CHAPTER 11 Hope and the Twisted Road

Authoritarianism and Democracy

Russia’s future regeneration, in Yakunin’s view, required the church’s regeneration, yet by the late 1990s, that renewal seemed to be a distant possibility. The promise of the early 1990s had not resulted in the kinds of changes he had envisioned. In particular, three major events had significantly narrowed the potential for Russia’s evolution into an open and tolerant society, and had strengthened the social bases of an authoritarian political order.

The 1990 Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations that Yakunin championed laid the groundwork for a pluralistic society. Believing that the 1990 law provided legal protection for religious minorities, Yakunin mistakenly assumed it would remain in force throughout Russia’s period of transformation. Yet, as discussed in chapter 10, the Moscow Patriarchate and various other interest groups had repeatedly hammered away at the 1990 law, complaining that it allowed foreign religious organizations unlimited access to a country struggling to regain its national identity. Shortly after his excommunication, Yakunin initiated a libel case against an official of the Moscow Patriarchate, Aleksandr Dvorkin, who had become a leading spokesperson in support of taking official action against the new religious movements. The suit served as a major test of the legal principles that Yakunin held as sacrosanct.

Born in Moscow (1955), Aleksandr Leonidovich Dvorkin was educated in the United States at Hunter College, St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary, and Fordham University, where he received his doctorate in medieval studies. After graduation, he first worked for Voice of America radio, before moving to Germany, in 1991, to work for Radio Liberty. Early the following year, he returned to Moscow, where he soon landed a position in the newly created Department of Religious Education and Catechisms of the Moscow Patriarchate.⁴ After observing firsthand the growing popularity of several new religious groups, he began to look closely at their organization and methods. He became frightened about their appeal to young people and about what he perceived as their dangerous tactics to recruit and maintain converts. Outspoken in warning about their threat to Russia’s stability, Dvorkin rapidly earned a reputation as the chief ideologist of the anticult movement in Russia, especially after he wrote, in 1995, a widely distributed booklet titled Ten Questions for a Recruiter, published by the Moscow Patriarchate.⁵

Yakunin filed a suit against Dvorkin on the grounds of protecting the “honor, dignity, and reputation” of the religious minorities whom, he charged, Dvorkin had slandered. Dvorkin, he claimed, had wrongfully branded many law-abiding religious organizations as “totalitarian sects and destructive cults.” In his booklet, Dvorkin lumped together a large number of religious groups, calling them “totalitarian organizations” that exercised mind control over their members. Constructed around a charismatic personality, they represented a major danger to Russia’s youth, he warned, whose inexperience made them susceptible to simplistic teaching. As Dvorkin had written in his brochure, “We are dealing with mafia-like structures, with people bound together by iron discipline and unquestioning obedience to their leadership.”⁶ Among them, he included Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Unification Church, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, the Church of Scientology, and several others. He proposed their banishment from the Russian state.

Dvorkin’s trial took place in April–May 1997, in Moscow. Although he offered little concrete evidence for his assertions, Dvorkin painted a sensationalized portrait of religious groups whose destructive activities, he claimed, threatened Russia’s cultural and religious integrity and the foundation of Russia’s national life.⁷ The new religious groups, he charged, “are characterized by such phenomena as mind control, the perversion of basic ethical principles, and intensive recruitment, in which the recruits are not told the whole truth either about the organization. By virtue of the above properties, these groups practice inhumane and anti-social methods.”⁸ They spread their destructive teachings across Russia.

As the plaintiff, Yakunin argued that the defendant had grossly overgeneralized and reduced a complex picture to a few assertions. Dvorkin had ignored the many positive contributions that some of the new religious movements had made to the people they served. Yakunin reiterated the importance of freedom of conscience for Russia’s democratic society, then only in its infancy. Dvorkin had not provided, he argued, any details about the ideological content or a single confirmable fact about the religious groups he had targeted.⁹ The court, however, largely disregarded Yakunin’s request for concrete evidence, as well as the defendant’s seeming indifference to the 1990 law. In the end, the court ruled against Yakunin.¹⁰

Dvorkin’s writings, the anticult campaign, and the trial had ambiguous consequences. According to the historian Emily Baran, the accusation of “totalitarian methods” and “mind control” put the church in the awkward position of defending freedom of conscience and Russian democracy. In its desire to protect Russia from what it called antidemocratic religious movements, the church had the opportunity to defend democracy and thus move beyond its authoritarian past.¹¹ Yet it elected not to follow this path and celebrated the trial’s outcome instead. The court’s verdict had an additional consequence: the desire to protect the Russian Orthodox Church from new religious movements was a harbinger of political decisions that lay immediately ahead. The court’s ruling narrowed the potential for a dialogue that Yakunin and others deemed important for Russia’s future health and lay the groundwork for the second set of events that contributed to the rebirth of an authoritarian political order.

The second episode concerned the patriarch’s repeated efforts to weaken the 1990 law on freedom of conscience. Until the fall of 1997, President Yeltsin had resisted attempts to restrict the activities of foreign missionary groups in Russia. In September 1997, however, he bowed to pressure from the Moscow Patriarchate and nationalist groups that clamored to rescind key parts of the law. Several of the changes that followed bear mention as they contradict core principles that Yakunin viewed as essential to a pluralistic and democratic society.¹² Unlike the 1990 law that forbade religious discrimination, the new law awarded special status to Russia’s “traditional religions.” It identified these as Orthodox Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism, and the new law conferred protected status on each. In the preamble, the 1997 law awarded priority to the Orthodox Church, declaring that the state “recognizes the special contribution of Orthodoxy to the history of Russia and to the development of Russia’s spirituality and culture.”¹³ Various “traditional Christian” organizations, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism would have full legal rights, but they could expect substantially fewer financial and material benefits from the state. Although all other religious groups would in theory enjoy freedom of conscience, they would nevertheless be required to register annually with local authorities and could not expect any state benefits. Moreover, the 1997 law permitted only “centralized religious organizations, which have been active on a legal basis for no fewer than fifty years” in Russia, to use the word “Russian” in their name.¹⁴ Only the Orthodox Church, therefore, qualified to meet this requirement; this, too, set the Orthodox Church apart from other faiths operating in Russia.

The 1997 Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations was a great disappointment to church reformers. Zoia Krakhmal′nikova castigated Patriarch Aleksii II and President Yeltsin for the passage of the new law. One should not compromise fundamental principles, she emphasized: “Freedom of conscience … cannot be bought or sold, nor should it be exchanged for certain privileges.… It is an absolute value.”¹⁵ Fr. Veniamin (Novik) lost his position in the Leningrad Ecclesiastical Academy for his outspoken condemnation of the law. The new federal law, he wrote, “recalls the Syllabus issued by Pope Pius IX in 1864 … which condemned the rights of foreigners to settle in Catholic countries and forcefully expelled them.”¹⁶ Fr. Veniamin maintained that like the Catholic Syllabus, the new Russian law undermined ecumenism and made religious reconciliation nearly impossible to achieve.

Although the 1997 law did not abrogate the primary goal for which Yakunin had fought, freedom of conscience, it considerably narrowed that goal’s scope and protections. The newly revised law, in Yakunin’s interpretation, had major implications for Russian democracy, for interconfessional dialogue, and for the religious and civil rights of minorities. The church’s growing reliance on the Russian government for financial support and privileges also brought the church and the state closer together.¹⁷ Moreover, the patriarch and his allies significantly exaggerated the threat of foreign religious organizations to the recovery of Russia’s national heritage. The greater threat to democracy, Yakunin claimed, did not come from foreign missionaries, but from within Russia—from the Moscow Patriarchate and Russian nationalists, who used the imagined threats from foreign groups to their political advantage, charging that the real totalitarian sect in Russia was the Moscow Patriarchate.¹⁸ In taking such an extreme, perhaps unfortunate position, he further tarnished his legacy among traditional Orthodox believers.

These events constituted only part of the dangerous political and social trends Yakunin saw coalescing in Russia. As mentioned previously, he had once enthusiastically backed Boris Yeltsin and stood by him against assaults on his presidency in 1993, but by the second half of the 1990s, Yakunin’s support had turned to disappointment. Yeltsin’s signing of the 1997 law deepened Yakunin’s sense of betrayal and enhanced his perception that the Russian president was personally incapable of advancing much beyond the practices and values of the Soviet past. In coming to power, Yeltsin had promised democracy and unity, but his economic and political policies had led to a top-down leadership style of governance, which, rather than moving toward a democratic society, had fostered the opposite.

The last development constituted the third set of circumstances that fostered authoritarianism. Throughout his priesthood, Yakunin had criticized the concentration of power at the top of the church hierarchy. In his mind, this contradicted the Orthodox principle of sobornost′ (conciliarity) in which the church community made administrative decisions, and not a few powerful individuals who claimed the right to speak for the entire body. “Sobornost′,” Yakunin declared, “is democracy within the Church.”¹⁹ In such a community, the laity’s voices are heard and respected. He referred to the late Middle Ages, when the reforms of Martin Luther had challenged the concentrated power structures and corruption in the Catholic Church and had led to the creation of churches with democratic structures. These reforms abolished the vertical authority arrangements and “eliminated the despotic submission of believers to the ruling hierarchy.”²⁰ In contrast, he said, the Russian Church resembled a monarchy, in which power was concentrated at the top, an anachronism in a society that aspired to be democratic.

Yakunin saw a parallel between the monarchical power structure of the church and the increasingly powerful bureaucratic, top-down governing apparatus of President Boris Yeltsin. Until the church remodeled itself around the principle of sobornost′, neither would the government begin developing a democratic structure. Yeltsin had taken a different path, succumbing to the political pressures of lobbyists from the Moscow Patriarchate and other groups that sought power. Yakunin bemoaned the choices the president had made “by surrounding himself with sycophants and swindlers,” power seekers who had fostered corruption within the leadership of the Russian state.²¹

In 1999, Yakunin’s disappointment deepened, when President Yeltsin, by then in poor health, appointed Vladimir Putin as his successor. The selection of the former KGB officer, in Yakunin’s view, represented an ominous choice; it signified the desire to strengthen the “vertical lines of authority” within the governing apparatus. The new leader’s lack of moral values rooted in a strong religious identity quickly became evident. In an interview near the beginning of his presidency, Putin voiced little personal regard for either Christianity or the Orthodox Church. When asked about his belief in a higher authority, Putin responded as a “convinced humanist, but only nominally that.”²² Gradually, however, this image began to change, and in the media “soon appeared a portrait of Putin the pilgrim, attending church services, going to a monastery, conversing with monks, and visiting the St. Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral in New York” in November 2001, where a memorial service was held commemorating the victims of September 11.²³ Shortly afterward, he developed a close relationship with Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov), his rumored confessor, who professed the president’s conversion to the Orthodox faith and “solemnly witnessed to the exemplary religiosity of Putin himself and all his family.”²⁴ This public declaration of a private matter crossed a sacrosanct line, in Yakunin’s view, by politicizing the president’s faith.

The connection to Archimandrite Tikhon, an outspoken antidemocrat and fervent nationalist, Yakunin maintained, forecast the authoritarian direction that the president would soon take. The superior of the Sretenskii Monastery in Moscow, Archimandrite Tikhon had little sympathy for either ecumenism or relations with the West. As cohost of the television program Russia Home, where he voiced his political commitments, the archimandrite proclaimed: “Censorship is a normal instrument of control in a normal society, and I support its extension into both the religious and secular fields; the entire second chapter of the Constitution of the Russian Federation professing ‘the right and freedom of the citizen’ is false … the declaration in the Constitution of freedom of conscience evolves into the freedom of dishonesty.”²⁵

The interference of state authorities in the inner life of the church continued to trouble Yakunin and, in 2000, the injection of politics into state affairs demonstrated that the state had no intention of separating itself entirely from the religious sphere. This intrusion took place in a celebrated decision about the canonization of priests who had sacrificed their lives for their faith.

A quarter century after Yakunin’s plea for their glorification, in the Jubilee Council of Bishops meeting in August 2000, the same body that passed the “Social Conception of the Orthodox Church,” voted to glorify more than one thousand Christian martyrs who had lost their lives under the Bolshevik regime.²⁶ Their number included Tsar Nicholas II and the members of the royal family. Yakunin supported the canonization of the former tsar; when Yakunin was in exile, Elena Volkova recounted, “he designed a draft of an icon of Tsar Nicolas II and his family, a drawing that both his aunt Lidiia and Fr. Viacheslav Vinnikov had seen.”²⁷ Yet Yakunin did not approve of the process by which the canonization had taken place. Without looking further into the circumstances that transpired behind the scene, it would seem that the patriarch carried out the plea that Yakunin and his associates had made years ago. “Fr. Gleb told me,” Volkova said, “that Nicholas II and the royal family were canonized because Vladimir Putin called Patriarch Aleksii II and ordered him to do so.” Having recently been elected president of Russia, “Putin wanted to be the person who united Russian Orthodox Churches inside Russia and abroad.”²⁸ Yakunin viewed the politicization of the martyrs as a “forced act behind which a spiritual bond with the holy martyrs did not exist.” In post-Soviet Russia, this was clear evidence to Yakunin that the Orthodox Church had again lost its way, its capacity to determine its own sacred actions without the state’s interference.

Although he had no authority within the Russian Church and no political standing in his society, Yakunin pursued the same path he had followed throughout his life. Despite the obstacles he faced, he did not give up or lose hope. With the possibility of a return to his priestly status under the Moscow Patriarchate forever closed, his position under the Kyivan Patriarchate enabled him to pursue goals he had long held. It gave him an opportunity to develop a parish community different from those that paid obeisance to the Moscow Patriarch.

Priest Pavel Bochkov is the most prolific and reputable scholar of the separatist religious organizations that came into being in post-Soviet Russia. He has identified three different types of church communities that broke away from union with the Moscow Patriarchate:

1. Nationalistic communities, whose religious consciousness consists of a narrow nationalistic worldview. Psychologically, members of this community suppress the mystical spirit of the church and overlook the universal nature of Orthodoxy in favor of the exclusively national nature of the church.²⁹
2. Jurisdictional-political communities that protest the government’s interference in church affairs and reject political activities conducted by the state in the name of the religious communities. They express strong opposition to the politicization of the church.
3. Revolutionary and reformative communities whose members support modernism and the integration of rational pragmatism, as a means of adapting theology to rapidly changing present-day events.³⁰

The Apostolic Orthodox Church that Yakunin helped create belonged to the second type. Its predominant characteristic lay in the claim that political authorities had no legitimate right to involve themselves in the inner life of the parish community, as the previous Soviet government had done. The church was sacrosanct, and in the Apostolic Orthodox Church Yakunin was determined to maintain that hallowed principle.

Originally named the Orthodox Church of the Resurrection (Pravoslavnaia Tserkov′ Vozrozhdeniia), the Apostolic Orthodox Church (Apostol′skaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov′) was established in Moscow in January 2000. Archbishop Stefan (Ainitskii), Bishop Kiriak (Temertsidi), and proto-presbyter Gleb Yakunin attended a press conference that announced the creation of this “independent church jurisdiction.”³¹

The Apostolic Orthodox Church (AOTs) traced its heritage to the 1920s and the Russian True Orthodox Church or the Catacomb Church, which the Bolshevik government had heavily persecuted. In its founding declaration, the AOTs paid homage to the Catacomb Church, as well as to the “positive liberal reforms” of the “renovationists” of the 1920s.³² In 2004, the AOTs officially registered with the state, thus making it the youngest schismatic religious organization in post-Soviet Russia.³³

Several characteristics distinguished the AOTs from similar religious communities in post-Soviet Russia:

• Fundamentally, the AOTs sought independence because of what it viewed as the Moscow Patriarchate’s compromises with the state, accommodations that betrayed the church’s mission of service to Christ rather than to the government.³⁴ As Yakunin for many years had believed, the official church’s corruption had begun with Metropolitan Sergei’s “Declaration of Loyalty” to the Bolshevik regime; the AOTs, like the Catacomb Church earlier, viewed the church’s subservience as a fatal mistake.
• The Russian Orthodox Church had failed to seek repentance for either its allegiance to the Soviet state or its relationship with the KGB. The church’s silence about its transgressions, and especially the church’s unwillingness to look deeply into its sins of commission made true reform an impossibility.
• The AOTs wanted a new beginning, unhindered either by the weight of the church’s previous wrongdoings, or its thirst for power and privileges.³⁵ When the church worshipped those values, it lost its primary purpose: “Idolatry is terrible in the world, when it betrays Christ in the name of the state, the nation, a social idea, or a small bourgeois comfort and prosperity,” proclaimed Mother Mariia of Paris [Skobtsova].³⁶
• A distinguishing feature, especially in Fr. Gleb’s parish, was his incorporation of sobornost′ at all levels of the church community. In the eleventh century, in the schism with the Roman Church, why had the Eastern Orthodox Church rejected a hierarchical administrative structure, Yakunin asked, only to create “mini Popes” later, thereby reinstating a network of power it had ejected?³⁷ Instead of administrative authority concentrated at the top of the church hierarchy, the Apostolic Orthodox Church hoped to diffuse authority throughout the community, a democratic reform that the All-Russian Church Council of 1917–1918 had earlier adopted.
• The AOTs recognized Fr. Aleksandr Men’s teachings that helped a generation of people find the way out of the confines of Marxist-Leninist thought. A decade after his murder in 1990, the Orthodox Church had not recognized his singular gifts as a missionary to the Russian people. On September 8, 2000, in honor of his unique contributions, the AOTs canonized Fr. Aleksandr.³⁸
• The AOTs policy on sexual morality was much more tolerant than in other similar religious organizations. The church did not object to the marriage either of priests or bishops.³⁹
• In addition to the integration of sobornost′ at all levels of the parish’s administrative framework, worship services in the AOTs were performed in the contemporary Russian language, rather than in the archaic Church Slavonic. The “renovationists” had once urged such a reform, but the Moscow Patriarchate had rejected it.⁴⁰

Although they did not change the course of the AOTs, these policies soon forced unforeseen problems. Resistance to the powerful sway of the official Russian Orthodox Church proved too strong for some, and by 2006, several parishes had rejoined the much-better-funded and more stable church.⁴¹ In addition, in early January 2007, when Bishop Sergei (Savinykh) married, reportedly for the third time, it created a scandal that resulted in two influential parishes leaving the church’s jurisdiction, one in Moscow led by the publicist Iakov Krotov, and a second in St. Petersburg led by the priest Aleksandr Smirnov.⁴²

Many of Fr. Aleksandr Men’s followers greeted his canonization with gratitude and as a well-deserved, appropriate honor (figure 11.1). But not everyone responded favorably. Fr. Aleksandr’s son Mikhail Men was outraged by the audacity of the AOTs: “I look upon this as a provocation directed against all my family … by an organized group of people having no relationship to the Russian Orthodox Church.”⁴³ Yakunin, however, held fast to the decision and the rightness of his church’s action, arguing that Mikhail Men may have wanted the Russian Orthodox Church to canonize his father, but political support for the consecration of his father did not exist.⁴⁴

The founding of the AOTs, as well as Yakunin’s role in it, provoked strong criticism. According to Pavel Bochkov, the AOTs fostered disunity within the larger body of the church, an approach that deliberately undermined the official church.⁴⁵ Through their own self-interest, Bochkov claimed, Yakunin and other schismatics turned a cohesive body into an organism marked by conflict, dissent, and hostility. Sergei Bychkov, Yakunin’s biographer and longtime acquaintance, voiced similar criticism. Yakunin’s efforts to create an alternative church, Bychkov maintained, “seemed to me to be alien, strange, reckless, misguided,” and harmful to the unity of the larger church body.⁴⁶

Yakunin had a different view. He was adamant in his belief that the Russian Orthodox Church, with its hierarchical model of leadership and rigid bureaucratic structure, had squandered a historic opportunity to regenerate Russia. When questioned about the wisdom of creating a separate church, he responded: “We are accused of creating a schism. But what exactly caused this schism? In the Gospels, it is said: ‘If your eye offends you, pluck it out.’ And if one eye remains healthy, or one hand is healthy, but the body is rotten, like the Moscow Patriarchate, separate parts of the body—the eye or the hand—may remain alive. Thus, what causes a schism? If the whole church is dying, then it is necessary to break away from it.”⁴⁷

In Yakunin’s eyes, the policies of the AOTs would have a positive effect on both the church and the country, by breaking down the leader-subordinate mentality that had long predominated.⁴⁸ Yakunin’s vision of the future advocated a way of thinking different from that in the past. He was extremely critical of the self-effacing attitudes that he found prevalent among the rank and file of the Orthodox Church. Submissive thinking, in his view, was still widespread among large numbers of the Russian population, who commonly viewed priests as the ultimate authorities, godlike in stature and wisdom. Such attitudes were instilled in religious believers from an early age, and they continued long after the monarchical form of government had passed away.⁴⁹

Yakunin cited an example in which one of his parishioners told him that she had gone to confession and asked the priest, how she might “hear what the Lord God has said to me. And he responded, ‘What is this Lord God?’ ‘I am your Lord God. Whatever I say—you must hear and do!’ ”⁵⁰ This was the kind of thinking that had to change, and it had to begin at a young age. What Yakunin called the “cruel suppression of the will” had deep roots in the church. It had to be replaced by the democratic model of sobornost′, in which the priest answered to the people, rather than the reverse.⁵¹ Sobornost′, he believed, offered the most effective means of dispelling the compliant attitudes that had dominated Russia’s past and present.

The AOTs would also be free from the heritage of communism and the Moscow Patriarchate’s complicity with the atheistic regime and the KGB. Although small in numbers, the AOTs had the capacity, Yakunin asserted, to appeal to believers and creative leaders who would be attracted to an open and democratic church. To this end, Yakunin aimed to fulfill the promise that the Russian Church had made earlier, but failed to carry out: “In order that it becomes what it must be, the resurrection of the Orthodox Church in Russia is impossible without deep internal reform and a return to the democratic principles of the All-Russian Church Council of 1917–1918. It is necessary to abolish the all-powerful Patriarchate and the Holy Synod, to regenerate the election of the clergy throughout the vertical leadership of the church.”⁵²

Further, Yakunin now had the opportunity to integrate certain democratic values that he considered essential in a vibrant parish community. In the place of resignation and compliance with the authorities, Yakunin spoke of a new energy and aspiration. Instead of the subjugation of the clergy, he talked about their liberation from state controls. In doing so, he believed he addressed the future, building a religious community that offered a viable alternative to the official Russian Orthodox Church that had cast him out.

To put his plans into action, Yakunin secured space for his parish church in the basement of the Memorial Society’s building in Moscow. Already under pressure from the Russian government for its promotion of democracy and law, the Memorial Society welcomed Yakunin as a fellow advocate and offered him accommodations. Operating as he always had as a parish priest, he warmly greeted the people who came to the services, most of whom belonged to the intelligentsia.⁵³ He did not waver in his conviction, which he repeated on numerous occasions and in different contexts, that Russia’s future required the church’s transformation from a static to a dynamic body that defended religious liberty and human rights. He hoped that the Apostolic Orthodox Church would provide, in practice, the basic principles for that transformation.

Today the AOTs has parishes in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Voronezh, Volgograd, and Briansk, as well as in Germany, Ukraine, Switzerland, Latvia, and Belarus.⁵⁴

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the subject of Russia’s transformation from a Soviet to a post-Soviet country continued to occupy public attention that went beyond the regeneration of the church, although the church remained important to that endeavor. As President Putin sought to redefine Russia’s ambitions and its place in world affairs, international agreements that the state had made earlier came up for review. Among the most important of these was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the United Nations General Assembly adopted on December 10, 1947. Metropolitan Kirill (Gundiaev) of Smolensk and Kaliningrad and the chair of the Russian Orthodox Church Department for External Church Relations, played a major role in this reevaluation. As the successor (in 2009) to Aleksii II as patriarch of Moscow and All Russia and a close collaborator of President Putin, Metropolitan Kirill’s position on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would have a significant bearing on Russia’s commitment to the declaration’s principles. As a priest and a long-standing proponent of human rights, Yakunin contested Metropolitan Kirill’s efforts to reframe these values.

In April 2006, Kirill presented a Russian alternative to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which had served as the moral touchstone for human rights around the globe for a half century. The very first article of the Universal Declaration expressed the fundamental tenet underlying human rights: “All people are born free and equal in their dignity and rights.” Metropolitan Kirill’s alternative “Declaration of Human Rights and Dignity,” revised the first article by connecting human rights and dignity to morality. His new version began by proclaiming the following: “The person as an image of God has a special value, which cannot be taken away. It must be respected by each of us, by society and by the government. By doing good, a person acquires dignity. Thus, we distinguish the value and dignity of the person. Value is what is given, dignity is what is earned.”⁵⁵ On April 6, 2006, at the Tenth Universal Russian People’s Assembly, the delegates adopted Kirill’s “Declaration.”

Yakunin took strong exception to Metropolitan Kirill’s formulation and what he termed its “quasi-religious orientation” as well as its potential danger for democracy in Russia. The underlying peril “becomes more understandable,” Yakunin wrote, “if we translate the first article in Kirill’s ‘Declaration’ into theological language …: According to the teaching of the church, the person is created in the image and through the love of God. The image of God is indestructible in the person by sin, because it has a special value; the likeness of God is distorted by human sin and is restored only by a personal feat by the person walking the path of moral perfection.”⁵⁶ The Universal Declaration guarantees human dignity from birth; in Kirill’s version, it is acquired by doing good. How is “doing good” determined? According to Kirill, the distinction between good and evil is defined by Russia’s “religious tradition, which has God as its Primary Source.”⁵⁷ The words “Russia’s tradition,” Yakunin said, represented “key words in the metropolitan’s rhetoric.” They were bandied about often, but they concealed a great deal. If one looks closely at historical reality, Russian tradition “revered the state and the Homeland” much more than it respected the human being and human life. Given these priorities, Russian tradition had neither prized nor defended the sanctity of the person. According to Metropolitan Kirill’s “Declaration,” “we recognize the rights and freedoms of a person to the extent that they help the ascent of the individual to goodness, protect the person from internal and external evil, and allow the person to be positively realized in society.”⁵⁸ Yet the question that troubled Yakunin was what agency determined the moral “ascent of the person to goodness?” If the church is the sanctuary of Russia’s religious tradition, the interpreter of the good, and the ultimate judge of human dignity, then it fell to the Moscow Patriarchate to determine good and evil and the actions that constituted each of them. Such a future, Yakunin warned, defined a precipitous course for the protection of human rights.

Kirill’s “Declaration,” placed certain other values on the same level as human rights. These included morality, faith, holy shrines, and the Motherland. Behaviors that insulted any of them, according to the “Declaration,” were dangerous and should be condemned. Kirill did not accept the fundamental democratic principle of human dignity as an inherent right that the Universal Declaration had endorsed.

Like Metropolitan Kirill, Yakunin did not separate human dignity from faith, but unlike the metropolitan, he viewed it as far above the reverence for national shrines, morality, and the Motherland. He expressed surprise that Kirill did not understand that the loss of freedom and human rights undermined a person’s capacity to choose one’s faith and devalued the love of holy shrines. Kirill’s “Declaration,” Yakunin charged, was written to satisfy the “needs of the day,” and it “chopped away at the struggle for rights and freedoms suffered by humanity and the Christian martyrs who are included in their number.”⁵⁹ Should the Kremlin adopt Metropolitan Kirill’s “Declaration,” Yakunin feared, it would become known as the “Russian way” and potentially serve as the basis for a new national ideology. Should this happen, he believed, it would undermine the “democratic foundation of Russian society.” The Russian National Assembly’s adoption of the “Declaration” in April 2006, Metropolitan Kirill’s elevation two years later as Patriarch, and his allegiance to Putin’s government added to Yakunin’s apprehension about the future of democracy.

Metropolitan Kirill’s rejection of human rights as a Western European construct would later become a cornerstone of his “Russian World” (Russkii Mir) concept, which, as patriarch, he developed into a civilizational moral and spiritual ideal. “Russian World” connected Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia into a common unit, unified by history, culture, and religion that stood in opposition to the decadent West. Reviving the medieval belief in “Holy Russia,” Patriarch Kirill ascribed to the Russian nation the sacred mission of protecting “traditional values” against the steadily encroaching secularism of the West with its denigration of religion, its assault on the family, and its homage to LGBTQ rights, marriage equality, and abortion. The church and the state, acting in concert, had the obligation to protect Orthodox civilization from being infected by anti-Christian values that entered through Russia’s relationship with the United States and Western Europe. In February 2022, President Putin used this quasi-religious narrative to justify his invasion of Ukraine and to prevent it, he said, from falling into the hands of the West.⁶⁰

The Final Years

Yakunin’s anxieties were compounded by an unexpected problem that would have a significant bearing on his own future. In 2008, he began to experience acute physical difficulties, which affected his ability to perform his work at the level he expected of himself. His consultation with specialists about his physical condition led to several tests to determine the causes of his discomfort, and the results of these tests did not bring positive news. Yakunin learned that he was in the beginning stages of the neuromuscular disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease), a progressive neurological disease of the motor nerve cells in which the muscles begin to atrophy and eventually leave a person immobile. The disease has no medical cure and normally results in a shortened life span. When the doctors gave him this diagnosis, they told Fr. Gleb he had a maximum of two years left to live.⁶¹ His physicians, however, had little knowledge of the fire that burned in Yakunin’s heart. While he curtailed some of his activities, he continued to perform his priestly responsibilities.

In these final years of his life, Yakunin neither terminated his political pursuits nor ceased his criticism of the Moscow Patriarchate. He attended nearly every political protest from 2009 to 2011, during which time they became increasingly prevalent in the streets of Moscow. He supported the three young women of the musical group Pussy Riot, whose performance of a “Punk Prayer” on February 21, 2012, in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior of the Russian Orthodox Church in central Moscow, created a religious and political uproar.⁶² Patriarch Kirill hastened to label the young women’s performance as “the work of the devil,” a scourge on everything the Russian people held sacred. “Those people don’t believe in the power of prayer,” the patriarch charged, “they believe in the power of propaganda, in the power of lies and slander, in the power of the internet and mass media, in the power of money and weapons.”⁶³ Despite the frequent accusations of their blasphemy, sacrilege, and debasement of sacred space, the three women, in Yakunin’s eyes, represented authentic folk heroes. In reality, their “Punk Prayer” essentially protested the Moscow Patriarchate’s alliance with Vladimir Putin’s presidency, Patriarch Kirill’s moral authority, the male dominated historical memory of the church, and the Orthodox Church’s support for violence and social injustice. Believing they were wrongly demeaned, Yakunin defended the women of Pussy Riot. He asserted that they spoke truth about Putin and the leadership of the church whom, he said, had “chosen service to Putin, instead of to God.”⁶⁴ He wrote several poems praising the women’s courage, vision, and prophetic critique of power. In his poem, “Although Lenin Is Dead, He Has Not Vanished Yet,” Yakunin paid homage to what he viewed as the truth of their message:

And now it’s a new madness

to strengthen the country with a ruddy mummy

That, which Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] wants to keep a secret,

will turn the spiritual into a frail replica of itself.

Presently, many people believe, like you and me,

that Pussy Riot was right.⁶⁵

On August 17, 2012, the three women were convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” and sentenced to two years of imprisonment. Their conviction neither lessened his respect for them nor weakened his belief in the rightness of their cause. He continued to assert their heroism in speaking truth to power, despite the condemnation that they had to endure from the Orthodox Church leadership and important segments of the church’s followers.⁶⁶ Soon, however, Yakunin’s own health issues would limit his capacity to speak publicly in support of such causes.

In September 2013, Sergei Bychkov recalled that he saw Fr. Gleb at the funeral of Fr. Nikolai Gainov, an old and dear friend, who, in the 1970s, had served with Yakunin on the Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights. After the burial, a group of old acquaintances gathered in the home of the deceased and reminisced, as they lamented the loss of their friend, relived the past, and invoked the memories of the causes for which they had struggled. Missing their deceased friend, the small group assembled that early autumn afternoon represented a final remnant of the courageous individuals who constituted the conscience of religious liberty in the former Soviet Union. Looking back at the gathering that afternoon, the elderly members of a group of individuals who had struggled mightily for human rights, Bychkov knew that he had witnessed a significant moment in the history of his country. Soon after that event, Bychkov said, Fr. Gleb fell from his bicycle and severely injured himself.⁶⁷ The fall compounded the physical difficulties from which he already suffered and likely hastened his death.

Throughout 2013, Yakunin’s neurological illness rapidly progressed. At first, he gradually lost the feeling in one of his fingers before it spread to other fingers, and then to both of his hands. As a result, by early in the following year, he fully lost the use of his hands and could not lift a cup to his mouth without help. Still, he continued to serve in his parish, moving gingerly, yet with a mind that remained sharp and clear.⁶⁸ In mid-November 2014, he suffered a major neurological attack that required hospitalization. All the major organs, except for his brain, had shut down by then. He was placed in intensive care, where he remained for the next month and a half. “We were allowed to visit him,” his daughter Mariia said, and “he was able to receive communion.”⁶⁹ “These weeks were incredibly difficult,” she recalled. Her father suffered a great deal, interrupted only when the hospital staff permitted the visits of a few friends, who came to pay homage to him (figure 11.2). On December 9, he was in significant decline, the effects of his illness seriously affecting the intake of oxygen into his lungs. The following day, the hospital staff transferred him to the intensive care unit and connected him to a ventilator.⁷⁰ A once powerful body that always displayed energy and resolve slowly lost its capacity to live. Fr. Gleb died on December 25, 2014, at the age of eighty.

Abiding by his earlier request, the family did not hold Fr. Gleb’s funeral in a standard Russian Orthodox Church, but in the Andrei Sakharov Center, a place that had come to hold special significance for him. He was buried in the northern region of Moscow, in the modest Piatnitskoe cemetery, a final resting place selected by few members of the former Soviet elite.

Gleb Yakunin is commonly labeled a religious dissident. But, as this book has argued, the designation offers only a partial description of his life. As an Orthodox priest and religious activist, Yakunin became a prime defender of religious liberty, an advocate of social justice, a spokesperson for the outcast and marginalized members of Russian society, and a champion of human rights. His long quest to contribute to a renaissance in the Russian Orthodox Church was predicated on the belief that it would lead to healing the gap between the church and the spiritual needs of the Russian people. The church’s overwhelming focus on ceremonial prescriptions, he maintained, may have protected it from a destructive assault by the state’s security services, but, as the Orthodox layperson Boris Talantov noted, for the young people who would shape Russia’s future, such an emphasis had little relevance to their lives.⁷¹ Yakunin, too, believed it imperative that the church speak with a stronger voice.

The thread that appeared throughout Fr. Gleb Yakunin’s life was hope. Despite the severe hardships he endured, he never lost hope in the creativity of the Russian people, in Russia’s future possibilities, and in the capacity of human beings, if given the opportunity, to bring about fundamental change. The hope he expressed emanated from several wellsprings, not least of them an inherently positive view of humankind. In addition, hope derived from Fr. Aleksandr Men’s strong influence on Yakunin’s personal and theological development. Men opened up for the young Yakunin an understanding of Christianity as a liberating, yet unfinished religion, much different from the stolid, closed system of belief that he had previously known.

Hope in the future enabled Yakunin to survive the difficulties he faced and to overcome and move beyond them. He never lost hope in the arc of history, a confidence that also had deep roots in his Orthodox faith. “Our Lord, God, from my point of view,” he testified, “very rarely interferes in human history, and in the beginning, God acted invisibly, and the Holy Spirit acts and helps the people through an individual or [through a group of] people. In some special moments in history, God acts immediately. Especially clearly is this found in the Old Testament, although rarely in the New Testament of the Bible.”⁷² Having such hope, Yakunin did not succumb to the mental captivity that he witnessed around him in much of Russian society. This mental captivity, he believed, perverted the capacity to imagine something different. Feeding on lies and illusions, it disparaged truth and what Yakunin conceived as fact-based realities. Such a readiness to accept lies and illusions, in Yakunin’s view, as well as in the eyes of Viktor Popkov and Tat’iana Lebedeva, former members of Moscow’s Christian Seminar, constituted key elements that fostered authoritarianism (figure 11.3).⁷³ In his letters of protest, his creation of the Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights, his exposure of the Orthodox Church hierarchy, his legislative work, his poetry, and his service as a priest, Yakunin endeavored to shatter the fear of thinking for the self. He wanted to break down the barriers and the illusions, constructed by those in power, which prevented human beings from fulfilling their God-given potential.⁷⁴

Fr. Gleb Yakunin was not the only Russian citizen who fought for intellectual and personal freedom. Other voices described in this study, including Zoia Krakhmal′nikova, Tat′iana Velikanova, Fr. Sergei Zheludkov, Boris Talantov, Lev Regel′son, and Fr. Aleksandr Men, joined him in this struggle. Nearly all of them, with the exception of Velikanova, came out of the Orthodox Church or were closely related to it and drew from its heritage in justifying their actions. They represented a small but significant coterie of people who viewed their faith as a liberating force and as one of the foundational stones of democracy, rather than as a restrictive and submissive component of an authoritarian political order. Taken as a whole, they dispute the common view that Russians, by tradition and disposition, are inclined to support a closed, autocratic governmental system. “The history of Russia,” the cultural historian Irina Karatsuba has proclaimed, “is not only the history of despotism, Stalinism, and suppression of the individual. It is the history of struggle and resistance, in whose number is also Christianity.”⁷⁵

Unafraid of change, the members of this group pressed hard for reform. Yakunin, in particular, was critical of the status quo and disparaged the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church for embracing the existing state of affairs. The memoirist Nadezhda Mandel′stam recounts how, in Soviet society, people loyal to the Soviet regime, as well as many others, resisted social and political change. Fearing instability and an unpredictable future, they greatly preferred the certainty of the present to the unreliability (or capriciousness) of change: “What we wanted was for the course of history to be made smooth, all the ruts and potholes removed, so there should never again be any unforeseen events and everything should flow along evenly and according to plan. This longing prepared us, psychologically, for the appearance of the Wise Leaders who would tell us where we were going. And once they were there, we no longer ventured to act without their guidance and looked to them for direct instructions and foolproof prescriptions.”⁷⁶

This, Mandel′stam notes, is one of the salient characteristics of a totalitarian society. Such anxiety about the future, Yakunin also discovered, served as a hindrance to the kind of reforms that he envisioned. Society’s reluctance to conceive of an imaginary future fundamentally different from the present made it difficult to instigate the democratic reforms that he had in mind. That is why he pushed so hard in the 1990s and thereafter to change ways of thinking, a process that had to begin early in a person’s education.

Relegated to near obscurity by the Russian Orthodox Church, by the time of his death Gleb Yakunin was unknown among most of the Russian population. (figure 11.4). Political events of the second decade of the twenty-first century have commanded the center of public attention, as the battles that had shaped religion and politics at the end of the twentieth century receded from national attention. But to individuals who had fought alongside Fr. Gleb for religious freedom in the last decades of the Soviet era and the first years of the postcommunist period, Yakunin’s contributions to a more tolerant and open Russian society commanded considerable acclaim. Lev Ponomarev, who served with him on the Parliamentary Commission to investigate the church’s connections to the KGB, said that his friend and collaborator “was convinced that life changes only for the better. He was a warrior.”⁷⁷ To the leading human rights activist Valerii Borshchev, Yakunin exemplified incredible courage and steadfastness to his ideals. “I went to see him in 1984,” Borshchev recalled, “precisely on the day before he left the labor camp for Yakutiia. It was December [when he arrived] there—in the dreadful cold and depressing surroundings. Yet he was optimistic and energetic. When he returned to Moscow in 1987, he immediately became active. I am amazed by this man!”⁷⁸ To Mariia Riabikova, a friend and member of the Apostolic Ukrainian Church,

His service was always celebratory, truly joyful. But the most important thing was the steady increase in joy, a celebration up to the time for the Eucharist. I experienced the liturgies that he performed as celebrations, and I wasn’t the only one who had this feeling. After all, the liturgy reveals the drama of the living relationship between a person and God, which is brought together in the mystery of the love of the cross. This is the meaning that has always been conveyed. Life for him was also a liturgy, a battlefield where the victor was always Christ.⁷⁹

To Heleen Zorgdrager, a Dutch theologian at the Protestant Theological University in Amsterdam, who served as a visiting professor at Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine, from 2005 to 2013, Yakunin’s life was “a light shining in the darkness of totalitarian regimes and brutal repressions. May his courageous testimony of righteousness and Christian love be a comfort and inspiration, now and forever.”⁸⁰

When I began this book, I considered Gleb Yakunin primarily, if not exclusively, a religious dissident. He was, however, much more than this appellation conveyed, and his significance extended beyond his opposition to the Russian state’s persecution of religious believers. His critique of power—political and religious—principally aimed at breaking down the barriers that divided people of diverse ideological commitments and whose rigid separation, he believed, fostered war, oppression, and hatred. Religion, as he witnessed firsthand, fostered violence, but in his case, he found it to be a source of creativity and love that led him to recognize a common humanity. A Russian patriot rather than a nationalist, a spokesperson for truth rather than a conveyer of illusions, a believer in personal freedom rather than the comforts of the captive mind, he maintained his hope in the future rather than submitting to despair in the present. Gleb Yakunin devoted himself to making this a better world, and he dedicated his life to that endeavor.