CHAPTER 5 Gleb Yakunin, Henry Dakin, and the Defense of Religious Liberty
On a cold, gray afternoon in late December 1976, Fr. Gleb Yakunin and two of his associates held a press conference in a Moscow apartment. The purpose of the meeting was to announce the formation of a small group they called the Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights in the USSR. They proclaimed that the organization had no political goals whatsoever.1 Its sole purpose was to better the lives of religious believers, and it aimed neither to violate nor subvert, but to act within the laws of the state. Foreign and Soviet journalists attended the press conference that afternoon. It also attracted the attention of the KGB, which, for more than a year, had been monitoring Fr. Gleb’s activities. He had already provoked new KGB suspicions the previous year by the letter he and the physicist Lev Regel′son had written to delegates of the World Council of Churches. The creation of this new committee, despite the priest’s public claims, invited the further watchfulness of the security police.
Although Fr. Gleb asserted the Christian Committee’s benign, noncontroversial intentions, they could easily be interpreted as political. Members of the committee aimed to document violations of human rights in the USSR. At a time when local government officials often arbitrarily applied the laws, acts of recording and publicizing those infractions, in the eyes of state officials, amounted to political pursuits. As its charter read, the Christian Committee intended “to gather, analyze, and distribute information,” to advise religious believers of their rights, to appeal to the government when those rights had been violated, and, fundamentally, to help with “strengthening Soviet laws on religion.”2 If conducted well, the collection, analysis, and distribution of information promised to open a wide window on the concrete realities of religious life. No longer would the government control the narrative about freedom of religion. A different picture thus had the potential to emerge.
The Christian Committee’s work raises several basic questions about the intended audience for its work and whether it had in mind state officials, the rumor mills of provincial Russia, or a much wider, even international public. Should it seek the latter course, the Christian Committee would have to establish a network of sympathetic people who would help make their desires into realities. In December 1976, such a network did not exist. Until his arrest on November 1, 1979, Fr. Gleb’s committee collected a massive amount of information about the those had been persecuted and disinherited. To members of the World Council of Churches, who had taken Fr. Gleb’s words lightly at the Nairobi meeting in 1975, the committee’s materials challenged their earlier conceptions and led to a rethinking of freedom of conscience and its repressors. In pushing his endeavors further, Fr. Gleb had the support of his young family, which in 1976, in addition to his wife Iraida, included two children, Mariia and Aleksandr (figure 5.1).
Russian historians often emphasize the significance of the Christian Committee in the reawakening of Russian religious consciousness. Mikhail Vital′evich Shkarovskii’s seminal history of the Orthodox Church in the twentieth century cited the committee as a major example of the “flourishing Orthodox dissidence” in the late 1970s.3 Dimitry Pospielovsky noted the committee’s collection of data on religious persecution that circulated in samizdat, some of which made its way to the West via Western correspondents.4 The British historian Jane Ellis emphasized the special role the committee played in defending religious believers; it was the one body that tried to protect them against state persecution.5 These studies provide valuable insights into the workings of Yakunin’s committee and place them in the context of the Soviet era. But they do not tell the full story of Yakunin’s work and how the information the committee gathered became widespread. This historical background gives greater depth to a story heretofore scantily known.
First, the identity of the committee’s leaders further exemplified the religious awakening then developing among certain members of Russian society in the 1970s. The founders consisted of Fr. Gleb Yakunin, Hierodeacon Varsonofi Khaibulin, and Viktor Kapitanchuk, the latter an Orthodox layperson. A brief word about each of them will help explain their commitment. In 1976, Fr. Gleb Yakunin, the Christian Committee’s chief spokesperson, was forty-two years old. Among intellectual circles around Moscow, he already had a growing reputation as a defender of religious liberty. Hierodeacon Varsonofi Khaibulin served on the committee for only a year before his transfer to a parish in the Vladimir region, at which time Vadim Shcheglov replaced him.6 Viktor Kapitanchuk was a thirty-two-year-old chemist who worked in an art restoration institute in Moscow. Earlier, while a student, he had visited Fr. Aleksandr Men’s parish in the nearby town of Tarasovka and had become a regular participant.7 Kapitanchuk’s friend Tat′iana Lebedeva described him as an extremely intelligent person who had “little concern with church ceremonies, but much interest in how to understand faith, and he raised many questions about it.”8 He served as secretary of the Christian Committee.
FIGURE 5.1. Yakunin and family, mid-1970s. From left to right, daughter Mariia, son Aleksandr, Yakunin, and wife Iraida Georgievna. Courtesy of the Keston Center for Religion, Politics, and Society, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.
Vadim Shcheglov was a forty-six-year-old layperson when he joined the committee after Khaibulin’s departure. Shcheglov, a mathematician, was employed by the Ministry of Health. He had not grown up as a religious believer and, as a young man, had scant concern with matters of faith. But his entire life changed after his fortuitous reading of a book written by Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Sourozh. No longer did he remain a passive observer of state persecution of religious believers.9 In the Christian Committee, he found like-minded associates who voiced similar concerns about what they considered a primary human right.
Second, the Christian Committee’s creation had a close relationship to the origins of another significant organization formed earlier that same year in Moscow. On May 12, 1976, at the home of Andrei Sakharov, Elena Bonner (Sakharov’s wife), the physicist Yuri Orlov, and fellow human rights activists announced the inception of the Moscow Helsinki Monitoring Group. The goal of their group, Orlov proclaimed, was “to inform the heads of the signatory states, as well as the world public, about direct violations of the Helsinki Accords.”10
In Point 7 of what is known as the Helsinki Accords’ Final Act, all signers of the diplomatic accord committed to “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.” The group of Russian dissidents saw the statement on human rights as an opportunity to hold the Soviet government accountable. Members of the Moscow Group invited Soviet citizens to notify them about abuses that interfered with “their fundamental freedoms” as stated in the Helsinki Accords which the Soviet Union had signed in 1976.11
Yuri Orlov sympathized with Fr. Gleb’s efforts to address religious persecution, and the two became friends. Orlov had reached out to Fr. Gleb and asked him to join the Moscow Group, but the priest declined, telling Orlov he hoped to create a parallel organization that focused specifically on freedom of conscience.12 Although the Helsinki Accords advocated freedom of conscience and thought for all regardless of their religious beliefs, race, sex, or language, Fr. Gleb saw freedom of conscience as the basis for all other human rights. From it came freedom of thought and speech and the core principle of human dignity.13 When the state violated spiritual freedom, it also abused the core of human identity and purpose. This was a belief that may well have come from Nikolai Berdiaev’s Philosophy of Freedom, which Fr. Gleb admired and to which he returned repeatedly throughout his life.14 Although the Christian Committee remained an independent organization, it had close coordination with the Helsinki group, channeling materials to Sakharov and supporting his work.15
The leadership of the Christian Committee consisted exclusively of Orthodox members, yet it announced its intention to speak for all religious believers in the Soviet Union, seemingly a contradiction between its membership and its stated purposes. In explaining this discrepancy, Yakunin addressed the church’s guilt. Throughout much of its history, he said, the Russian Orthodox Church viewed itself as superior to other faiths; it had a long tradition of trying to suppress non-Orthodox denominations. The time had come for the church to rectify its prejudicial behavior (figure 5.2). Fr. Gleb and his associate Viktor Kapitanchuk, as well as others, including Lev Regel′son, needed “to redress these historical wrongs and come to the defense of believers of all denominations,” a responsibility Yakunin viewed as an obligation.16
FIGURE 5.2. From left to right, Lev Regel′son, Fr. Gleb Yakunin, and Viktor Kapitanchuk, mid-1970s. Courtesy of the Keston Center for Religion, Politics, and Society, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.
The committee’s files contained a large number of letters from grassroots religious organizations and people, many of them addressed to Patriarch Pimen. They beseeched the reigning high priest of the church to hear their cries of distress; many others, coming from all over the Soviet Union, told the stories of individuals and families whose appeals to local courts about grievances had not met with what they considered to be just responses.17 Originally, many of the documents assembled by Yakunin’s committee circulated in samizdat in the Soviet Union. Taken as a whole, they represented an uncoordinated, chaotic assortment of letters and petitions. The Christian Committee’s contribution was to put the documents together into a full set of materials that told a story of religious life and the struggles to preserve freedom of conscience in diverse communities throughout the country. In some cases, Yakunin’s committee appealed to the relevant authorities to redress the grievances, but it also sent these materials across national boundaries. They ultimately reached California in the United States, where they were published and circulated in parts of the Western world in multiple copies, which surreptitiously reentered the Soviet Union. In the United States, they found an unusually entrepreneurial publisher who exhibited a willingness to venture beyond his familiar environs to forge a relationship with Yakunin’s committee in Moscow. He was Henry Dakin of San Francisco.
Henry Dakin and Breaking the Boundaries of the Cold War
At first glance, Henry Saltonstall Dakin, a San Francisco entrepreneur, appeared to be an unlikely candidate to forge a relationship with Fr. Gleb Yakunin. A soft-spoken, gentle, middle-aged father, he had earned a reputation as an innovative, forward-looking professional who prized people, took risks, and looked beyond the everyday circumstances of life. He sought to better the world, and he had confidence that with hard work and creativity, this goal could be achieved.
Henry Dakin and Gleb Yakunin were about the same age, the former born on December 6, 1936, in Los Angeles, and the latter two years earlier, in Moscow. Both men had a keen interest in the sciences—Dakin in physics, Yakunin in biology—and they had lifelong interests and curious, inquisitive minds that ranged widely across numerous fields. Each left home for university education. Dakin attended Harvard University, where, in addition to his physics major, he developed an interest in the Soviet Union and took elective courses in Russian history and literature.18 Yakunin, as described earlier, studied at a zoological institute in Irkutsk, Siberia, before going home to Moscow to prepare for the priesthood. After graduation, Dakin returned to California, where he went to work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in San Francisco in the growing field of health physics.19
Both Dakin and Yakunin faced severe personal difficulties shortly after beginning their careers. In 1966, Patriarch Aleksii I’s suspension of Yakunin from the priesthood had severely cut short his future plans. Dakin confronted traumatic personal tragedy. On Christmas Day 1966, the private plane carrying Henry Dakin’s father and mother, his older brother and wife, and four of his brother’s five children crashed in Baja, California, killing all eight family members.20 The air disaster left Henry Dakin bereft of most of his family, the touchstones of his existence and the sources of support on which he had heretofore relied. The catastrophe irrevocably changed the course of his life.
“Henry believed that the only good purpose of money was to put it to good use,” and “he never valued money for its own sake,” his sister Susanna said.21 Dakin had no interest in expanding his inherited fortune, but his inheritance enabled him to pursue new directions in his life. Opening an office on Washington Street in the Pacific Heights area of San Francisco, he involved himself in cutting-edge projects that spanned the fields of philosophy, psychology, and technology. He attracted young scientists and entrepreneurs, many of whom had little capital but whom Dakin perceived as having innovative minds, people who needed support to put their ideas into practice. “I have a feeling Henry blundered into what he was doing about fourteen years ago, when he began giving a haven to creative-waifs who had no money or place to go,” observed Willis Harman, a Stanford University professor and director of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in the late 1980s.22
Dakin cut an imposing figure intellectually, but not physically. He was of medium height and build with a thick head of hair, which turned silver in his middle years. “He liked to laugh, which he did often,” his daughter Adriana later described. “He had a dry sense of humor, enjoyed physical activity,” and loved to play with his three daughters. “He often took us with him to his office, and allowed us to play on the technological equipment. He loved his work, but he found time for us.”23 Intellectually, Dakin had a brilliant mind and a passion for learning, which he retained all his life. He had a “ceaseless wonder for things new and unusual,” said a close friend and collaborator, and he “provided essential and often hidden support for individuals who demonstrated those same qualities.”24
Henry Dakin believed the future required the building of relationships that brought people of diverse backgrounds, skills, and interests more closely together. Politically, he lived at a time when nations and individuals were rigidly separated, a time marked by the peril of nuclear confrontation and military conflict. Scientifically, in contrast, Dakin worked in an Einsteinian universe characterized by the rapid disintegration of boundaries once held to be immutable. How to bring similar ways of thinking from the sciences to politics and to relationships between people fascinated him.
In the late 1970s, the threat of nuclear annihilation had reached a crescendo, heightened by harsh rhetoric emanating from both American and Soviet political leaders, who appeared unable to resolve the issues that engulfed their citizenry. “It was then,” recalled Jim Hickman, who worked with Dakin, “that Henry became convinced of the power of individuals, not working through cumbrous bureaucracies, to more effectively deal with dilemmas” confronting the two countries. “He thought that individuals had to take responsibility for the fate of the world.”25
International contacts, as Dakin later said, offered the chance to “break down walls,” because “there is mental suffocation that comes from not having contact with the rest of the world.”26 He thought that direct communication between people offered the most effective means of overcoming boundaries, sharing information, and creating the conditions for world peace.27 In the 1970s, Dakin began publishing materials from Soviet scientists, especially physicists and those in the burgeoning fields of physics and parapsychology. He learned about samizdat, the unofficial self-publishing industry that had rapidly developed in the Soviet Union since the late 1960s. Samizdat had opened a clear pathway to the ideas and aspirations of the Russian people, who found a means of self-expression that circumvented the government, as Dakin, too, found a new channel for disseminating information.28 The documents of Fr. Gleb Yakunin’s Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights stood at the top of Henry Dakin’s nascent publishing activity.
The documents, however, first needed to reach Dakin’s San Francisco office. As it did in the case of other materials issued in samizdat, the Soviet government did not sanction publication of the Christian Committee’s materials, so they could not be transported through official channels. They had to come via a backdoor network. The Christian Committee had couriers who transported the documents across the borders of the Soviet Union to Western Europe, where they were mailed directly to Dakin’s office in San Francisco. The people who courageously risked their own arrest included Natalia Solzhenitsyn, the former wife of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; the human rights activist Natalia Khodorovicha; and foreign tourists.29 Committee members copied the materials on 35mm negative microfilm for transport, and Dakin agreed to publish the documents within three weeks of delivery.30
From 1977 to 1980, the years of the Christian Committee’s existence, Henry Dakin’s Washington Street Research Center published twelve volumes of these documents. Dakin printed them in Russian, with the exception of the third volume, which represented a compendium of selected documents translated into English. Each volume had a summary in English of every document it contained. Taken as a whole, the materials created an intimate portrait of religious life in the Soviet Union that had rarely existed on such a local level since the Russian Revolution. As will be shown later, these publications depicted the arbitrary, often illegal activities of government officials in numerous towns and villages, generally in contravention of the Soviet Constitution. They provided concrete testimony about violations of the international human rights standards that the Soviet government had pledged to uphold. They also offered another side to religious life that readers might not have expected to see.
Abuses of Power
The Christian Committee’s files contained many letters beseeching Patriarch Pimen to hear their cries of distress. They discussed abuses of power coming from outside their parishes, but it is also striking to find here letters describing wrongdoing emanating from within the parish. In February 1977, a few months after the committee’s creation, a series of letters and petitions from a community in Ukraine, in particular, offered a poignant example of such misbehavior. The story was related by parishioners of the Church of St. Nicholas, in the town of Nikolaev (in southern Ukraine), describing instances of illegal harassment and asking Patriarch Pimen “to help us find justice and truth.” They began by relating an incident that took place on November 11, 1976, when “the police, treating us like brigands, burst into the church, cut off the locks everywhere with a blowtorch, and … accused the former church assembly of stealing 14 thousand rubles” from local authorities.31
The files coming from the Nikolaev Church portrayed a series of actions that had destroyed trust within the parish community. The parishioners attributed most of the disturbances to the behavior of their new head priest, Fr. Pyotr Stryzhik, who had arrived to serve them two years earlier. According to parishioners of the Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas, Fr. Pyotr failed to minister as a caretaker of the parish and a holy father to his flock, but instead acted as someone who looked upon the Orthodox community as his own patrimony. He demanded extra payments from congregants, falsely claiming that they went to paying the church’s registration fees. In reality, however, he “put the money in his own pocket.”32
Parishioners described a litany of other abuses attributed to Fr. Pyotr: theft, threats, embezzlement, beatings, curses, embarrassing outbursts against older women, public insults directed at servitors of the church, and immoral acts that he conducted both within the church and on the streets of Nikolaev. When parishioners complained, Fr. Pyotr said, “I am the boss [khoziain], and what I wish to do, I will do.”33 The local town representative of the Council for Religious Affairs, identified as Chunikhin, served as Fr. Pyotr’s protector. The two formed a close alliance that made any attempt of the parishioners to defend themselves against their priest’s barbaric behavior extremely difficult. Chunikhin told members of the parish who complained that if Fr. Pyotr were removed from the parish, he intended to close their church. Upon learning of their plans to write to the authorities in Kyiv or Moscow, Chunikhin replied that he feared neither Kyiv nor Moscow, and despite his threats to put the complainants in jail for five years, they persisted.34 When the parishioners prepared an appeal to higher authorities, the archbishop of the diocese intervened. He ordered them to desist and then, to intimidate their leaders, excommunicated eleven members of the parish, eight of them women.35
Yet the parishioners of St. Nicholas refused to capitulate. They appealed to the Regional Central Executive of the church, and, following that, petitioned the People’s Court of the Central Region. Both bodies ignored their requests. In addition, the local government-sponsored radio station and newspaper, Iuzhnaia Pravda (Southern Truth), disparaged the parishioners’ loyalty, morality, and “political” motivations.” The author of the newspaper article branded the parishioners of St. Nicholas Church as religious fanatics who had little regard for church unity. He asserted that they had turned the church into what the local archbishop called “a den of brigands.”36 As it turned out, nearly everything appeared allied against the parishioners of St. Nicholas, as if the diocesan and local authorities, the court, and the media had conspired to prevent their pleas from gaining a sympathetic hearing.
Having exhausted all available channels open to them, the parishioners sent two letters to Patriarch Pimen, in which they described many occurrences of harassment in their church community.37 Significantly, the writers of these letters appeared to understand that Pimen had no ability to rectify their grievances. Their words seemed to express either sympathy for him or, more likely, the helplessness of his plight, given the political restrictions under which he operated. Nevertheless, they needed him to hear their pleas and what they hoped would be the path he would take: “Your Holiness,” their appeal read, “we know that we cannot ask for your help. We know that it will not be forthcoming, but we ask for one thing only—that you not cover up the lies and hypocritical actions before the whole world. Before the world, it is necessary to make war not with beautiful words, but with the realities.… Against the lies, it is necessary to fight. We must not cover ourselves in lies but dress ourselves in the truth.… Let the atheists cover themselves in lies. We will stand with the truth.”38
The patriarch offered no response to the letters. Fr. Gleb and his associates on the Christian Committee, however, heard their cries. The materials in this case served as a major part of the information gathered about the harassment of religious believers, a significant segment of the larger story about truth and falsehood that they wanted to tell.
Fr. Pyotr Stryzhik’s degradation of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine did not represent a solitary example. The Christian Committee files included a similar account of profligacy that took place in the Osh community of Tashkent. The Osh parishioners had a head priest, Leonid Demianovich Aleksenko, who for nearly a decade had served in the local Orthodox Church exhibiting behavior that violated nearly every norm of the moral teachings of the church. The Osh parishioners described his brutish actions, drunkenness, and callous treatment of members of the community, especially of older women, whom he regarded with disdain.39
The Osh parishioners’ letter to the patriarch described numerous acts of Fr. Leonid, which they claimed betrayed the sacrosanct traditions of their church: “At New Year’s, during the last four years, our priest, Aleksenko, dragged four-meter-tall fir trees into the church sanctuary, placed them immediately in front of the altar, decorated them with all kinds of baubles, and wired them with bright lights. Everything about them shined and sparkled in the church, while the people who were praying said to themselves, ‘Next, we’ll probably have a carnival, with dancing, in the church.’ ”40
When inebriated, Aleksenko violated every principle of his sacred oath. His boorish behavior, as members of the Osh community described it, extended beyond the church to his family and to the town. “Our Aleksenko can hold his own against any alcoholic churl on a side street off the market square.”41 They portrayed him as having a corrupt and unprincipled family life, quarreling incessantly with his wife and beating her so that when he is drunk, “she flees their home, leaving the children behind to endure his wrath and abuse.”42 The Osh parishioners had tolerated him long enough: they proposed the defrocking of Fr. Leonid and his transfer to a job in an industrial plant where perhaps he would be able to reform his dissolute behavior. But if this was not possible, they requested that the church move him from their parish to a small, remote town where he would “be able to put less money into his pocket. To put it more simply, our Aleksenko would dry out more quickly in the fresh air.”43
In their description of Fr. Leonid Aleksenko’s behavior, the Osh petitioners intentionally employed extremely harsh language. Some of their complaints about their priest—his public drunkenness, boorish behavior, abuse of his family—should not be taken literally. These accusations exemplified what the historian Stephen Kotkin labeled “Bolshevik speak,” in which supplicants, in order to be heard, adopted the language of Bolshevik anti-religious propaganda to express their grievances.44 Fr. Leonid, however, had likely violated certain norms of the parish and deeply offended the members, and they wanted his removal. In voicing their resentments, the Osh petitioners sought to present themselves as true Soviet citizens, loyal to the state, while simultaneously identifying themselves as religious believers. As did other members of the rural population, in their minds, they saw no difference between being a “Soviet citizen” and being a “religious believer.”45
Additional examples of the church’s appointed leaders reveal the harsh, inhumane qualities of priests’ leadership roles. In the Pskov-Caves Monastery, one of Orthodoxy’s most venerated treasures, Archimandrite Gavriil, recently named head of the monastery, had created “an oppressive environment for the brethren.” According to the nun Anastasiia Kleimionova, Archimandrite Gavriil made the monastery an unwelcome place for pilgrims. Rather than welcome them, he deliberately scorned and turned them away. “We are crucifying our Lord once more; the Mother of God weeps over our iniquities,” she asserted in her letter to Patriarch Pimen.46
Numerous photographs in the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate show that, in 1970s and 1980s, the majority of worshippers in the Russian Orthodox Church consisted of older women, the famous “babushki”—humble, long-suffering, and among the most poorly educated people in Soviet society.47 Viewing themselves as protectors of church tradition, they responded with suspicion and outright resentment toward younger priests, newcomers to their parish, who attempted to change the rites of service or introduce new approaches.48 In their criticisms of Frs. Pyotr Stryzhik, Leonid Aleksenko, and Archimandrite Gavriil, however, their outrage expressed something else. Parishioners were furious that their church no longer provided a sanctuary from social ills and preserved practices they considered inviolable. The images their priests presented undermined the trust and respect for an institution the parishioners viewed as sacred.49
Whether the letters and petitions of these and other church communities represent anomalies or more widespread phenomena remain difficult to determine. Yet they evoke questions posed by the Russian historian and essayist Evgenii Barabanov: whether the church itself had a large hand in turning people away from religious belief; and, closely related to this, whether the actions of some religious leaders were among the main instruments that promoted atheism.50 In their attitudes and behaviors, certain priests did a great deal to convince people that the church was morally bankrupt. Describing the priesthood in general, Yakunin, too, called the interior of church life a “tragic phenomenon.”51 When people came to the church seeking help with the deepest concerns of their lives, they rarely found what they sought. The materials of the Christian Committee provided evidence that Orthodox leaders, according to Barabanov, might have done as much to undermine trust and respect for the church as the prosecutorial agencies of the Soviet state.52
Stories of Struggle
Despite the cases of profligate behavior described above, a large number of Orthodox priests served with dignity, remaining true to the mission, tending to the spiritual needs of their flocks, and exhibiting compassion for older people or those with disabilities. Even under pressure from the political authorities, they fulfilled their responsibilities—celebrating the liturgy, providing a sanctuary against the harsh circumstances of life, and paying homage to the beauty and richness of the Orthodox heritage. The materials collected by the Christian Committee contain a wealth of diverse stories of individuals and groups of believers in the former Soviet Union.
These stories depict spiritual quests pursued by individuals and groups of people at great personal cost to their well-being and that of their families. They also offer accounts of their desire for justice, a wish to overcome the large discrepancy between what they perceived as their constitutional rights and what they witnessed in their lives. It was this disparity that Yakunin’s committee sought to document, despite the Moscow Patriarchate’s and the Soviet government’s repeated denials of their veracity. The published materials recount many tales of individuals, the challenging circumstances they encountered, and their struggle to make freedom of conscience a reality. Three cases illustrate these themes: one describing the experience of a Russian Orthodox priest, a second involving the education of children in Lithuania, and a third concerning a recently married young woman in Taganrog.
Lev Konin, the second priest in the Orthodox Church in the city of St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), had had a difficult, trouble-filled life. Born in the Ural city of Ekaterinburg (then Sverdlovsk), the son of a secondary-school teacher, he first studied at a technical institute. There, at the age of sixteen, in 1961, he ran into trouble for the first time after he made some disparaging comments about Khrushchev’s twenty-year program to achieve communism in the Soviet Union.53 The institute’s director expelled him. Afterward, he entered a pedagogical institute, where three years later, in 1964, after witnessing the rector of the institute pocketing the monthly stipends of students, he revealed what he had seen. In a school assembly, in front of the other students, the rector humiliated him. This time, his punishment was more severe than before: the pedagogical institute, in coordination with the local authorities, had Konin committed to a psychiatric hospital. The diagnosis of the hospital specialists was that he suffered from “a paranoid syndrome,” which provoked, they said, “delusional and irrational behavior”—that is, behavior that did not conform to the Communist Party’s ideological goals.54 He remained in the psychiatric hospital until July 1965, undergoing “injections and shock treatments” and was released, he said, “when the doctors feared that I would soon die.”55
Konin’s hospital stay did, however, have a positive result. For the first time, he recounted, he began to think seriously about his life’s purpose. After his discharge, out of curiosity, he went to the only Orthodox Church in Sverdlovsk, an experience that ultimately led to his desire to be baptized. In the winter of 1965, he said, “I memorized the texts of prayers and read all the atheistic literature and the little spiritual literature that could be found in the city—Dostoevsky, Leskov, separate issues of old journals—and I also began study of the German language,” reading and study that persuaded him to seek enrollment in the St. Petersburg Ecclesiastical Seminary.56
Konin’s life had finally set out on a stable course. In January 1973, he was ordained as an Orthodox priest. He married, started a family, secured a house, and received an appointment as second priest in the Nikolskaia Church in the suburbs of St. Petersburg. After his turbulent earlier years, he felt confident that his personal and professional life had taken an upward turn. But then came a bombshell that shattered his sense of well-being: someone wrote a denunciation about him, and he was removed.57 Beyond temporarily serving in a Pskov diocese, for the next four years, he did not hold a regular church appointment. In March 1977, a story in the newspaper Vechernii Leningrad (Evening Leningrad) brought up new allegations. The newspaper, without offering any evidence, claimed that Fr. Lev was working as a Swedish agent and “deemed him to be a terribly dangerous element of society.”58 The following month, the KGB arrested Fr. Lev and confined him again to a psychiatric hospital.59
After his release, he wrote an appeal to the Christian Committee requesting their help in seeking justice. The justice he desired entailed adherence to the Constitution of the USSR, which sanctified the rights of Soviet citizens against capricious, illegal treatment by state authorities. In concert with his appeal, he called for an end to the “psychological torture-chamber,” which, he argued, had no place in a just society.60
The pursuit of social justice extended to other spheres of life beyond the Orthodox priesthood. In Lithuania, members of the Catholic Church, inspired by Yakunin’s committee in Moscow, created a similar organization, the Catholic Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights. Expressing identical goals, it closely coordinated with Yakunin’s group. Its aims included protecting the rights of children.
In September 1978, the Soviet Union hosted an international conference in Moscow devoted to the theme “Towards a Peaceful and Happy Future for All Children.” At the conference, which was attended by human rights activists from all over the world, the participants pledged “to defend children from violence in all of its forms.”61 A consensus emerged among the participants about the responsibilities of all nations to guarantee through the laws that children would be protected against all kinds of force.
In Lithuania, the Catholic Committee closely followed the agreements made at the Moscow conference and saw an opportunity to reopen the question of childhood education. In the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ministry of Education decreed that “from the very first class,” the primary goal of pedagogy at all levels must be to inculcate in each schoolchild and in all extracurricular activities “a scientific worldview, in order that each child will grow up as a militant atheist.”62 How was it possible, the Catholic Committee wanted to know, for the state to combine this compulsory goal with the rights of the child, especially with the documents signed in Moscow titled “Towards a Peaceful and Happy Future for All Children?”63
The Catholic Committee cited a specific case in which a teacher in Belarus visited the family of one of her students during the summer holidays. While there, she taught the children several prayers and the rudiments of Christianity. An informer learned of her actions and had her arrested, after which the police imposed upon her a monetary fine. A month later, the police charged her with violating the Criminal Code of the Belarusian SSR and placed her in a jail cell “together with the drunks and venereal prisoners.”64 The entire judicial process in this town, the Catholic Committee wrote, demonstrated that children in this republic had “only a single right—to be atheists.”
As Fr. Gleb’s Christian Committee in Moscow repeatedly asserted, the Catholic Committee in Lithuania emphasized the large gap between actual practices in everyday life and the international agreements the Soviet Union purported to uphold. Compulsion as a means of molding citizens into compliant beings contradicted Soviet public claims about the upbringing of children. The Lithuanian committee members argued that the greatest violence done to children entailed taking away their freedom to worship according to the dictates of their souls. Only by adherence to freedom of conscience, this fundamental human right, could children develop the capacity to create for themselves “a peaceful and bright future.”65
The third case in the trilogy of disputes concerned a young mother, Tati′ana Ivanovna, who lived in the seaport city of Taganrog on the northern shore of the Sea of Azov. Her story concerned a dispute between a husband and wife and how the authorities, in violation of the laws, discriminated against religious believers.
In 1977, twenty-three-year-old Tat′iana married Sergei Ivanovich Sorokin, a worker and member of the Communist Party. The birthplace of the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Taganrog, in the 1970s, had become one of the most important industrial and scientific centers of southern Russia. Although her husband did not want children, she testified, the following year she gave birth to a son. The birth of the child exacerbated difficulties that had already emerged in the marriage. The couple did not have much money, and Sergei Sorokin often came from work drunk, at which time he would berate and sometimes beat his wife. Having few defenses against her husband’s abusive behavior, Sorokina sought solace in reading the Gospels and praying for help. Her behavior, which ran counter to her husband’s views of what their marriage should be, infuriated him. In July 1978, five months after her baby’s birth, her husband forcefully took the child from her and moved back home with his parents. She went to his parents’ home, she said, “asked for my baby back, but was driven away, insulted, and struck by my husband.”66
Sorokina took the only course of action open to her: she filed suit in the district court to reclaim her child.67 In the court proceedings that followed, Sorokina, desperate to recover the most important part of her life, pled her case as a mother who wished to raise her child and had the capacity to do so responsibly. Her husband argued the reverse, claiming that his wife had not worked since June, resided in a private apartment, and lacked the proper means for the child’s upbringing. Asked by the judge to explain his capability for raising the child, Sergei Ivanovich testified that he had a regular job, had adjusted his working hours in order to care for his son, and had the ability to provide everything the child needed. But a key component in the husband’s testimony appeared to be his contention that his wife had joined “a sect of Baptists-Pentecostals, to whose meetings she brought the child as well.” He claimed he had taken the child away because he “did not wish to have the child brought up in the religious spirit.”68
The district court denied Sorokina’s suit, as did the Rostov Regional Court to which she next appealed. In both instances, the official verdict, which awarded custody of the child to the father, justified the decision by asserting that the father had all the economic means to give the child a normal upbringing. Although the courts made no mention of Sorokina’s religious belief in issuing their verdicts, at every level this played a significant role in the court’s denial of the mother’s claims. At the first hearing, in the district court, Procurator Riabova, upon learning that Sorokina was a religious believer, expressed outrage and called her an “animal” who “belonged in the woods.” According to Sorokina, “they said that they would take my child away because I believed, but in the court decision, they wrote down that it was because I was not working and had no place to live”69 The father’s forcible removal of the child from the mother’s care without first going through the proper channels constituted an illegal act. Yet in siding with the father, the courts disregarded this unlawful deed.
FIGURE 5.3. From left to right, Varsonofi Khaibulin, Viktor Kapitanchuk, and Fr. Gleb Yakunin, founders of the Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights in the USSR, 1976. Courtesy of the Keston Center for Religion, Politics, and Society, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.
In founding the Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights in the USSR, Varsonofi Khaibulin, Gleb Yakunin, and Viktor Kapitanchuk pledged to bring to light examples of state violations of Soviet citizens’ constitutional rights (figure 5.3). Other examples contained in the files of Yakunin’s Christian Committee provide specific testimony concerning the persecution of religious believers. In Ukraine, after confessing that she had converted to Christianity, Valeriia Petrovna Bondarenko, a twenty-five-year-old mother of two, suffered immediate reprisals. Mocked, scolded, and threatened with the loss of her children, she also lost her job and was divorced by her husband. A letter to the Christian Committee from Anna Paul recounted the hardships her family endured following the arrest of her husband, a dentist, in Kochetov, a village in the Briansk district of western Russia. Charging him with disseminating religious propaganda and teaching their children about the Bible, the local court sentenced him to two and a half years in jail and suspended him from his dental practice for an additional three years. Anna Paul appealed her husband’s loss of work: “We have three young children—ages from one to seven—and elderly sick parents,” she wrote, “and without his income, we lack the means for our survival.”70
In a communication directed to General Procurator Rudenko, Riazan’ Baptists protested the indifference of local authorities to the plight of a fellow believer, Galina Afanas′evna Ivashura who, after confessing her belief in God, suffered several kinds of indignities. Her husband, a police officer, took away from her care their four-year-old son. Pregnant with another child, when she was in the hospital, the police chief installed a fellow police officer in her apartment, leaving her with only one room, yet required her to pay rent for the entire apartment.71 In a letter addressed to Christians of the Whole World, the Christian Committee, and the Council of Prisoners’ Relatives, young Baptist people living in the Zakarpattia district of western Ukraine recounted a gathering of their friends in the forest for prayer and a “peaceful worship service,” when about two hundred people from the police and KGB descended upon them. The authorities seized their religious literature, musical instruments, and personal items, before ordering the youth onto a bus, arresting five of their leaders, and imposing fines and forced labor on the rest of them. In addition, the letter writers referred to similar recent attacks against fellow Baptists in Kharkov, Briansk, Omsk, the Central Asia region, and other cities in the Soviet Union.72
The documents published by Henry Dakin do not offer a complete picture, especially of religious believers in parishes that operated under the solicitous care of devoted priests, although they, too, functioned under great pressure from state authorities. The Christian Committee’s purpose, however, never intended to offer a comprehensive account. The intimate look at abuses coming from outside and within church communities gave much greater depth to the claims he had made in the letter Yakunin and Nikolai Eshliman sent to the patriarch in 1965 and his appeal to the Nairobi Assembly in 1975. They provided the factual evidence for a report Yakunin soon made about the efficacy of the church.
Yakunin’s Report
On August 15, 1979, shortly before his arrest, Yakunin issued a major report that represented his overall assessment of the findings drawn from the publication of the Christian Committee’s documents.73 Jane Ellis called Yakunin’s paper probably the most important single document issued by the organization.74 Every aspect of the patriarchal structure had been surveyed, including the patriarch and the church episcopate, the clergy, parish council, parishes, monasteries, seminaries and academies, financial management, and publishing. Yakunin’s report analyzed each part and its effectiveness in addressing the spiritual needs of the Russian people. Based on factual evidence, his examination made one other contribution: it lifted the veil on the inner workings of the church previously concealed behind the veneer of political assertions.
A common thread running through every part of the report consisted of the dominating influence of the state in suppressing creativity. Nearly fifteen years earlier, the letter he and Nikolai Eshliman had sent to Patriarch Aleksii I voiced a similar complaint. Yakunin’s 1979 report demonstrated the progression of his thinking and also showed how the church had changed, becoming even more stultifying and ineffective than before. In 1965, he and Eshliman had expected a political and religious springtime that would usher in a new administration and new thinking, marking the end of Khrushchev’s irrational policies. “Today,” Yakunin wrote in 1979, “an icy darkness” enveloped the church, which had chosen to become docile and complaisant, completely under the control of the authorities.75 “In Russia, at the present time,” Yakunin wrote, “an awakening of religious consciousness is taking place. Those who are reaching out for religion, who are coming to it, only yesterday were atheists.”76 He spoke of this growing consciousness, after many years of hibernation, as a springtime. Neither the church nor the government understood the significance of this awakening, he asserted. The government’s ideological commitments had left it blind to present realities, particularly the thirst for new ways of thinking among young people.
Yakunin’s report portrayed an authoritarian mentality that pervaded every part of the church’s official structure. One could not expect action from either the patriarch or the episcopate, both of which were dependent on civil authorities. Fear and intimidation characterized the upper hierarchy of the church, whose dependency left them enfeebled and enslaved. But even in lower “tiers” of the church hierarchy—the clergy, monasteries, seminaries and academies—government control pervaded the entire atmosphere. Living under constant intimidation, priests elected to play it safe; to confine their services to rituals; to eschew interpretation of the Gospels, the sacraments, and key biblical texts; and to refrain from going beyond the narrowest possible limits of their duties.77 He cited the first encyclical of the newly elected Pope John Paul II, in which he defined the primary goal of Christ’s Church as the redemptive service of humanity.78 Yakunin claimed that in its quest to serve the state, the Orthodox Church had lost sight of its fundamental mission.79
In The Captive Mind, Czesław Miłosz defined the compliant personality as one who accepted what his superiors said, submerged his identity in the New Faith, and willingly gave up his own creative spirit.80 Yakunin’s description of the patriarch, episcopate, and clergy exemplified nearly every aspect of this mentality. For its own purposes, the state had made them dependent functionaries. The state’s quest to “extinguish religious life” meant that in relation to the clergy, “the worse the priest, the better.” Thus, the authorities turned a blind eye to corruption, as in the aforementioned case of Pyotr Stryzhik, who, according to Yakunin, did not represent an isolated example. “Each diocese,” he wrote, “contains immoral priests who are supported by local authorities, because their presence aids the cause of religious propaganda.”81 A large gap existed between the Soviet people who sought help from the church and what they found there.
Despite the dark portrait it painted of the Moscow Patriarchate and its gloomy prognostications for leadership and reform, the report still held out hope. This expectation did not lie within the official agencies of the church, but outside them. Most of all, Yakunin’s optimism resided in the young people and the quest for a spiritual renaissance. He had seen this aspiration in the Christian Seminar, whose energy and dedication he had witnessed firsthand. In their expressions of communal love, compassion, and their desire for knowledge, they had created a communal atmosphere that stood diametrically opposed to the “pharisaical mentality” Yakunin found within the Moscow Patriarchate. “The government does not persecute the Moscow patriarchate,” Yakunin wrote, “but the religiously active young people, thus attesting to the fact that it is precisely among them that Russia’s true meeting with Christ is taking place.”82
According to Yakunin’s report, the most promising movements took place, by necessity, in those that operated independent of governmental control. The more talented and energetic the priest, the more independent he was.83 He offered two examples of such priests: Frs. Dmitrii Dudko and Aleksandr Men, whose willingness to step outside the docile, compliant framework in which other parishes operated attracted large numbers of young people.84 He cited the earlier examples of “catacomb priests” who, refusing to pledge their allegiance to the Soviet state, functioned independently of its stultifying controls.
Perhaps most surprisingly, Yakunin’s report held up as models unregistered Catholic, Baptist, Pentecostal, and Adventist parishes, which, despite state prohibitions, taught the young people. Although they operated illegally, they chose to pursue their own pathways, to teach their children, and to develop thriving communities. Orthodox parishes, he believed, should pursue a similar pattern. He proposed that Orthodox believers follow a dual track in which some parishes would remain inside the state-regulated structure while others would take the risk of functioning illegally.85 In addition, he suggested a significant change in the Orthodox Church’s jurisdiction, a change that would not have earned the favor of the Moscow Patriarchate. Canon law dictated that a local church organization did not have the right to operate on the geographical dominion of another. Recent circumstances, however, required another look at this principle. In the United States, for example, the Moscow Patriarchate had parishes located on the territories of the American Autocephalous Orthodox Church. The American Orthodox Church (AOC) had its origins in Alaska and was founded by Russian Orthodox monks. After the purchase of Alaska by the United States in 1867, the arrival of Russian and East European immigrants in the last decades of the nineteenth century led the Orthodox Church to spread out into other regions of the country. In 1970, the Moscow Patriarchate granted autocephaly to the AOC, formally recognizing the status it had held since the Russian Revolution. Governed by its metropolitan, located in Washington, DC, the AOC retains full communion with the Moscow Patriarchate.
If, Yakunin proposed, suffering churches in the Soviet Union were permitted to come under the jurisdiction of the AOC, it would significantly “render them brotherly help.” Additionally, as he maintained, “it would deepen the exchange experience,” which the Moscow Patriarchate encouraged elsewhere in the church hierarchy.86
Whether such ideas represented realistic possibilities when Yakunin advanced them remains questionable. To expect the Moscow Patriarchate to regard them favorably appeared extremely unlikely. Nevertheless, they were imaginative and forward-looking, and they signified the kind of thinking that Henry Dakin would have admired, since these ideas crossed over boundaries that limited human contact. In an effort to justify his proposal, Yakunin quoted Christ: “The Sabbath is for man, not man for the Sabbath.”87 Practical needs justified breaking the law when the act was intended to benefit people and lift a heavy burden. The patriarchate presented obstacles that stood in the way of the country’s religious renaissance.88
The publication of the Christian Committee’s materials was significant for additional reasons.
First, during its four-year existence, Yakunin’s committee sent Dakin 419 documents, amounting to more than 2,600 pages of materials. The Christian Committee’s charter had promised to speak for all denominations, and the materials the committee forwarded to Henry Dakin held true to this commitment. Although 154 of the documents related to Russian Orthodox individuals or bodies, the remainder comprised a wide assortment of denominations, ranging from Catholics to Reform Baptists, Pentecostals, True and Seventh Day Adventists, and others.89
When the Russian Orthodox Church joined the World Council of Churches, Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov) of Leningrad and Novgorod, a strong proponent of ecumenism, had led the effort. His report, “The Russian Orthodox Church and the Ecumenical Movement” (1968), presented at Uppsala University, signified a major change in the church’s desire for rapprochement with the Catholic Church.90 Metropolitan Nikodim’s advocacy of the ecumenical movement primarily related to international relations. He specifically had in mind the desire for reconciliation with the Catholic Church, Christian unity, and support for the peace movement. Yakunin’s Christian Committee had a goal much different from Nikodim’s. While it, too, wanted reconciliation with the Catholic Church, the committee had a much broader focus. It aspired to overcome the long-standing enmity of the Russian Orthodox Church toward other faiths. Its support for freedom of conscience did not end with Russian Orthodoxy. Yakunin and the Christian Committee embraced a practical ecumenism that the Russian Orthodox Church had not heretofore experienced.
Throughout much of its history, Yakunin and his associates reiterated, the Russian Orthodox Church had viewed itself as superior to other faiths; it had a long tradition of trying to suppress non-Orthodox denominations. The time had come when the church needed to rectify its prejudicial behavior. The Christian Committee, therefore, owed to others the duty “to redress these historical wrongs and come to the defense of believers of all denominations,” a responsibility it viewed as an obligation.91
This practical ecumenism also appeared in the letter Yakunin and his associates wrote to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Dimitrios I. On Christmas Day 1977, Dimitrios I appealed to heads of state and churches everywhere to proclaim the new year the Year of Religious Freedom. The committee’s letter offered a devastating critique of the Moscow Patriarchate in its transformation from a spiritual body that supported religious believers into a political institution that buttressed the Soviet state. The Christian Committee appealed to Ecumenical Orthodoxy to “raise your voices, that Christian love with brotherly criticism and exhortation will arouse the pastoral conscience of our Hierarchy, will awaken in them the courage to confess their faith, without which spiritual freedom is impossible.”92 In addition, the Christian Committee sent three letters to the pope, the first sent in the interim after the death of Pope John Paul I in September 1978, and the other two to the new Polish pope John Paul II. They sought the pope’s help with and understanding of the plight of religious believers in the Soviet Union. They expressed the wish for the pope to join forces with them in supporting freedom of conscience in East and West.93
Second, the Christian Committee’s materials bore witness to a spiritual thirst, especially among young people, a thirst that the state, through various means, attempted either to deny or to suppress. These methods included the political manipulation of the courts and the use of psychiatric incarceration, both of which the published materials confirmed. Yakunin also castigated Patriarch Pimen for his seeming indifference to the religious awakening that was taking place, particularly among the young Russian intelligentsia. Yakunin’s “Report” claimed that the patriarch existed in a “golden cage,” ignorant of the needs of the people.94 Rarely venturing outside the narrow confines of his insulated world, the patriarch met the desire for knowledge with either dismissal or apathy.95
Third, the publication of the Christian Committee’s documents aspired to draw public attention to the persecution of religious believers not only in the Soviet Union but also internationally. The committee countered the narrative promulgated by Metropolitan Nikodim in 1976 at the World Council of Churches about the flourishing condition of the Russian Orthodox Church. According to Yakunin, however, Metropolitan Nikodim and others in the church hierarchy had created a distorted image with little relationship to actual realities.
In disseminating falsehoods, Yakunin argued, Nikodim had done something even more insidious. He had “given unconditional approval to the legislation obligating Christians to participate in the realization of the Communist ideal: the creation of a society of worldly prosperity in which there is no place for religion, and the raising of a consciousness in which there is no place for God.”96 The documents of the Christian Committee challenged that ideal. Speaking from the grassroots of Soviet society, the documents of the Christian Committee told a story much different from the official narrative.
Fourth, upon its creation, the Christian Committee proclaimed that it had five major goals. The first of these, and probably its primary goal, was the “collection, study, and distribution of information.”97 Yakunin and his collaborators understood an often repeated principle: Knowledge equals power. Whoever controls the flow of information controls the source of power. “The lie has long been a tradition in the official declarations of the Moscow Patriarchate,” Yakunin and his committee members wrote, and the lie conceals the truth.98
Fifth, having lost trust in the patriarch’s ability and willingness to address their concerns, Fr. Gleb and his associates sought to build a new network of authority outside the old. In contrast to the traditional hierarchical network, the new arrangement was decentralized. Aided by new technologies—cassettes, self-publishing, and digital printing—Yakunin and his colleagues reached beyond the hierarchical structures of power. They attempted to shift what the US political scientist James Rosenau termed a “state-centric” to a “multi-centric world.”99 Forging a relationship with Henry Dakin served as one of several fresh channels that Fr. Gleb Yakunin and others used to gain support.
The significance of the collaboration between Yakunin and Henry Dakin’s Washington Street Research Center cannot be overstated. The issuance of the committee’s documents and other materials that emanated from the Washington Street Research Center represented early efforts at desktop publishing. Henry Dakin believed in the power of telecommunications to transform human relationships.100 Like Keston College in England, Dakin’s center gave religious believers in the Soviet Union a voice, connecting their outcries from provincial towns and villages of the Soviet Union with a much larger audience. Their voices enabled an opposing narrative to gain traction versus the official account. In creating these new relationships with Dakin, Yakunin’s Christian Committee, perhaps inadvertently, countered the state’s goal of creating a harmonious, unified social order based on an all-embracing ideology.
The relationship between the Moscow priest and the San Francisco entrepreneur challenged the traditional political order in an additional way. In the following decade, Henry Dakin would become a prominent leader of the person-to-person diplomacy movement, which helped defuse the politics of the Cold War.101 He invited prominent Russian and American political leaders and scientists to the Esalen Institute, the retreat center in Big Sur, California, where they engaged in conversation and developed personal relationships.102 “In 1988,” Henry Dakin’s spouse Vergilia recounted, “a Russian delegation arrived in San Francisco. Gleb Yakunin was among its members, and he came to our home. I shall never forget Henry’s excitement in meeting him face-to-face.”103 The earlier collaboration between Yakunin, Regel′son, and Dakin marked the first stage in breaking down what had once seemed impenetrable barriers.
In the late 1970s, Soviet leaders knew of the dangers that the Christian Committee posed to the established political and religious order. Their response lay immediately ahead, and it would have severe consequences for Yakunin.