CHAPTER 3 The Awakening

Death or Rebirth?

In coming to power in Russia, the Bolshevik Party claimed to be riding a deeply rooted historical trend in which religion would soon die out. Religion, the Bolshevik leaders believed, belonged to the past, had served as an instrument of exploitation by the ruling class, and had originated in superstition and mythology. An industrial, scientific, and rational public order promised to kill off naturally what remained of a backward-looking set of beliefs. In 1922, elaborating the new Soviet ideology, Vladimir Lenin called Christianity a naive faith whose extirpation “was essential for our struggle against the governing religious obscurantists.”⁹

In the late 1960s and the 1970s, members of the Soviet elite considered the victory over this vestige of the past nearly won. In May 1976, the deputy chair of the Council for Religious Affairs, Vasilii Grigor′evich Furov, gave a lecture on the status of religious belief in which he announced that religion in the Soviet Union had nearly disappeared. In the past five years, he boasted, about 700 religious establishments had passed from existence, and about 1,000 Orthodox Churches once registered as active congregations had closed. The Soviet Union had ten times fewer Orthodox Churches than existed in prerevolutionary Russia (their number had declined from 77,676 to 7,500). Catholic Churches, which once totaled 4,200 in the Baltic region, had now shrunk to 1,000. In regions where Islam had flourished, only 1,000 mosques remained out of 24,000, and the number of Jewish synagogues had decreased from 5,000 to 2,020, only 92 of which were registered; fifty rabbis were all that remained.¹⁰

In his lecture, Furov characterized the relationship between church and state as “normalized,” a condition evidenced by formerly recalcitrant priests having reformed and allied themselves with the government. Most of them, he said, supported government policies and were staunch advocates of Soviet patriotism. Harmony and goodwill described the bond that existed between the remaining churches and the Soviet government, a condition attributed to the “modernist, reforming tendencies” that “were penetrating ever deeper into parish life, actively supporting the domestic and foreign policy of the USSR.”¹¹

Furov did not gloss over people, vestiges of the past who expressed “anti-Soviet” views. He named three who articulated “anti-Soviet” ways of thinking: the Orthodox Hierodeacon Varsonofi Khaibulin, the physicist Lev Regel′son, and the mathematician Igor Shafarevich. As will be discussed later, Khaibulin and Regel′son had a close relationship with Gleb Yakunin. Sharfarevich had recently published abroad a short book on religious legislation in the USSR, which, Furov claimed, expressed opposition to Soviet policy on the church.¹² According to Furov, these three were aberrations. In a concluding statement to his lecture, one filled with irony, he spoke of the possibility of state support for the church even as the state continued to wage ideological war against it.

At the end of the 1970s, just a few years after Furov’s assessment, Gleb Yakunin expressed a much different view of the church’s present condition. Instead of speaking about “modernizing trends,” he strongly criticized the government’s unlawful interference in religious affairs, which, he believed, had significantly weakened the church’s presence in Russian life. At every level, from the patriarch to the parish, government policies had corrupted the Orthodox church’s capacity to carry out its responsibilities.

Most important, Yakunin maintained that religion was not dying out in the Soviet Union. He spoke of a “Religious Renaissance” among important segments of the population. The contentions that Yakunin advanced presented several questions. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the emergence of this so-called awakening served as a key element in Gleb Yakunin’s evolution as a religious activist. It would become a vital part of how he viewed his role in his country’s potential transformation.

Fresh Directions

In the mid- to late 1960s, the ideological beliefs and commitments that had so inflamed earlier generations of Soviet citizens had begun to lose their power. Nikita Khrushchev’s speech to a closed session at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, in which he denounced his predecessor, Joseph Stalin, as a cruel, despotic, and irrational leader, opened up Pandora’s box of questions about the Stalinist system and the ideology that supported it. Following the long Stalinist winter, a period known as “the Thaw” launched a series of disputes that raged across Russian literature, the arts, and the subject of history. Questions about history led to a growing interest in the church’s contributions to the development of the Russian state.

Tat′iana Goricheva was a participant in this revival of interest. “In the sixties,” she said, “when the breakdown of the myth of Stalin and the ideals of communism began, we saw that culture served as a point of departure.… Cultural values helped us come out of the underground towards the light.”¹³ Seeking new ways of interpreting Russian history and culture, the generation of the 1960s lacked an immediate bridge connecting them to the past. The bridge had to be discovered. Because prerevolutionary Russian religious history received little attention in schools, and people had no solid body of facts on which to build; the trial-and-error process of discovery often led to many misconceptions, and sometimes to extreme views. Yet increasing numbers of people aspired to know more about particular subjects, especially religion, which the school system had forbidden them to explore.

The desire for knowledge, authenticity, and freedom of expression emerged from several additional sources. In the late 1960s, Yakunin and Eshliman’s letter to Patriarch Aleksii I, and other voices were calling freedom of thought and speech essential to human creativity. These voices came from people closely allied with the church. Their writings, widely circulated in samizdat, found a ready audience, above all among those who sympathized with the ideas of Yakunin and Eshliman.

“It is obvious that the absence of freedom is the death of creativity in all aspects of life,” wrote Fr. Sergei Zheludkov in his letter to Pavel Litvinov, the human rights activist, on March 30, 1968.¹⁴ An outcast Orthodox priest and a friend of Fr. Aleksandr Men, Zheludkov (1910–1984) sounded the moral voice of the old Russian religious intelligentsia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On December 3, 1969, writing to the academician Andrei Sakharov, Zheludkov criticized the Soviet effort to create an illusory world built on faith in pagan rituals and magical incantations.¹⁵ His letter decried the lasting effects of Stalinism that waged war on the human spirit and crushed the creative gifts embedded in each person. He likened the effects to the Nazi indoctrination of Germany, but such a program had lasted only a short period of time. In the Soviet Union, the consequences of Stalinism had penetrated far more deeply, because Stalinism, he said, has continued to “grow in us.” It manifested itself in various forms, most importantly in what Zheludkov referred to as “pretentiousness.” As a Soviet person, one “has an inexplicable desire to preserve, at all costs, one’s own self-respect”; to do so, one “leaves ajar before oneself, in the depths of one’s crippled soul, the willingness to adopt a false, historical and current stream of information in order to justify one’s own submissiveness.”¹⁶ Thus a person believes that the government does not make mistakes and accepts the view that the Russian people do not have the maturity for intellectual freedom, a fabrication that functions like a “fox in the vineyard.” Information, therefore, is censored; the press is tightly controlled; it is forbidden to criticize the government; and when confronted with the truth, one finds it painful to accept it.¹⁷

Zheludkov’s critique of Stalinism and his view of religion and intellectual freedom as inseparable came from the depths of his Orthodox faith. The freedom to think and speak did not belong to the government. “It does not belong to God”; it belongs to the person; it is part of one’s sacred responsibility. He quoted the apostle Paul: “Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. To freedom you are called.”¹⁸ What made Stalinism so vile, he maintained, was that it deprived humans the most precious part of their existence.

If Fr. Sergei Zheludkov’s admonitions focused on Stalinism, another significant critic turned his attention to the church itself. Boris Vladimirovich Talantov (1903–1971) was the son of an Orthodox priest, who had been caught in Stalin’s wave of arrests in the 1930s and perished in the Temnikov labor camps in Mordovia in 1940. After graduating from the Kirov Pedagogical Institute in Zaraisk, Talantov taught higher mathematics in the institute until he was fired in 1954, after the KGB traced to him an anonymous letter he published in Pravda criticizing the illegal actions of the local government.¹⁹

Although Talantov admired the True Orthodox Church, the schismatic organization that had broken away from the official church, he remained faithful to his tradition. Nevertheless, he was dismayed by its present course—the “lies,” “deceit,” and repeated “excuses for injustice” perpetuated by the Orthodox hierarchy. He had read the letter Yakunin and Eshliman sent to the patriarch and sympathized with their critique of the church’s leadership, as well as the portrayal of the “lawlessness and arbitrary behavior” of local civil administrators.²⁰ He knew Yakunin well and frequently stopped by his home when traveling to Moscow.²¹ The punishment Yakunin and Eshliman received did not prevent him from expressing his own similar views or hinder him from boldly castigating the intellectual servitude that the church had fostered.

Like Yakunin, Talantov traced the problem to Metropolitan Sergei’s 1927 agreement pledging the church’s cooperation with the Bolshevik government.²² Its declaration of loyalty had bound the church, a sacred institution, to an atheistic regime. This action had deleterious consequences: instead of the church defining social justice and the meaning of a flourishing society, the Bolshevik government alone determined them. Church theologians thus adopted the communist organization of society, the “only happy and just one” that they claimed the Gospels had always taught.²³ “In essence,” Talantov maintained, “adaptation to atheism represented a maniacal union of Christian dogmas and rites with the socio-political views of the official ideology of the CPSU.”²⁴ Most insidious, according to Talantov, were the effects on the mentality of church leaders. “Any criticism of the state,” its ideology, or the actions of its authorities was not allowed and was viewed “as a deviation from proper religious activity and as counter-revolutionary behavior. People knew that if they spoke out against the arbitrary and illegal deeds of the authorities they would be branded as criminals and subject to arrest.”²⁵ This atmosphere of fear within the body of the church stifled freedom of thought and undermined the creativity that served as the essence of humanity.

The boldness of Talantov’s writings did not shield him from the security police. He was arrested in June 1969 and later sentenced to two years in prison for his “anti-Soviet” activities. He died in prison on January 4, 1971, at the age of sixty-seven.

Beneath their harsh criticisms of the present state of affairs in the Orthodox Church and the Soviet state, the writings of Fr. Sergei Zheludkov and Boris Talantov expressed a yearning for an authentic form of Orthodoxy, a return to the ideals they believed essential to a flourishing society. Both men decried the passivity, servility, and fear that covered up the rich cultural resources that lay buried beneath the frozen surface of Orthodoxy’s heritage. Zheludkov and Talantov wanted to remove the obstacles that prevented the intellectual and personal exploration of their faith. At the core of their writings was the craving for freedom of thought, speech, and belief. Like the letters of Yakunin and Eshliman, the writings of Zheludkov and Talantov represented a fresh wind blowing within and around the church and opened a gateway for other, younger voices to explore the questions they raised.

The rejuvenated interest, as the theologian Fr. Michael Aksenov-Meerson has pointed out, did not signify the first time such a movement had occurred in the Soviet Union. During and immediately after World War II, the Orthodox Church enjoyed a brief period in which a large number of churches were reopened and religious life flourished.²⁶ Despite the wave of violence directed against the church in the prewar decade, it had not dampened the desire of the Russian people to restore places of worship. But, as Aksenov-Meerson noted, the revival in the late 1960s differed significantly from its predecessor. The earlier resurrection originated with people who had grown up in the church and were already religious believers. The young generation who led the late 1960s revival had grown up as atheists; they had been educated to consider religion as superstition and had no experience with church life. In addition, unlike their predecessors, who remained committed to the Soviet government, the young generation had no such allegiance.²⁷ They questioned everything. They especially revolted against the government’s intolerance of dissent, its reluctance to admit multiple points of view, and its restrictions on free expression.²⁸

By the late 1960s, disillusionment with the Soviet state and its supportive ideology had made deep inroads into Soviet youth. They had become disenchanted with what life under the present regime had to offer, and the state’s promised road to the future held little attraction. In their dissatisfaction with the established order and the revolutionary spirit that had animated their predecessors, they resembled similar groups of young people during the same period in France, Great Britain, and the United States. Like them, Soviet youth searched for a deeper and more authentic meaning of life than their predecessors offered. Unlike their counterparts elsewhere, however, Soviet youth were not in rebellion against the capitalist social and economic system. They rebelled against a political order that pushed them into narrowly defined social categories, limited their freedom of choice, and tried to restrict their imagination. In short, they disdained the state’s attempt to control the mind and the spirit. They presented a particular challenge to the Soviet authorities, who viewed the “convictions of the young” as essential to the future development of a secular social order.²⁹

This refusal to conform to the established order is what drew the future Orthodox priest Michael Aksenov-Meerson into open rebellion. A brilliant student of history at Moscow State University in the early 1960s, he became a dissident at the end of his first year, which resulted in his expulsion. He had decided that he could no longer accept the ideological straitjacket that forced the interpretation of history into a prescribed framework. After leaving the university, he entered a period of uncertainty and confusion about his future course. “I would have become a terrorist,” he said, “if, at that time, on a whim, I had not traveled out to the parish of Fr. Aleksandr Men,” whose church outside Moscow attracted similar young members of the Russian intelligentsia.³⁰

Fr. Aleksandr’s reputation as one of a small number of unusually gifted Orthodox priests had rapidly spread in the late 1960s in the Russian capital and other nearby cities. His parish in the small town of Tarasovka, where he served from 1962 to 1970, lay on the railroad line from Moscow to Zagorsk (Sergiev Posad), the traditional seat of Russian Orthodox theology. An ever-increasing number of Russian youth journeyed to Tarasovka each Sunday morning to attend services and engage in conversation with the well-read, open-minded Fr. Aleksandr.³¹ A master conversationalist and a staunch believer in the importance of dialogue, Men was a rare example of a priest who expressed openness to the world.³² During a time when many young people searched for new directions in their lives and questioned everything, Fr. Aleksandr offered them a fresh look at Orthodox Christianity, which they had been taught to denigrate.³³

The seeds Fr. Aleksandr planted about freedom, faith, and human purpose germinated still further in the writings of Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov.³⁴ In his early career, Levitin-Krasnov had taught Russian literature in a Leningrad elementary school. Encouraging his students to read the Symbolist poets, he raised questions about the influence of Orthodox Christianity on the poetry of this group of writers, and he discovered that his students had a keen interest in spiritual topics. “I can see before me now those thirty children, pale, disheveled little boys and urchin-like girls with pigtails, all of them with their eyes fixed on me. And I, only twenty-three years of age, wearing the same cheap jacket as they, leaning on the ink-stained teacher’s desk and reading … making no secret of my religious beliefs.”³⁵ His faith in the promise of Russian youth never wavered, and by the 1970s, Levitin-Krasnov was convinced that Russian youth had set out on a long journey. Everywhere in society, one felt the silence, but also the expectation, he wrote: “The night is over. The sleepers are waking up. Life is beginning to stir. What will the day be like?”³⁶

The dialogue Levitin-Krasnov advanced in his writings received a considerable boost in the early 1970s from an Orthodox priest who changed the entire structure of his church services. A short, broad-shouldered, ebullient man with an omnipresent smile, Fr. Dmitrii Dudko had a dynamic preaching style and welcoming approach to newcomers who entered the several churches he served in Moscow and neighboring towns in the late 1960s and early 1970s.³⁷

In 1973, Fr. Dmitrii changed the format of his Saturday evening sermons. Instead of a delivering a preconceived message, he initiated a dialogue with members of his congregation. At first, this dialogue largely focused on theological issues, but it soon evolved into other subjects. Controversial questions often came up concerning the relationship between religion and society, personal morality and responsibility, and church and state. Fr. Dmitrii, in the words of an observer, “did not ask for such provocative questions, but he did not avoid them either. He mainly insisted upon basic religious truths, upon Orthodoxy as the living content of life, upon the hopelessness of atheism.”³⁸ Although he did not set out either to challenge authority or to remake the political establishment, the methods Fr. Dmitrii employed threatened to the core the hierarchy’s top-down approach to knowledge and truth.

The open character of the Saturday evening meetings was the antithesis of the services offered in other Orthodox Churches. Word of this courageous, approachable, talented priest rapidly spread. His meetings provided an education to the five hundred or six hundred people in attendance, giving them facts and perspectives that they had not heard during their schooling. The discussions continued for nine sessions. At the tenth, Fr. Dmitrii announced that the meetings were being suspended upon orders from Patriarch Pimen.³⁹ But they had opened doors to questions about certain topics that could not easily be closed.

In the early 1970s, in Leningrad, a thriving underground literary movement that would soon parallel other such movements interested in philosophical discussion and theological searching. This underground organization raised spiritual questions, which resulted in a large outpouring of religious poetry, written in the guise of “holy foolishness” to emphasize the poets’ position as outsiders to official Soviet culture.⁴⁰ In the mid-1970s, other informal seminars among the young sprang up in Moscow, Leningrad, and several other cities. Their existence directly challenged the state’s efforts to build an atheistic political and social order. The seminars almost immediately attracted the interest of the state’s agencies of social control, most notably the KGB.

The Participants

Ideas in history do not always move in a straight line, as the English historian J. H. Hexter wrote many years ago; they take a zigzag course, advancing, retreating, and then often reappearing in different forms.⁴¹ One cannot trace a direct line between Fr. Dmitrii Dudko’s evening sessions and the student seminars that sprang up a year later. But the questions raised in the earlier discussions about freedom, community, and culture began to be explored more deeply and expansively than they were before.

In September 1974, a little more than a year after the patriarch suspended Fr. Dudko’s Saturday evening sessions, a religious-philosophical seminar was formed in Moscow. The seminar invited young people who were interested in learning more about religious issues. It was the brainchild of twenty-four-year-old Aleksandr Ogorodnikov, a former student of the All-Union State Cinematography Institute in Moscow. Born and raised in the provincial town of Chistopol, in the Republic of Tatarstan in east-central Russia, as a youth Ogorodnikov had served as a leader in the Young Pioneers and Komsomol organizations. His pathway to open rebellion against the established order followed a trajectory similar to those of other young members of the Soviet intelligentsia. A top student at all three educational institutions he attended, Moscow State University, the Urals University (he majored in philosophy at both), and the Cinematography Institute, he began to question the philosophical principles of Soviet ideology even before he arrived at the Cinematography Institute, where he hoped to become a film director. The breakthrough moment, he claimed, came after viewing the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel according to St. Matthew. Pasolini’s film closely followed the story of Christ’s life, his teachings, and the parables and contrasted them with the actions of the authorities. Soon after seeing the film, Ogorodnikov converted to Christianity and, among his fellow students, made little secret of his newly found faith. Upon learning of his conversion, the institute expelled him.⁴²

In early 1974, the plan to organize a special seminar emerged gradually in Ogorodnikov’s mind. In the past year, he had met Fr. Aleksandr Men, traveled to his parish many times, and shared his idea with Fr. Aleksandr, who encouraged him and offered advice.⁴³ Inspired by Fr. Dmitrii Dudkov’s Saturday night gatherings, which he had attended, Ogorodnikov created a seminar for open dialogue on questions that concerned many in the group. He established three principal reasons for its existence: to enhance the participants’ theological understanding, “which we could not obtain by any other means,” to develop a Christian community based on mutual love, and to engage in missionary work.⁴⁴ All these purposes violated the ideological underpinnings of the government’s political campaign to extirpate religion.

The seminar attracted some outstanding personalities who remained with Ogorodnikov throughout its existence. They included several prominent leaders: Tat′iana Shchipkova, a teacher from Smolensk; Vladimir Poresh, her former student; and Lev Regel′son, a mathematician and physicist who, before his conversion to Russian Orthodoxy, worked at the Moscow Planetarium. Their personal evolutions reveal their attraction to the Christian Seminar and the quest for a more authentic life.

Tat′iana Shchipkova served as a lecturer in the Pedagogical Institute in Smolensk, where she had taught for more than a decade. At fifty years old, she was a rare exception to the young age of most seminar participants, which included her own son and two other Smolensk residents.⁴⁵ Shchipkova specialized in classical languages, cultures, and history. In her Latin class, she often managed to integrate several sessions on the rise of Christianity in the ancient world. “I had a usual class on first-year Latin,” she wrote. “For thirteen or fourteen years, it had been my practice to teach the students about the culture and history of ancient Rome, as well as elementary Latin grammar.” She would give “the first-year students preparatory lessons on the rise of Christianity, on the personhood of Christ, on His parables, and the significance of Christianity in the subsequent fate of Rome, Europe, and humankind.”⁴⁶

After joining the Christian Seminar, Shchipkova decided to go further, resolving to be open and honest in her teaching. “On June 7 [1977], I continued my lectures on Christianity and explained to the students that the Christian religion was still alive (the first time that a teacher had told the students of such a thing). I explained to them that, in our time, it is attracting more and more educated people in the Soviet Union, as well as in other countries and that I am a believer myself.” Shchipkova continued, “We were not in the habit of telling the truth about ourselves, and so the students were unaccustomed to hearing it. They were stunned by what I said, listened in total silence, and did not ask a single question. Judging by everything, no one ran off to report me.”⁴⁷

Word of Shchipkova’s confession, however, did reach the administration. In mid-June, she was summoned before the faculty and accused of disseminating religious propaganda. She maintained that she “was not guilty of propagating anything that would risk my work and position.” “My goal,” she said, “was to give my students a representation of this huge world and its cultural phenomena.”⁴⁸ Shchipkova recounted that no one in the faculty meeting at which she was charged rose up to defend her, although she remained convinced that some had sympathetic views. The faculty dismissed her from her teaching position for what they called spreading lies.

Vladimir Poresh, like Shchipkova, had grown up in Smolensk and he studied at the Pedagogical Institute there. She recalled him as an extremely talented and sensitive student with an inquiring mind that questioned everything.⁴⁹ Poresh often remained after class to ask her about various points in her lecture, Shchipkova said, and sometimes he offered a carefully constructed counterargument. She recalled her sadness when he moved away to enter Leningrad State University.⁵⁰

By the time she next saw Poresh, in late 1969 and again in 1970, he had changed. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he had become extremely depressed. The Soviets’ violent suppression of free thought had convinced him of “his own spiritual enslavement and that of everyone around him.”⁵¹ He told her that he had contemplated suicide. But then, Shchipkova recounted, he had managed to work his way through his depression, because when she later encountered him on the streets of Leningrad, sometime in 1973, he expressed joy and hopefulness.

“I have begun a new phase of my life,” he told Shchipkova. “I’ve got to know someone called Sasha Ogorodnikov. We have decided to create a culture within a culture.”⁵² Poresh said that he had begun to read Russian religious philosophy, and although he found it difficult, he saw in it the spiritual foundation for which he had searched a long time. He and Ogorodnikov had become fast friends, recognizing each other as “fellow travelers,” and Poresh had joined Ogorodnikov in creating a similar student seminar in Leningrad.⁵³

A third leading participant in the Christian Seminar, Lev Regel′son, came from a distinguished Moscow family. Born in 1929, he was the son of a prominent professor of physics at Moscow State University. His father and grandparents were committed communists who had lived the Stalinist dream of building a new society. Regel′son lived in the home of his grandparents and barely knew his mother.⁵⁴ He matriculated at Moscow State University, where he specialized in physics and mathematics, intending to follow the same career path as his father. He was fascinated by inquiry into the physical universe and the process of discovery. “But narrow scientific endeavors did not satisfy him,” wrote Levitin-Krasnov, who knew Regel′son well. “He was constantly searching for higher truth,” Levitin-Krasnov continued:

Even in his student years, he was often carried away by the study of philosophy. First, he was enthused by Nietzsche, but was soon a little disappointed by the German philosopher, and turned to the study of Freud, whose works were suppressed and illegal at that time in the USSR. Once, he made a public report on Freud’s work at a meeting of young students, which attracted wide attention. The young, inquisitive student did not stop with the study of Freud. He turned to the works of the Russian philosopher Berdiaev, then he took up religion seriously.⁵⁵

During his years working as a physicist, Regel′son simultaneously considered himself a scientist and a religious person, although he had to keep the latter private. Afterward, following his baptism in the Orthodox Church, he was removed from his position and forced to live in the most meager circumstances. He wrote a large number of articles for samizdat publications and was one of the Christian Seminar’s oldest and most experienced participants.⁵⁶ In the late 1970s in Paris, he published The Tragedy of the Russian Orthodox Church, 1917–1945, a unique, invaluable collection of primary documents detailing the assault on religious belief and the compromises the patriarchate made to preserve the church’s existence.⁵⁷ He also became a close associate of Fr. Yakunin in the struggle for human rights. The two would write a series of significant appeals about the Soviet attack on religious liberty.

Shchipkova, Poresh, and Regel′son were all raised in atheist households. For each of them, the materialist intellectual underpinnings of the Soviet worldview proved unconvincing and led to resentment of the narrow framework it provided. They went in search of something larger, less confining, open to the world of mystery, wonder, and the imagination. Alexander Ogorodnikov described the quest of many of his cohorts as well as their disappointment in what they found in the official church: “Each of us has undergone a complex, sometimes agonizing path of spiritual questing, from Marxist convictions, via nihilism and the complete rejection of any ideology, via attraction to the ‘hippy’ lifestyle, we have come to the church. We came to it with our questions and our hopes.” But “[we were] soon convinced that our problems were ignored in church sermons, which were the only means for the religious education of believers, nor did they have a place in the pages of the church’s publication the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, which, moreover, is inaccessible to the ordinary Christian.”⁵⁸

Like most of the other participants in the Christian Seminar, Shchipkova, Poresh, and Regel′son had a higher education. They did not fit the common stereotype advanced in the Soviet media of religious believers as uneducated, superstitious, and unmindful remnants of the past. In a time when there were many captive minds, they raised questions that had no predetermined answers.

Breaking the Chains of Ideology

In 1978, Fr. Gleb Yakunin began attending sessions of the Christian Seminar. “He came to our meetings,” said his friends Viktor Popkov and Tat′iana Lebedeva, “although he listened carefully and rarely said much at all.”⁵⁹ The conversations he heard deepened his understanding of the readings the participants discussed. The quest of these young people inspired him, and he saw them as evidence of a new wave of human consciousness in the Soviet people. They had discovered deeply submerged in the Orthodox faith and in other religious traditions a wealth of thought that contradicted much of what they had heretofore known. This experience of Yakunin’s testified to his conviction that a new day had dawned in the Soviet Union, and if left unimpeded, its course was irreversible.

The awakening had not emerged spontaneously; since at least the early 1960s, young people had begun to despair of the lies they witnessed all around them. The thirst for personal freedom, freedom of the spirit, had developed its own momentum. The Christian Seminar, with its searching spirit and the desire of its participants to learn more about Orthodox Christianity, exemplified that momentum. Yakunin grasped the optimism that Aleksandr Ogorodnikov expressed, perhaps too exuberantly, about Russia’s present situation: “Russian culture today, while pushing its way out from under the rubble of terror, lies, and delusions, has given birth to an intellectual ferment which neither we ourselves nor the world in general expected.”⁶⁰

The Christian Seminar differed dramatically from the cultural and educational setting that its participants had previously known. Mark Popovskii, a young journalist, described a seminar meeting he attended. “In one of the Moscow apartments, in a condition of strict secrecy, the usual religious-philosophical Seminar of young Orthodox people just concluded. More than forty people, the majority of them from the provinces, for two days have discussed problems of philosophy, theory, and contemporary practice of Orthodoxy.”⁶¹

According to Popovskii, seminars similar to the one in Moscow had emerged in Leningrad, Smolensk, Kazan, Odesa, Ufa, Grodno, and Lviv. This was a sign that “in many cities of the country, there are young men and women, for the most part students, teachers, and very diverse kinds of intelligentsia—workers, who have moved away from the official ideology, from the left-wing radicalism and the pathos of the counter-cultural, to Orthodoxy.”⁶² The seminar sessions Popovskii attended discussed the relationship between newly converted Christians and the church as well as the writings of contemporary leftist philosophers such as Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Jean-Pierre Debré. The topic that most excited the participants was a presentation devoted to “The Culture of the Catacombs, or the Search for Free Forms of Life in Soviet Totalitarian Society.”⁶³ The discussants wanted to know how they could successfully create a dynamic, mutually supportive Christian community in the milieu of a totalitarian society. The participants proposed beginning with a summer-school camp organized during the holidays that would attract like-minded people of similar spiritual dispositions. In an isolated location, attendees could discuss a whole range of topics related to their lives and their society. They wanted to raise their children in such an environment.

During his journey, like many other seminar participants, Ogorodnikov had grown sick of what he referred to as the “spellbound spiritual captivity of ideology” and its penetration into every corner of one’s life.⁶⁴ In the depths of our despair, Ogorodnikov said, we learned that underneath the outward layer of Soviet existence, “spiritual life quietly and secretly flows, streams into the deep Soviet underground, weaving the light.”⁶⁵ This discovery, he said, was what led them to the “eternal truth” of the church and, from there, to Russia’s great spiritual writers and philosophers such as Nikolai Gogol, Pyotr Kireevskii, Aleksei Khomiakov, Vladimir Solov′ev, Nikolai Berdiaev, and Sergei Bulgakov.⁶⁶

Yakunin observed that the rising tide of interest in religion among the young was taking place outside the institutional church. According to Yakunin, the Moscow Patriarchate and its lethargic Patriarch Pimen demonstrated little interest in this religious awakening. While they did not attempt to stifle the movement, neither did they offer any encouragement.

Earlier, in 1975, Yakunin, Lev Regel′son, and an associate, Viktor Kapitanchuk, wrote to Patriarch Pimen hoping that he would be more courageous than his predecessor. “Faith without action is dead,” they had written. “Most of all, a truly believing heart cannot remain indifferent to the events taking place in the history of the world around us.”⁶⁷ This Christian doctrine, calling the church to respond to events taking place in history and its responsibility “to unmask lies and injustices,” would become a central theme in Yakunin’s life.⁶⁸

In the meantime, members of the Christian Seminar, in Yakunin’s presence, continued their quest for an authentic existence, questioning the kind of society in which they wanted to live, which the authorities deemed threatening to the Soviet order.

Raising Questions

On the morning of May 21, 1978, Tat′iana Shchipkova was sitting in her Smolensk apartment, conversing with several members of the Christian Seminar. Aleksandr Ogorodnikov and Viktor Popkov had come from Moscow to visit her, and they were joined by the sympathetic superintendent of her apartment building. Suddenly, they were interrupted by a loud knock on the door. Surprised by the arrival of additional visitors, Shchipkova asked who they were and was told “the police!” They demanded that she open the door immediately, and when she refused, they threatened to force it open. She stepped out into the hallway, slamming the door behind her. The lead police officer showed her a search warrant. “There were five of them who confronted me,” she said, a senior investigator named Kleshcheva, an assistant public prosecutor, and three men in civilian clothes. They demanded again that she open the door. When she told them that she had forgotten her key, the public prosecutor called for an ax and ordered the police to break the lock.⁶⁹

The security police had carefully watched Shchipkova’s movements, as well as those of other members of the Christian Seminar. The printed materials that circulated among seminar members, including their journal Obshchina, deeply threatened the ideological framework of the Soviet state, and while authorities had tolerated the seminar’s existence earlier, they no longer exhibited such patience. The police, joined by two witnesses (a cashier and saleswoman from a local store), entered Shchipkova’s apartment. The ensuing scene was chaotic, a combination of threats, demands, and belittling comments. The investigators searched every crevice of the apartment, pulling out papers, documents, and any little fragment of writing they could find. Spreading them out on the floor, they examined each one, looking for evidence of anti-Soviet materials. The assistant public prosecutor ridiculed the Christian Seminar, “Nowadays, when we are sending up spaceships, to believe in such nonsense.… They thought themselves up a myth, a fairy tale—a fine thing for people to waste their time on!”⁷⁰ At one point, as Shchipkova defended the seminar’s purpose, its earnest attempt to investigate Russian Orthodoxy, and its theological relevance to the present, one of the women who served as a witness expressed surprise that such an organization existed and conveyed her interest in it.⁷¹

The search of Shchipkov’a apartment lasted six hours. In the end, the police and their collaborators tied everything into bundles—books, samizdat materials, carbon paper, and manuscripts—and carted them away along with Shchipkova’s typewriter. As they departed, the emissaries of the KGB handed her an inventory of condemned books and manuscripts. They asked her voluntarily to surrender all the materials in her possession that defamed the Soviet Union; she responded she had no items that defamed the Soviet state.⁷²

The inventory, as well as Ogorodnikov’s list of readings for the seminar, offered a firsthand view of the main issues the participants explored. These materials consisted of 108 in all, and included copies of letters to various government officials, essays circulated among Christian Seminar members, and books by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian philosopher-theologians as well as Western writers. Three of the writers warrant special attention: Vladimir Solov′ev, Aleksei Khomiakov, and Henri Bergson. All three offered alternative views of religion that contributed to Yakunin’s evolving understanding of freedom of conscience, creativity, and open-mindedness.

Vladimir Sergeevich Solov′ev (1853–1900) majored in philosophy at Moscow University with an emphasis on the natural sciences and theology. Educated during a time when positivism reigned supreme among Russian educated youth, early on he began to carve out a path different from the positivists. One of Russia’s greatest philosophers, Solov′ev had a big influence on a whole generation of Russia’s most creative thinkers.

Solov′ev’s belief that God had created the universe as a single, interconnected unity lay at the core of his philosophy. When people removed any part of this unity, abstracted and made it into the whole of their perceptions, they engaged in a delusion. “We know that objects before us in the world did not fall haphazardly from the sky in a ready-made state,” Solov′ev maintained, “but were composed over time and on the earth. Knowing that they are in a constant state of becoming, we have no reasonable basis to claim that what we see before us is already completed.”⁷³ Humans were essentially creative beings endowed with a divine spirit, capable of making the world a better place, infusing society with this divine spirit, bringing all of humankind closer together. Solov′ev saw this as a fundamental principle of Christianity.⁷⁴

Members of the Christian Seminar, raised on dialectical materialism, found Solov′ev’s ideas immensely attractive. He offered the participants a different, more coherent view of the world than they had been taught. Solov′ev’s emphasis on creativity and the individual’s role in fulfilling a divine plan gave the seminar members a positive view of their own responsibilities. They did not see a conflict between science and faith, although they understood that each sphere represented a distinctive way of knowing. Together, these spheres represented parts of God’s creation, divine sources of a universal unity.⁷⁵

Drawing from Solov′ev, Vladimir Poresh wrote, “Our nation has borne incredible suffering which has formed the moral core, the religious foundation, on which a new rediscovered religious consciousness is being built.”⁷⁶ This religious consciousness, Poresh asserted, remained incomplete and infirm, but he had little doubt in Russia’s spiritual power and its role in Russia’s eventual transformation.

Speaking of the mindset of present-day Russia, Poresh was adamant in his condemnation as well as his faith in his country’s hidden resources: “We do not want talentless vulgarity, the stillness that destroys. We do not want the cynicism and despair that suppress the Word, the meaning of life. We do not want this lying [falsified] peace: we want a just war. Where are you, Holy Russia, Russia of the saints and holy men? We do not believe you are dead.”⁷⁷

In its efforts to foster a communal society, the USSR placed little emphasis on the individual. In the attempt to rediscover Christianity, members of the seminar gave special attention to the question of the person and the person’s relationship to the parish community.⁷⁸ What did freedom of the individual mean in reality, and how, Poresh asked, might it contribute to the creation of a moral order and “religious consciousness?” What did it mean to have an authentic church community, one that operated in freedom, unrestricted by the state? Frustrated by their inability to locate such a community in the contemporary church, members of the seminar looked for guidance in the writings of one of Russia’s most prophetic theological minds.

Aleksei Stepanovich Khomiakov (1804–1860), a founding member of the influential nineteenth-century Slavophiles, belonged to the landed nobility that had deep roots in the Orthodox Church. He was a poet, historian, artist, linguist, and theologian, whose writings spoke with a freshness and power that members of the conservative church hierarchy of his time often criticized. Perceiving these writings as revolutionary, church censorship prohibited most of them from being published. As the Orthodox scholar Nicholas Zernov noted, however, Khomiakov’s thoughts drew from the deepest recesses of the Orthodox tradition.⁷⁹

Among the subjects that Aleksandr Ogorodnikov listed for discussion, “The Church and Industrial Society Today” stood at the top. He added “The Individual and the Community of the Church.” Khomiakov appeared as the first name recorded on the topic. The two subjects concerned the present condition in which Soviet youth had grown up and both suggested the chief interests of the seminar’s participants, particularly the question of freedom and community. The treatment of Christ in the Gospels was central to both questions, and Khomiakov’s portrayal of Christ addressed them. As Fr. Aleksandr Men later noted in his public lecture on Khomiakov’s understanding of Christ:

He is the victor in the New Testament, but a victor who does not humiliate, who does not destroy, and who preserves human freedom. Freedom is a great gift, which distinguishes us from animals—this is the freedom that God has carefully endowed us with. Therefore, the appearance of Christ took place without force over the personality and conscience of the human being. Christ always allowed a person the opportunity to turn one’s back on Him.⁸⁰

The freedom of choice stood in stark contrast to force and violence. When it operated properly, the church community fulfilled a similar purpose.

In his seminal work, Tserkov′ Odna (The Church Is One), unpublished during his lifetime, Khomiakov defined the church as a fellowship of love, which allowed a person, in living communion with others, to separate from a lonely, ego-driven existence and become part of a living organism. The term “sobornost′,” meaning “conciliarity,” expressed this unity in freedom and love.⁸¹

It is easy to see the appeal of Khomiakov’s ideas to members of the Christian Seminar. His discussion of love, freedom, and the church community spoke directly to the founding purposes of the seminar and the main interests of its participants. The more a person lived in cooperation with others, the richer and more fulfilled life would be. The church lived not under force or constraint. It was not an authority, as some were wont to say: “God is not an authority, and Christ is not an authority, because an authority is something exterior to us.” Rather, the “church is truth. She lives in a person more real than the heart beating in his breast, or the blood running in his veins.”⁸² In this community, a person found his true calling in freedom and unity with others. These beliefs offered the participants in the Christian Seminar a much different view of life than the ideology under which they had grown up.

The discussion of the role of the church in the contemporary world, the individual and society, and the relationship between the church and freedom raised other questions concerning the church’s effectiveness in speaking to the spiritual needs of the Russian people. Such issues related to the relationship between freedom and creativity, as well as the present qualities and ways of thinking that impeded the development of a spiritual community.

The last question—the idea that certain philosophies could be counterproductive for spiritual growth—was the subject of the great French scientist and philosopher Henri Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Bergson (1859–1941) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, and several of his works, like other significant foreign books, were translated into Russian shortly after their publication. Many of them could still be found in Soviet antiquarian bookstores, and they remained fresh sources of discussion among segments of the population. Two Sources of Morality and Religion was one of these.

In this influential work, Bergson contrasted the evolution and characteristics of what he called closed and open societies.⁸³ He likened a closed society to a biological organism that attempted to define the functions of each part of the whole and fit them together for the sake of the common good. In such a society, a clan mentality predominated that aimed at preserving the status quo and safeguarding the community against outside attack. In the closed society, according to Bergson, human beings operated as ants in an ant heap.⁸⁴ The religious beliefs of the closed society focused on ritual, stability, reproduction, and keeping everything in their predefined order.⁸⁵

In contrast, the open society was less concerned with rigidly defined obligations and put greater emphasis on creativity and progress. The open society accepted that life involved adapting to changing circumstances; it operated much differently from the “anthill.” Remaining open to change, new possibilities, and discovery were paramount, and citizens operated not as cogwheels in a well-organized and disciplined mechanism, but as participants in a dynamic community. Religion in the open society emphasized love and grace rather than rigid doctrines and rituals.⁸⁶

Bergson offered seminar members a critique of the closed society, but he did not offer them a prescription for how to construct an open community. His conclusions were a good fit for the seminar participants’ quest for a new social order. His Two Sources spoke directly to the Soviet Union’s political condition, particularly the high value placed by its governing elite on stability, self-preservation, and clan mentality. In a closed society, the questions people raised had answers within a preestablished framework. In a time when there are many captive minds, according to Czesław Miłosz, one must not ask embarrassing questions, but rather accept what one is told, submerging one’s identity in the political order.⁸⁷

Seminar participants were fully aware that the security police were present all around them. The arrests of their leaders and the most energetic members would follow in 1978–1979. Yet the conversations their questions stimulated and the critiques they generated about power and violence would continue to germinate and take form in the struggle for human rights and religious liberty. In that quest, Fr. Gleb Yakunin, Lev Regel′son, and other members would play major parts.⁸⁸

The readings and conversations in which Yakunin participated in the Christian Seminar gave him hope for Russia’s future. The seminar raised questions and pointed to issues that he saw as essential to the future health of the Orthodox Church and Russian society. He believed that his country held valuable intellectual and spiritual resources that only needed to be released to foster regeneration. The Christian Seminar gave him the confidence to reach out beyond Russia’s borders to build sympathetic relationships and seek new sources of support for religious freedom.