Unlike the not-so-independent-minded writers attacking PEN America today, Russian writers have had to face real censorship and the possibility of serious punishment for their work—whether they labored under tsarist, Soviet, or Putinist rule. They also did something that I doubt many of today’s writers do: treat religion with deadly seriousness. Gary Saul Morson delves into the subject.

Ultimate questions were asked in ultimate conditions. The poet Osip Mandelstam died on the way to the Gulag. Isaac Babel was shot. Many writers disappeared. The lucky ones found themselves in exile. Witnessing murder and cruelty on a hitherto unimaginable scale, they naturally thought: so this is where atheism and materialism lead! And isn’t that a good reason to embrace faith? One still astonishing fact about militantly atheist Soviet culture is that three of its greatest literary masterpieces—by Pasternak, Bulgakov, and Solzhenitsyn—were avowedly Christian, and a fourth, Life and Fate, by the Jewish writer Vasily Grossman, was equally spiritual.

It’s worth mentioning that Babel, Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak were also Jews. Like their Christian counterparts, their religious preoccupations were shaped by those who came before them:

From the start, the key question was where morality came from, if there was nothing but natural laws. “If there is no God, all is permitted.” . . . Is it any wonder, then, that once the implications of materialism and atheism became clear, some writers came to profess absolute morality, the soul, individual responsibility, Christian virtues, and even belief in God? Even those who remained atheists . . . could not help noticing that Communists who found themselves in prison were the first to betray others.

“The fact is that I am a Christian,” the late Alexei Navalny explained. “I was once quite a militant atheist myself . . . But now I am a believer, and that helps me a lot in my activities.” . . . Navalny learned, as Solzhenitsyn, Natan Sharansky, and many others did, that it is the God of the Universe who gives us the living water to nourish our souls. And it is our soul, not our life, that matters most.

When the IDF finally caught up with the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, he wasn’t deep inside a subterranean lair, as many had expected, but moving around the streets the Rafah. Israeli forces had driven him out of whatever tunnel he had been hiding in and he could only get to another tunnel via the surface. Likewise, Israel hasn’t returned to fight in northern Gaza because its previous operations failed, but because of its success in forcing Hamas out of the tunnels and onto the surface, where the IDF can attack it more easily. Thus maps of the progress of the fighting show only half the story, not accounting for the simultaneous battle belowground.

At the beginning of the war, various options were floated in the press and by military and political leaders about how to deal with the problem posed by the tunnels: destroying them from the air, cutting off electricity and supplies so that they became uninhabitable, flooding them, and even creating offensive tunnels from which to burrow into them. These tactics proved impracticable or insufficient, but the IDF eventually developed methods that worked.

John Spencer, America’s leading expert on urban warfare, explains how. First, he notes the unprecedented size and complexity of the underground network, which served both a strategic and tactical purpose:

The Hamas underground network, often called the “Gaza metro,” includes between 350 and 450 miles of tunnels and bunkers at depths ranging from just beneath apartment complexes, mosques, schools, hospitals, and other civilian structures to over 200 feet underground. . . . The tunnels gave Hamas the ability to control the initiative of most battles in Gaza.

One elite unit, commanded by Brigadier-General Dan Goldfus, led the way in devising countermeasures:

General Goldfus developed a plan to enter Hamas’s tunnels without Hamas knowing his soldiers were there. . . . General Goldfus’s division headquarters refined the ability to control forces moving underground with the tempo of the surface forces. Incrementally, the division refined its tactics to the point its soldiers were conducting raids with separate brigades attacking on the surface while more than one subterranean force maneuvered on the same enemy underground. . . . They had turned tunnels from obstacles controlled by the defending enemy into maneuver corridors for the attacker.

This operational approach, Spencer explains, is “unlike that of any other military in modern history.” Later, Goldfus’s division was moved north to take on the hundreds of miles of tunnels built by Hizballah. The U.S. will have much to learn from these exploits, as China, Iran, and North Korea have all developed underground defenses of their own.