“2. The Letters” in “Freedom and the Captive Mind”
CHAPTER 2 The Letters
In the last two months of 1965, letters sent by two young Russian parish priests, Fathers Gleb Yakunin and Nikolai Eshliman, shattered the widespread view of the Russian Orthodox Church as submissive and malleable. Although the letters were group composed, the two young priests signed them, thus taking on the responsibility of being the public face of the messages. The names of the two priests were then little recognized in the Soviet Union and the Western world. The first letter, dated November 21, they delivered to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Aleksii I, patriarch of Moscow and All-Russia; the second, written on December 15, addressed the chair of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, Nikolai I. Podgorny.1 In the context of the letters sent to Aleksii I and Podgorny, statements attributed herein to Yakunin and Eshliman, the only signatures on the documents, represent the thoughts and conclusions of the larger group with whom they collaborated.
The two letters, which challenged the Russian state and the Orthodox Church, soon received near universal attention. Excerpts were widely published and distributed, and these published accounts focused on the writers’ accusations of widespread persecution of religious believers, and included a demand that the patriarch stand up to the government’s violations of the Soviet Constitution. Historians and journalists have examined these letters, particularly the lengthy first one addressed to Patriarch Aleksii I, for their political content, which, during the Cold War, neatly fell into the narrative of the Soviet Union as an oppressor nation. But the time has come for a closer look at the documents and at the Orthodox Church and its practices at a crucial moment in the history of the Soviet Union.
The two letters reached Western Europe and the United States in the late spring and early summer of 1966 and immediately created a sensation. The National Council of Churches, which made the letters public in the United States, called them new evidence of a “not so quiet revolution inside the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow.” In London, Victor Frank, the son of the early twentieth-century Russian philosopher-theologian Semen Frank, described the letters as rare and incisive portraits of life inside the church. “Hitherto,” he wrote in the progressive Catholic weekly the Tablet, “most scholars had to rely either on Soviet press accounts or the isolated testimonies of individual believers, many of them devout but inarticulate humble folk. What we have now in the shape of this letter [to the patriarch] is a highly articulate analysis of the church-state relationship in the Soviet Union, an analysis made by two young Orthodox priests of Soviet nationality.” Expressing its surprise at the appearance of the letter to the Soviet president, the Christian Century called the first letter a document of “extraordinary historical importance.” But in the Soviet Union, perhaps taken aback by the letters’ reception and interpretation in the Western world, the view was much different: Western writers were simply misinformed; they misread the actual realities of religious life in the Soviet Union. The prominent Soviet journal Science and Religion called the two young priests “ecclesiastical extremists” who were attempting to “push the church into a position of political opposition to the regime.” Given the political passions Eshliman and Yakunin stirred and the uproar over their letters, it bears another look at the context for their actions and the immediate consequences, both for them and for the church. The story of these letters began long before 1965.2
A Gathering of Young Priests
In 1962, a group of young priests came together in the village of Alabino in the environs of Moscow, southwest of the city. As newly minted priests fresh out of the seminary or other educational institutions, none of them held positions of prominence within the Orthodox Church. Nearly all of them had recently received appointments to village parishes where they came face-to-face with the difficult realities of their calling. They gathered in Alabino to discuss the problems they encountered, to support each other in their separate endeavors, and to share the results of their individual efforts to reach people both within and outside the church. The priests prayed together, asking for divine guidance, and read the Gospels, seeking inspiration for the mission they collectively shared.
The priests were also reform-minded. They well understood the harsh conditions in which they served and recognized that the church itself was the source of many of their problems, thanks, in part, to the low levels of education held by many of their superiors and the fear these superiors had of taking any kind of bold action. But mostly, the difficulties came from outside the church. Beginning in 1959, the Orthodox Church experienced the second great wave of religious repression in Soviet times. Large numbers of churches and monasteries were closed, a virulent antireligion campaign began in the press and other media, and educational and cultural institutions portrayed religious beliefs as superstitious holdovers from the past that would soon be left behind.3 The new journal Science and Religion, which began publication in 1959, publicly spearheaded this effort, describing many of the giants of Russian cultural history as atheists. The Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev vowed to extirpate religion from Soviet life, and the years 1962 and 1963 represented the high-water mark of this effort.4
To the young priests who met at Alabino, as to all other Orthodox servitors, the Soviet government’s passage of parish reform in 1961 represented an especially onerous restriction on their activities. The parish reform was passed by a hastily convened Council of Bishops whose members were summoned to the Holy Trinity Monastery at Zagorsk on July 18, 1961, given the decree that had already been prepared, and forced to sign it on the same day. The decree crippled the priests’ authority in their parish and took away all their rights there, with the exception of allowing them to conduct church services. Authority was placed in the hands of a government-appointed council of twenty people, the desiatniki, which were often composed of older citizens and people with mental illnesses or avowed atheists—all of which made effective management of the parish extremely difficult. Most often, rights within the parish fell under the jurisdiction of the local police. This decree represented a breach of canon law as well as a serious infringement on the Soviet Constitution of 1918. In the early 1960s, Russian Orthodox parishes became subject to all kinds of arbitrary actions carried out by state representatives.5
Normally, the priests who met regularly at Alabino complained about the 1961 decree and its hindrance to their activities. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that their meetings aimed at an objective larger than this one piece of legislation. They were concerned, more broadly, with the Orthodox Church’s traditional mission and how best to fulfill that mission. These clerics were not radicals who aspired to overturn Orthodoxy’s theological message; but they were rebels against the status quo, against the static mindset that they witnessed around them, and against the policies that prevented them from reaching out to people. In the early 1960s, unpublished decrees issued by Khrushchev’s government required clergy to provide a written application each time they conducted christenings, funerals, and weddings. They could not conduct any special religious service in a believer’s private residence without special permission of the local officials.6 They wanted these restrictions removed. Moreover, they wanted the church reformed and returned to its proper roots.
Leading Voices
The group of priests that met regularly numbered about ten members. Some of them did not want their names known, and they have remained anonymous. Others, however, soon became well known; for diverse reasons, they would play prominent roles in Russia’s religious history in the second half of the twentieth century, and they included Aleksandr Men, Gleb Yakunin, Nikolai Eshliman, and Dmitrii Dudko.
Fr. Aleksandr Men was the leader of the group. It was likely his initiative that first brought the members together; originally, he served as second priest in the Alabino parish, the place of the gatherings. Only two years had passed since his ordination into the Orthodox priesthood, and Alabino was his first posting. The head priest was older and in poor health, and left most of the active duties in the parish to his young associate. In 1961, a year after Men’s posting, the elderly priest died, which left the twenty-six-year-old Fr. Aleksandr in charge of the parish. Until the late 1980s, near the end of his life, this would be the only time he had the opportunity to serve as head priest. Broadly educated and an inveterate reader of the sciences and theology, he had already begun to write the impressive, deeply researched books on the Gospels and the history of religion that could only be published in Russia many years later. Men had a lively curiosity and searching mind, an attribute that would make him very attractive to the Russian intelligentsia, who had already heard of this unusually gifted young priest and came out to Alabino in increasing numbers to meet him. Fr. Aleksandr also had an uncommon ability to speak across educational boundaries and relate to simple people. His magnetic personality drew many different kinds of people to him, occasionally including some with unsavory motives. He never wavered in his resolve to serve people. In 1962, the church transferred him to the provincial parish of Tarasovka, a settlement on the railway line between Moscow and the famous Orthodox Church center of Zagorsk. The circle of young priests who began at Alabino moved with him.7
Fr. Gleb Yakunin was in the first months of his priesthood. Men had played a major role in converting Yakunin, previously an atheist, to Christianity (discussed in chapter 1). Yakunin freely admitted his personal and intellectual debts to Men both in his later poetry and in his theological commitments. Psychologically, however, the two young priests were very different. Although well-read, broadly educated, and possessed of a curious mind, Yakunin had a fiery temperament and sometimes acted impulsively, with scant regard for the consequences. He did not hesitate to speak out boldly, and often loudly, against acts that he considered unjust. Men was the deeper thinker, the more scholarly student of history and philosophy, Yakunin the more politically active person, who had little hesitation in challenging authority. Like Men, he made friends easily, although Men proved much more circumspect in his closest affiliations than Yakunin. Both, however, had a deep commitment to the Orthodox Church and to the belief that it needed to reach far beyond the narrow physical boundaries that the Russian government prescribed.
Fr. Nikolai Eshliman was one of the older members of the group. Thirty-four years old when he joined the gathering in 1964, he had a lively personality, was a gifted storyteller, and had a large number of friends. A member of the Moscow intelligentsia, Eshliman and his wife, Irina, in their younger years held open court in their one-room apartment in the city of Dmitrov, where their intelligentsia friends gathered to drink and hold long conversations about literature and the arts. Aleksandr Men met Eshliman in 1956, and the two immediately became friends, although they had dissimilar backgrounds and personalities. Many people took Eshliman to be Jewish because of his last name, but, in reality, he was a descendent of Scottish forebears whose name was Ashley and who, as skilled craftspeople, had immigrated to Russia during the period of Catherine the Great. Eshliman’s mother was a member of the Russian nobility who had passed on to her son the social mannerisms and speech of her class. “He was an aristocrat—and I was never one of them,” Fr. Aleksandr explained. “Nikolai was an aristocrat at heart, a person with majestic aristocratic manners, mixed in with artistic qualities. He played the piano well, sculpted something, drew—there was something bohemian in him.”8 Eshliman worked first as an artist, a reconstructionist of church art. But in his early thirties, he changed course; he enrolled in the Moscow Theological Academy to study for the priesthood. He was ordained in 1961. Once he entered this vocation, he threw his whole being into it. He served with a passion and grace one rarely saw, Men said. “He preached excellently. His people loved him.… I myself attended his services and saw how his people loved him—because he was a gentleman, in the best sense of this word. His parishioners somehow felt in him a ‘gentleman’—they sensed this immediately.”9 Eshliman served in a large church a short distance from Moscow before his transfer to a church in the center of the city.
Father Dmitrii Dudko was the senior member of the group. He had also traveled the most difficult personal road to reach this point in his life. Forty years old, he came from a peasant village in the deep interior of Russia, the son of hardworking parents who struggled night and day to provide sustenance for their nine children. Dudko vividly remembered the Stalinist collectivization campaign, when state officials entered their hut and asked the family for all the grain they possessed. He recalled his father’s protest, his cry to the grain collectors that he would not be able to feed his children, and the indifference of a state official as he removed the family’s one remaining sack of grain. A bright and curious child, Dudko stood out from all the other children in the village; he was an avid reader, absorbing every book he could get his hands on, including the Gospels, which he read at an early age. After the war, he heard of an open seminary in Moscow and, in 1946, he left his village to enroll.
The seminary, housed in Novodevichy Monastery in the same quarters that Tsarevna Sofiia had once lived, served as the first step to a vocation filled with numerous twists and turns. Achieving high marks on the entrance exams, he enrolled in Moscow’s premier religious institution, its Theological Academy, where he prepared for the priesthood. His studies, however, were interrupted. He was arrested, ostensibly for his poetry, but in reality for being what the police considered an “unreliable person,” and from there he followed the usual path for those arrested: the Lubyanka and Butyrka prisons, followed by a labor camp in the Ural Mountains where he spent eight and one-half years.10 The labor camp, despite its harsh conditions, exposed him to a wide assortment of people, from the coarsest, most foul-talking individuals to the most highly educated intellectuals of the “old school.” The camp became, for Dudko, his “university”; but most of all, according to a close friend, Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov, in the time he spent there, he prayed.11 In 1956, he was rehabilitated and he returned to Moscow and the Theological Academy to write his dissertation. He completed it two years later, and titled it “Sobornost′ and the Church” (Sobornost′ i Tserkov′), which expounded on the view of the Russian philosopher/theologian Nikolai Berdiaev that freedom was the foundation of the Church community. Otherwise, Dudko argued, the Church would become heavily contaminated with papism, an illness that had become embedded in Russian Orthodoxy.12 Dudko was ordained as a deacon in November 1960 and shortly afterward as a priest. In 1962, when he became an active member of the gathering of young priests, he served in the Church of the Kazan′ Virgin in Moscow.13 Short in stature, balding, with wire-rimmed glasses, he was fearless in his approach to Christianity and his critique of the church.14
The group of priests who gathered around Fr. Aleksandr Men represented some of the best and brightest of the Russian Orthodox clergy. All of them were well-educated and deeply steeped in the Gospels and Orthodox theology. All had their family roots in the Russian people; not one of the four came from a clerical family, and they maintained their ability to address the common people. All four believed the church had to become more accessible to people, young and old, and they were not to be hindered by obstacles, whether from within the church or from without, that prevented them from fulfilling what they believed to be their appointed mission. All four were married: Men to Natal′ia Fedorovna, a bookkeeper who worked in Zagorsk; Yakunin to Iraida Georgievna, who was employed part time in a Moscow office; Eshliman to Irina, a fellow artist and the granddaughter of the former Russian prime minister Sergei Witte; and Dudko to Nina Ivanovna, who worked in an office on the other side of Moscow from their house. All four priests—and one might well assume the other members of their group—held out hopes that the church could be reformed and made again into a powerful presence in people’s lives. In the early 1960s, they were virtually unknown. In a short time, their activities would no longer be shrouded in obscurity.
A Frequent Visitor
By 1963, Archbishop Yermogen (Aleksii Stepanovich Golubev) already had a reputation as one of Russia’s most accomplished religious leaders and a staunch defender of the Orthodox Church. In this same year, shortly after he moved to a diocese near the town of Kaluga, he began to visit the gathering of priests meeting in Alabino. The presence of such a distinguished clergyman had a large influence on the group that formed around Fr. Aleksandr Men.15 Erudite, accomplished, and knowledgeable about the inner workings of the church and its conditions in the countryside, Yermogen had experienced the best and the worst of dealing with both the church hierarchy and state authorities. In the past, he had been extremely skilled at navigating through the treacherous political waters in which the Orthodox Church operated.16
After World War II Yermogen sought to keep churches open in each of the dioceses he served. Despite heavy pressure from the local authorities to close them, he managed to persuade local officials to leave churches under his jurisdiction alone, fearlessly resisting arbitrary attempts to eliminate their operations. In the late 1940s, Patriarch Aleksii I sent him to Samarkand to serve as a pastor; following Yermogen’s outstanding service in the large Uzbekistan city, in 1956, the patriarch appointed him bishop of Tashkent and Central Asia. There again he was remarkably active, expanding the local church council three times and building the “largest church complex successfully completed by the Russian Orthodox Church since the Revolution.”17 This accomplishment earned him accolades from Patriarch Aleksii I, who elevated him to the rank of archbishop and “congratulated him in the warmest terms.”18
Yermogen’s energetic efforts on behalf of the church, however, did not escape criticism. In 1959, simultaneous with the beginning of Khrushchev’s antireligion campaign, the Tashkent press launched a vicious attack on him and other priests in his diocese.19 As the attack intensified, the patriarch transferred Yermogen to Kaluga, in central Russia. After a successful beginning, however, he soon ran into difficulties with a Soviet official, Fr. P. Riakov, who wanted to make all appointments within the diocese himself, presuming that the archbishop would simply “rubber-stamp” his selections.20 Yermogen viewed these actions as an unacceptable infringement on the church’s prerogatives.
These limitations on the church’s authority and the interference of secular officials in religious activities were not limited to the Kaluga diocese but widespread. They had become increasingly problematic since the 1961 parish reform, so in the summer of 1965, Archbishop Yermogen and eight bishops delivered a petition to the patriarch asking him to redress the abuses. Led by Yermogen, the delegation lamented what they called detrimental interference in their operations and requested that the patriarch rescind the parish reform.
It was a bold act, but one conceived in the hope that members of the delegation would receive a sympathetic hearing. The response they received, however, was the opposite of what they had wished. The bishops had demanded that the patriarch, for the sake of the church, no longer act as a submissive agent of the Soviet government. In his response to the bishops, however, Patriarch Aleksii I bowed to the pressure of the head of the Council for Religious Affairs, V. A. Kuroedov, and rejected their appeal. The patriarch summoned Archbishop Yermogen to appear before the Holy Synod, where he accepted full responsibility for the bishops’ conduct.21 Ordered to express remorse for his actions and delete his name from the declaration, the archbishop refused. The patriarch’s response came almost immediately. Again, under pressure from the head of the Council for Religious Affairs, Yermogen was removed from his Kaluga diocese and forced into retirement at the Zhirovitskii Monastery in Belorussia. Yermogen never left the Zhirovitskii Monastery: he died there on April 7, 1978.22
Blueprint for Regeneration
Historians and others have generally attributed Archbishop Yermogen’s dismissal with being the catalyst behind the larger group’s decision to send the letters they wrote to Patriarch Aleksii I and Chairman Podgorny.23 The timing of the two letters came almost immediately after the negative response Yermogen received. The group’s outrage at this turn of events must have precipitated their actions, their efforts to add their own voices to attempts to redress their grievances about the church’s plight. Yermogen had opened the door to a frank discussion of these injustices and for a return of the Orthodox Church to its proper role in Russian life. Yakunin and Eshliman wanted to show that the ideas articulated by Archbishop Yermogen and the eight bishops had wider support inside the church than the patriarch imagined. “The indications are that unless the patriarch and his advisors in Moscow give more weight to the demand for reform than they have yet done,” a leading scholar wrote, “they will find themselves increasingly isolated from their church—particularly from its younger members who did not endure the terrors of Stalin’s purges.”24
But other reasons also underlay the writing of the two letters. Many of the ideas put forward in the letters had long been discussed in the gathering of young priests around Fr. Aleksandr Men. The members of the group strongly believed in the need for Russian Orthodox Church reform. They wanted the church to be more responsive to people, and they hoped to enhance its voice in Russian life. The members were Russian patriots; they had seen the Orthodox Church spring back to life during World War II, when Stalin had permitted its resuscitation, and they had witnessed its contributions to the victory over the Nazi invaders. They knew the church’s potential to enliven the countryside, but only if the shackles hindering its activities were removed, allowing it to play the role endowed on it by history and tradition. Archbishop Yermogen’s visits to the gathering and encouragement of their ideas had furthered their thinking.25 The presence of the prestigious senior leader of the church had given them hope that their desires for reform had widespread support among the Russian clergy.
Despite the outcome of Yermogen’s declaration to the patriarch, the timing was right for reform. A year earlier, in October 1964, Nikita Khrushchev had been dismissed and a new administration had come into power. Participants in the gatherings at Alabino and Tarasovka could well remember what had taken place shortly after Stalin’s death in 1953 and how that period had opened up a Pandora’s box, bringing with it a “thaw” and fundamental changes in the state’s relationship with its citizens. Many of the most egregious abuses of the previous epoch had been rescinded. A similar expectation now presented itself. The country’s new leaders severely criticized Khrushchev, accusing him of “subjectivism,” “harebrained scheming,” ignorance, and reaching “half-baked conclusions.”26 The opportunity to make known to both the upper echelons of the government and the church the abuses and legislative inconsistences of the recent past would surely provoke fundamental reform.
The letters that the group composed did not emerge as spontaneous compositions. The writing took place over a two-year period, during which their content went through many drafts, beginning with a short piece written by Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov.27 During the next two years, some fifteen to twenty priests proposed ideas for inclusion in the letters, including Archbishop Yermogen, Fr. Aleksandr Men, and newcomers to the group such as Lev Regel′son, Feliks Karelin, and Viktor Kapitanchuk.28 Fr. Aleksandr wrote a three-page draft of the letter to the patriarch, protesting the harmful effects of the parish reform, and asked Yakunin to read it. “No, this is entirely inadequate,” Fr. Gleb responded. “It is necessary to hammer them! Hammer! So that it hits them hard.”29
The letters, therefore, represented a corporate endeavor, an ambitious plan to remove the heavy shackles on the church and provide a blueprint for the future role of the Orthodox Church in Russia.
In drawing up the plan, the priests knew they would have little chance of success without additional support. “We knew very well that we could not accomplish anything tangible without the backing of our bishops,” Yakunin said. “We sought out bishops sympathetic to our cause; one of them was Archbishop Yermogen, and all of us spent a lot of time meeting with him personally.”30 Yakunin believed they had the backing of many other bishops who longed for the Orthodox Church to recover its past traditions. Yakunin also believed, perhaps naively, that Patriarch Aleksii I “secretly supported the reformist movement” and that “letters like ours were needed” to encourage the government to make certain changes in its policies toward the Orthodox Church.31 Whereas others might have failed in the past, Yakunin thought the patriarch was simply waiting for a significant moment to reassert the church’s rightful place in the state.
Frs. Gleb Yakunin and Nikolai Eshliman knew that they were taking enormous risks. In putting their names on the two letters, the priests realized the dangers they faced and what it would mean not only to the futures of their priesthoods but also to their families. Both men had studied Russian history and were fully conscious of reformers inside and outside the church who had failed and suffered the consequences. “We well understood that we were like kamikazes and that sooner or later the state might come crashing down on us.… But the church needs not only prophets but a prophetic role in society,” Yakunin said.32 The two men signed the letters thinking they were contributing to that prophetic role. Yakunin and Eshliman assumed that many others would affix their names to the letters, but they turned out to be mistaken. Whether out of fear, reconsideration, or personal reasons, others did not follow through, leaving the signatures of Yakunin and Eshliman as the only names on the letters, the only two to go forward.
The ultimate goals of the letters were not only religious but also social. “In those times, many of us who had come to know the church,” Yakunin said, “believed the church had to be not only a way of performing the liturgy, but had to be something more, and we were looking for ways to bring about a renaissance in the church, a revival of sorts so that the church could compete and be viable in our society.”33 Making the church more energetic and giving it greater relevance to the needs of the people were the primary reasons underlying the two letters. How were these purposes to become realities? How did the letters portray a coming religious renaissance in Russian society?
Although they included plenty of harsh accusations, the letters represented much more than a criticism of the governing apparatus. They offered a blueprint for the church’s regeneration and a prospectus of the Orthodox priesthood’s role in that revival. Viewed in its full context, the letter addressed to Patriarch Aleksii I had a central theme: to become effective, the Orthodox Church had to recover its authentic voice. The authors of the letter emphasized the church’s silence during some of the most cataclysmic events of the twentieth century. This silence betrayed the church’s mission of advising the ruler and providing succor to the people when moral issues confronted both of them. Yet, for many years, the church had failed to fulfill its obligations. Its silence bespoke a “spiritual weakness,” a sinful lack of responsibility, and the letter writers called upon the patriarch, as the conscience of the Russian Orthodox Church, to redress this grievance. The patriarch’s smothering quietude was no longer tolerable. As parish priests, the authors said, we “consider it impossible to remain silent about those who transgress the rights of the church. These transgressions have produced a dangerous situation and, for all of your pastors, they are the reasons for ever growing anxiety, constant worry, and many embarrassing situations.”34
As Yakunin had desired, the letters placed the church’s present problems in the larger context of Russian history. They sought to remind the patriarch of the historical ideal of the relationship between the Orthodox Church, as the bearer of Russia’s moral traditions, and the government as the protector of the Russian land. Although the letters offered only a general outline, they referenced the period before the time of Tsar Peter I and his Ecclesiastical Regulation of 1721. Before Peter I, the church and the state had operated cooperatively, with the state seeking the church’s spiritual support and blessing (simfoniia) in matters concerning the citizens’ welfare. In turn, the church sought the state’s material support in order to care for the lives of its citizens. In early Russian history, according to the letters that Yakunin and Eshliman sent forward (see figure 2.1), the church had fulfilled this mission, and it had made a singular contribution to the national development of the Russian state and was “inseparably connected with the fate of the Russian people.”35 During some of the darkest periods of the past, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the country lay under the Mongol yoke, the Orthodox Church had preserved the sense of national unity among the people. During a time when brutality had flourished everywhere, the Orthodox Church had offered moral guidance. Additionally, it had provided the ideological underpinnings to the unification of Russian lands under the leadership of Moscow.
The historical excursion provided in the letters represented a simplistic, overgeneralized portrait of the church’s relationship with the state. The main purpose of this depiction, however, lay in reminding the authorities of the church’s significant role in defining the identity of the Russian people. The letters also attempted to bring attention to the importance of the All-Russian Church Council of 1917–1918, convened after the fall of the tsarist government, which endeavored to restore the symphonic ideal that had prevailed before the secular reforms of Peter I. The Church Council rejected the drawing of a hard line between spiritual and secular authorities and likened the act to the desire that “sun should not shine, fire should not warm up. By the internal law of her existence, the church cannot renounce her calling to enlighten, to transform the whole of human life, to imbue it with her rays.”36
The contributions of the church, therefore, extended beyond Russia’s spiritual consciousness to the evolution of Russian culture. On this topic, the letter to the patriarch presented an argument that countered the prevailing communist ideology, to what they called compliance with this “primitive ideology” and the patriarch’s failure to articulate publicly a dissenting point of view. They maintained that it was incorrect to depict science and religion as entirely separate disciplines; historically, “science and faith independently contributed to and strengthened each other.”37 As support, the letter to the patriarch referenced the Russian pioneering giant of the sciences Mikhail Lomonosov, the founder of Moscow University. Bolshevik historians had made him out to be a staunch atheist, but, in reality, he represented the opposite. In his famous ode “To God,” his poetry, and his other writings, Lomonosov gave thanks for the inexplicable benevolence of God and the gift of creativity that Lomonosov viewed as endemic in human beings.38
A primary theme of the letter to the patriarch consisted of the creative power of human beings and its divine source. This divine source marked the highest forms of Russian culture: the masterpieces of early icon painting, the writings of the Church Fathers, the poetry of Alexander Pushkin, the classical nineteenth-century writing and art of Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Fyodor Tyutchev, Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Solov′ev, and Viascheslav Ivanov.39 The letter made a polemical argument, but its purpose went beyond polemics to reminding the patriarch of his responsibility to uphold his sacred obligations to the church and overcome his silence. Additionally, the letter emphasized the large treasure house of spiritual riches that the official establishment generally ignored. That valuable collection held a substantial contingent of Russian thinkers who needed to be rediscovered, ranging from the nineteenth-century writers Aleksei Khomiakov and Konstantin Leontiev to the twentieth-century theologian-philosophers Frs. Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Pavel Florenskii.40 Most important, all these giants of Russian culture had been nourished within the bosom of the church; they represented an “open spirit,” a constant desire to see the world afresh. They were the opposite of the “closed mentality” that turned inward, disconnected from worldly realities and exigencies.
In expressing the relationship between religion and Russian culture, the letter to the patriarch is remarkably like those ideas expressed nearly twenty-five years later by Fr. Aleksandr Men. In the late 1980s, Men similarly sought to stake a claim to earlier cultural traditions. He interpreted the Incarnation as a call to creativity, a concrete summons to reach out to the world, not to reject or turn away from it.41 Creativity, Men said, expressed a “spontaneous movement within the person … some kind of ringing in the soul, a desire for transformation coming from the depths of one’s being,” diametrically opposed to submission to some external authority.42 In his lectures in the late 1980s, presented shortly before his death in 1990, Fr. Aleksandr discussed many of the same creative people mentioned in Yakunin’s and Eshliman’s letter to the patriarch.43 He sought an accessible bridge to earlier cultural traditions, reaching back beyond the Soviet state in an attempt to recapture certain ways of thinking. It may be that the similarities between Fr. Aleksandr’s lectures and the earlier letter were incidental. But, given the parallel thoughts, it is more likely that Fr. Aleksandr, as a member of the group of young priests who met in the 1960s, wrote that part of the letter dealing with history and creativity.
According to the letter writers, the church had labored for a long time under a “heavy burden.” They attributed this to two reasons: first, church leaders had too willingly submitted to the demands of lay authorities who ought not, by canon law, to exercise command over them. This acquiescence began more than two hundred years ago, with the Ecclesiastical Regulation of Peter I. It had continued under the Bolsheviks, but with one major difference: after the Russian Revolution, lay officials were replaced by atheistic authorities, with devastating effects on the self-government of the church. The second reason, related to the first, was that parish life, the lifeblood of the church, had suffered a heavy blow. Under the Bolshevik government, the scope of the parish’s activities had diminished and was eventually stifled. Consequently, the capability of the church to fulfill its proper functions had greatly suffered.44
In making these extremely negative assertions about the Synodal Church, however, the letter writers’ views overgeneralized the state’s power over the church. Recent research, particularly the work of the historian Gregory Freeze, has disproved the portrayal of a submissive church in tsarist Russia. In reality, the church had a much larger degree of autonomy than earlier historians often asserted.45 Moreover, the claim that the new Bolshevik government devastated parish life after the 1917 Revolution is inaccurate. Although the upper echelon of the church suffered a crippling blow, beneath that level, in the 1920s and 1930s, parish life witnessed a reinvigoration and restoration of rights lost under the tsarist regime. Parishioners, including laypersons, took on numerous responsibilities, more than they had previously been allowed to assume.46
Presently, with the downfall of Khrushchev’s rule, the time was propitious for fundamental reform, in which the patriarch, Yakunin and Eshliman believed, had to take the lead. In hopes that the patriarch would follow suit, the letter offered historical examples of Orthodox leaders and other prominent figures who had courageously stood up to the authorities. The letter referenced the archbishop of Rostov, Georgii Dashkov, who, during the time of Peter I, advocated the resurrection of the patriarchate. In the 1740s, two members of the synod proposed the abolition of Peter I’s Ecclesiastical Regulation. In the early nineteenth century, the Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin had emphasized the dangers of autocracy that was unrestricted by any sacred power. The letter to the patriarch quoted other critics of the government’s authority over the church, including the bishop of Eniseisk, Nikodim Kazantsev, who, in 1874, decried the illegitimacy of a secular power holding supreme legal authority over a sacred institution. The letter mentioned the Slavophile writer Ivan Sergeevich Aksakov, who likewise pointed out the negative consequences of the Holy Synod; the synod’s power, he wrote, “diminished the soul” by replacing “a church ideal with a government ideal.” As the late nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov′ev maintained, this led to an “official church, governed by civil servants, in which the church became only a government institution, a ‘secondary branch of a bureaucratic administration.’ ”47 The long-term effects on the church’s true mission were devastating.
Nearly forty years earlier, the letter to the patriarch observed, the All-Russian Church Council of 1917–1918 had redressed these grievances in its restoration of the patriarchate. But the antireligion campaigns of the Bolshevik regime had again crippled the church, and the stifling controls of church life had turned this sacred institution into a ghost of its true self. The two priests wanted reform, but the letter Yakunin and Eshliman sent expanded their desire for reform into a larger question about the church’s identity and purpose in the present-day Soviet Union. By focusing primarily on criticisms of the Soviet government’s actions, analysts have generally overlooked this issue. The two priests’ condemnation of government policies is an important part but not the only significant aspect of the letter Yakunin and Eshliman sent to the patriarch.
In the text, the word “conscience” appeared four times. The church was viewed as the “conscience” of the nation. Thus, the church embodied a sacred trust: it held the key to the judgment of right and wrong, good and evil, and this capacity could not be obliterated without doing serious injury to the nation’s well-being. Yet what the letter called the “asphyxiation of church life” had produced an extremely harmful situation: the church no longer fulfilled its divine task as the arbiter of good and evil.48 The silence had come about not only because of external acts of violence but also because of an internal view that such silence protected the church, shielding it from total destruction. In reality, the opposite was true. This failure to speak out and to fulfill its role had infected the body of the church with a deadly bacillus, “implanting in it a submissive and pliable conscience.”49
“The Orthodox Church is indeed the house of God, the focal point of church life, the spiritual table which feeds the incorruptible gifts of divine grace.”50 The letter sent by Yakunin and Eshliman proclaimed the church to be much more than a spiritual space, more than an edifice of stone. It encapsulated the entire sense of religious expression, the encounter with the holy, which, the text claimed, “Orthodox people have loved from earliest times.”51 As Fr. Sergei Bulgakov had written, the beauty of the church had a powerful attraction: it unified spiritual beauty with the beauty of this world.52 The divine and the human merged in it. It also brought together members of the community, forging bonds between each person and the divine. The callous, widespread closure of churches carried out by the government in recent years, the letter maintained, destroyed those bonds, and it would eventually have catastrophic moral consequences.
When the leaders of the church kept silent and failed to protect their commitment, they betrayed their sacred calling. The bureaucratic structure under which the state had placed the church produced a wholesale corruption of its purpose and foundation. By passively submitting to this bureaucratic structure, the leadership of the church violated the “sacred treasury,” the beauty entrusted to it by its predecessors. In passionate—and patriotic—language, the letters called upon the church leadership not to deny this heritage:
Because not for this did our most Holy Lady take the Russian church under her merciful protection; not for this did the first apostles of the Slavs preach the Word of God; not for this did the glorious army of Russian saints stand in the church, “invisibly praying to God for us”; not for this did St. Sergius—the great servant of God—shine forth in the heart of Russia; not for this did the holy blood of Russian martyrs flow abundantly; not for this have the Easter bells rang out over Russia for a thousand years with such triumph as has never been heard elsewhere in the world.53
As an instrument of God, the church assigned a vital role to the ministry. Given the chaos in which the parish priest functioned during the past two decades, and especially recently, the letter to the patriarch attempted to redefine that important position. Pastoral obligations served as the “foundation of the church,” and the priest always had to reach out to his people. If state authorities severely hampered the priest’s activities, he could not fulfill this time-honored responsibility. He had an obligation to pray for his people, to be present in their homes during times of suffering, to conduct wedding ceremonies, to perform requiems for the deceased, and to baptize children, both in private homes and in cemeteries, all of which he should be able to do without special state authorization.54 He had to manage effectively the economic and administrative affairs of the parish.55 During times of profound suffering, “who else, if not the pastor, must lay down his life for the sheep and protect his flock from destruction.”56 Yet in all these instances, recent government regulations put obstacles in the path of each priest’s capacity to carry out his responsibilities.57
The letter Yakunin and Eshliman sent mentioned “freedom of religion” and “freedom of conscience” only twice, but both terms were placed at strategic points. The first the letter called a “sacred right,” while the second it emphasized when discussing the teaching of children.58 Both terms were cited in relation to the government’s illegitimate interference into the realm of the sacred. The Soviet Constitution of 1918 guaranteed “freedom of religion.”59 When the church allied itself with the government and submitted to that authority, it lost its quest for social justice and corrupted its divine mission.60 The church ought never to give up the sacred meaning of religious freedom and freedom of conscience, yet it had surrendered both in the false hope that its survival depended on such a sacrifice. These freedoms had to be reclaimed for the Russian Church to experience a renaissance.
The Language of Protest
In addition to their letter to the patriarch, Yakunin and Eshliman sent a second letter, which was addressed to the chair of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Written on December 15, 1965, it contained numerous accusations and charges directed against the state authorities. The letter underscored the constitutional right to protest against what it called the flagrant abuse of the laws. In violation of both socialist and state laws, such transgressions, the letter claimed, were carried out repeatedly by the state authorities.61
As distinct from the first letter, the second one couched its argument in clever language in the context of Soviet politics. A main charge justifying the recent dismissal of Nikita Khrushchev as political leader of the Soviet Union, it said, related to “subjectivism and bureaucracy in the leadership.”62 Instead of serving as an office to resolve conflicts and solve problems, Eshliman and Yakunin charged, the Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs had exerted control over decisions that rightfully should have been made by the Moscow Patriarchate. This practice had allowed a bureaucratic office to interfere in the internal life of church bodies. This madness, according to the second letter, had not ended with Khrushchev’s ouster.63 The atmosphere of “anti-religious fanaticism,” so rampant in the recent past, had erupted in many locales, to the detriment of state stability.64
The letter to Nikolai Podgorny made several specific charges about bureaucratic interference in the internal affairs of the church. Representatives of the Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs had repeatedly issued unofficial, arbitrary oral decrees; removed and transferred clergymen from one diocese to another; displaced and ruined sacred objects; closed a massive number of churches; destroyed religious art; and violated the separation of church and state. “A persistent legacy of the period of arbitrariness” remained and had to be rooted out.65 The above-mentioned violations of the separation of church and state, which the Soviet Constitution, the fundamental law of the land, had guaranteed, the letter boldly said, represented criminal offenses.66 State officials often concealed their illegal actions. Using language straight out of the past, when Soviet leaders had asked the people to report violations of socialist legality and incidents of property destruction to the security police, Yakunin and Eshliman, as senders of the letter, claimed it their responsibility to bring those acts of subterfuge to the attention of the authorities.67
If the letter addressed to the patriarch had pleaded with him, as head of the Russian Orthodox Church, to fulfill his historic responsibilities, the letter addressed to the chair of the Presidium demanded that he redress “flagrant violations” of the laws. The second letter was an aggressive document. It was not a petition, did not make requests, and was not a supplication from citizens of the state. Rather, the language was harsh, accusatory, and fearless. It charged state officials with carrying out “scandalous policies,” radically distorting the laws, and willfully violating the core principles of socialist justice. Earlier, Archbishop Yermogen had counseled Yakunin, Eshliman, and their fellow priests not to go too far and not to act too precipitously. “He told us that we had to be careful and try not to make matters worse than they were,” Yakunin said.68 Whether they acted too rashly or idealistically may be subject to dispute. They had assumed, mistakenly, as it turned out, that their protests to the leadership would receive broad support. In the end, however, they acted alone. Why, then, did Yakunin and Eshliman take such an aggressive, uncompromising stand that was almost certain to provoke a strong response?
Who Wrote the Letters?
The authorship of the letters to the patriarch of Moscow and All-Russia and to the chairperson of the Presidium of the USSR remains a debatable question. As this chapter has argued, many members of the group of young priests who gathered around Fr. Aleksandr Men contributed to the letter, both directly and indirectly. The precise origins of the letters might be inferred during a conversation between Men and Yakunin about letters written by numerous small-town priests concerning the onerous burdens placed on them by the 1961 parish reform. Fr. Aleksandr put forth the idea about writing a group letter that would make an authoritative statement about these obstacles and questioning the legitimacy of the 1961 Church Council that had endorsed the parish reform. According to Men, Yakunin “was ecstatic at the idea and kissed me in his enthusiasm.”69 He immediately began to put the plan into action. He spread the idea among others in their group, including Nikolai Eshliman, Fr. Dmitrii Dudko, and Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov. Fr. Aleksandr and Levitin-Krasnov had formed a close friendship. Not surprisingly, he was drawn into the discussion of writing a letter to Patriarch Aleksii I on the revitalization of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The group met in Fr. Aleksandr’s home in Semkhoz to discuss what needed to be done.70 Their meeting must have been a lively occasion, filled with spirited conversation about both the possibilities and the risks. All the participants shared the view that something had to be done to protest the oppressive conditions under which the church operated. They also believed they had to expand the number of participants in their plan. They soon did so, holding a subsequent gathering at Eshliman’s country dacha and attended by ten guests who generated concrete ideas about how to move forward. That meeting led to Fr. Aleksandr Men’s composition of the three-page document setting forth their objectives and raising a whole series of questions about church policy. Levitin-Krasnov also developed a ten-page essay that went much farther, in which he elaborated on the church’s role in Russian national life and criticized the church leadership for its failures to defend that role.71
Yakunin was eager to act.72 He believed the issues were too important to wait, and in this he was joined by Nikolai Eshliman. But the actual composition of the letters still needed to be worked out, the ideas coming from various people had to be integrated, and the precise wording of what would be an explosive document remained to be done. Fr. Aleksandr, who had the requisite writing and editorial skills to carry out these tasks, did not wish to participate. Following the response to Archbishop Yermogen’s petition, he was uncertain about whether the present was the most propitious time to send the letters his fellow priests had in mind. He wanted a lot more deliberation before taking such a large risk. Moreover, despite his regard for Yakunin as a person, he did not take too seriously the chance that the letter would actually come to fruition. “I knew that Gleb would never write one line,” Fr. Aleksandr said, “and Nikolai would actually produce something, but very slowly—terribly slowly—super slowly, and he would not finish it. Therefore, I was not especially concerned.”73 Both Yakunin and Eshliman, Fr. Aleksandr believed, were too busy carrying out their day-to-day priestly duties to devote themselves to the time-consuming task of writing these letters.74
At this point, a fateful turn of events took place. Sometime earlier, a new arrival in Men’s parish impressed nearly everyone who had gathered there. Eventually, this newcomer was to become extremely controversial, but at first, he had a very positive impact. This person, Feliks Karelin, was a brilliant talker who could, Men said, “speak for hours ‘as though out of a book.’ ”75 An expert in Byzantine art and theology, an erudite spokesperson, and charismatic character, he quickly acquired a following among some of the young people in the parish.
Karelin had once been a member of a group of young intellectuals who had come together in Moscow to study religion and philosophy. When the police had arrested members of the group years earlier, Karelin was among them. He spent ten years in a prison camp, which had been his “university education.” In the camps, among professors, scholars, and intellectuals who were also serving prison sentences, he acquired firsthand, specialized knowledge of the history and theology of Byzantine culture. Liberated from prison during Khrushchev’s “thaw,” he married a Russian actress and lived in several places, including Tashkent and Irkutsk. In Irkutsk, at the same time that Men and Yakunin were students, he had heard of Men and tried, unsuccessfully, to meet him. But in the early 1960s, in Moscow, he encountered Gleb Yakunin; the two became friends, and Yakunin, charmed by Karelin, brought him to Men’s parish.
In the parish, shortly after Karelin’s arrival, two circles formed: the first, around Karelin, focused on reading and discussing Russian theology and philosophy, particularly writers such as Vladimir Solov′ev, Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Pavel Florenskii, Nikolai and Evgenii Trubetskoi, Vasilii Bolotov, and others. This circle included Gleb Yakunin, Lev Regel′son, a former physicist; Viktor Kapitanchuk, a church art restorer; and several others. A second circle, centered around Fr. Aleksandr Men, read more broadly than the first, both in the Russian religious and philosophical tradition and outside it. Members wanted to become better acquainted with the exciting new developments in worldwide theology by reading and discussing writers from diverse religious perspectives such as Constantin von Tischendorf, Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Paul Tillich, Karl Rahner, and Hans Küng, whose books they could find in Russian translation.76
Given their members’ strong personalities and different approaches, the two groups were perhaps destined to break apart. “As long as we were together, the very atmosphere of brotherhood and community prevailed,” wrote Lev Regel′son.77 But when they met separately, which increasingly became the case, tension between their theological approaches came into full view, and Fr. Aleksandr grew worried about the deleterious effects on the parish as a whole. But in the meantime, in 1965, it was Feliks Karelin and two of his associates, Viktor Kapitanchuk and Lev Regel′son, who played the leading parts in taking the various proposals and unfinished papers, synthesizing all the ideas, and refining them into completed documents.78 Yakunin’s contribution consisted only of a set of general ideas.79 In their final iteration, both letters to the patriarch and the government bore Karelin’s strong editorial imprint. The passionate tone of the letters, so pronounced in many of the parts, corresponded to similar aspects of his own personality.
Tempestuous, uncompromising, and extraordinarily intelligent, Felix Karelin was an extremely complex and controversial person. Rumors circulated widely in the parish. During his early years as a member of the religious study group in Leningrad, there is good evidence that he served as an informer for the secret police. He was named after Felix Dzerzhinsky, the infamous head of the original state security police, the Cheka, to whom he was related. It was said that in the prison camp, in order to prove his innocence after he was accused of being a provocateur and was threatened with death, he knifed to death a man who was believed to be a police informant.80 In his memoirs, Fr. Aleksandr provided the following portrait of Karelin:
He was a man with a systematic type of intelligence, which could have been advantageous to both church and business, if it had not been for his unrestrained nature.… As soon as we became acquainted, Karelin took me into a separate room and began straight away to tell me about how he had been in solitary confinement and how in that unpleasant place, he, for some reason, had drawn a six-pointed star on the wall and started to meditate on it. Whole systems of creation had constructed themselves within him, systems of redemption—a whole lot of things. I looked upon him with such sadness, as if he were a madman, that he soon stopped telling me about those convoluted beliefs.81
While Fr. Aleksandr always had suspicions about Karelin and questioned his motives, ultimately, he found him to be an honest, if misguided, person. Men described him as Stavrogin-like, referring to the character in Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed—a generous person with a charismatic personality “who led those young men astray and destroyed all of them.”82
Although he played only a marginal role in the actual writing of the 1965 letters, Gleb Yakunin sincerely believed everything they said. In ultimate acts of courage, he and Nikolai Eshliman signed both letters, the only two priests whose names appeared on them. Convinced that the letters told the truth to all who might read them, Yakunin and Eshliman firmly believed that the Orthodox Church could not fulfill its historic responsibilities to the Russian people until it stood up for this truth.
In an action that eventually cost them dearly, they distributed copies of the letter to the patriarch to all the bishops in the Russian Orthodox Church. Yakunin and Eshliman assumed that it was within their judicial and canonical rights to do so as members of the wider church body.83 Furthermore, perhaps naively, but in good faith, they believed that their fellow clergy held the same views, awaited such a statement of principles, and would stand behind them. The time had come, Yakunin and Eshliman maintained, for the Russian Orthodox Church to break its prolonged silence.
They expected that the patriarch would quickly respond and awaited his reply. For months, Yakunin and Eshliman heard nothing. But then the response did come, and it was not what they had either hoped or expected.
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