullient in his efforts to set up an “alternative millennium exhibition”, showing the destruction of churches, while church leaders from round the world were witnessing the pomp and splendour of an Orthodox Church now throwing off the shackles of 70 years of persecution.

Neither the Moscow Patriarchate nor the post-Communist government was comfortable with the dissidents. Russia has never had anything corresponding to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In the chaos of the 1990s Sasha tried, with singular lack of success, to establish a Christian Democratic Party. Nor could someone who now had been twice married be accepted under Orthodox canon law for ordination to the priesthood. So Sasha has become a social worker, establishing (in the teeth of opposition from local authorities and various hooligans) soup kitchens, children’s homes (Russia has 600,000 street children) and an “Island of Hope”, a rescue centre for young prostitutes.

Currently he is helping Christian refugees from Egypt, Syria and Central Asia with food, housing and sorting out their papers. He plans, too, to establish a refuge for young men on release from prison and might receive some help from the Orthodox Church for this. His only financial support for these enterprises has come from abroad, but he has the satisfaction of knowing that many of the Seminar’s members of the 1970s are part of the bedrock of Russia’s religious resilience today.

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Dissident for Life: Alexander Ogorodnikov and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in Russia, by Koenraad De Wolf (Eerdmans, £18.99).

Canon Michael Bourdeaux is president of Keston Institute, Oxford