The key to making it work is bumping up the atmosphere, which can be a little tricky since the idea is horror and creeping the PCs out with their powerlessness and a lot of T2K problems are either easily handled by head on confrontation with big guns and skill, or are clearly too much to chew.
If I were going to run it these days, I'd probably start foreshadowing the horror angle a couple scenarios out by working in some inexplicable stressors -- like a Soviet patrol coming out of Kalisz that seems specifically intent on killing the PC's group, follows them long after it makes any sense to just go after stragglers, is obviously too big to fight directly, and seems to have an uncanny ability to stay on their trail. I'd mostly make them a nuisance, and eventually reveal a mundane explanation (like they're a special unit with RF direction finding gear and other surviving high tech stuff and think the PCs are somehow involved with Operation Reset or some other super important deal). The trick would be to make them a problem that seems somewhat uncanny, and have it in place before the PCs get on the trail of the Madonna, otherwise the dots connect themselves too neatly.
Second, I'd conspire to have the PCs end up having some extended contacts with refugees -- camping with them outside a town, or do some extended contact interactions with them while trying to research the situation in the area. Along with information that directly advances the scenario's plot, hit the players up with the sort of stuff hungry, cold, terrified people with no sense of personal power are likely to by into. A mix of sort of plausible ideas coupled with downright strange ones, all featuring fear of unknown areas and the dark. Basically, the sort of stuff the locals would be saying in a good Hammer horror film set in Eastern Europe. Throw out some crazy stuff about vampires and zombies or werewolves, whatever, but have the locals buy into it 100%, and throw out some bodies to maybe/maybe not corroborate it (Y2K Poland should always have the occasional dead body laying around, and most of them would surely be predator or scavenger gnawed, but that makes for a whole different story after some frightened refugee told them the last night about a secret government lab that had a biowarfare agent that turns soldiers into unstoppable, psychotic cannibals . . . ).
Anyway, the trick, I think, is to shift gears from sort of mil-combat simulation game to horror story without being so sudden and heavy handed about it that the players think they've just warped into a whole other universe, but also to make sure the air of terror and unease is thick on the ground long before they get down into the monastery catacombs.
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