1. Obshchestvo remeslennogo i zemledel′cheskogo trud sredi evreev (Soviet Union), Materialy i issledovaniia, no. 4: Evrei v SSSR (Tel Aviv: Aticot, 1929), 50.

2. “Ananyev,” in Encyclopedia Judaica, ed. Cecil Roth (Jerusalem: Macmillan, 1971), vol. 2: 924; I. Michael Aronson, Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990) 59, 110; “Ananyev, Ukraine,” in Jewish Virtual Library, https:www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ananyev; and Die Judenpogrome in Russland hrsg. im aufrage des Zionistischen hilfsfonds in London; von der zur erforschung der pogrome eingesetzten kommission, ed. A. Linden, vol. 2 (Cologne: Jüdishcher verlag g.m.b.h., 1910), 134–37.

3. Anatolii Emmanuilovich Levitin-Krasnov, “Father Gleb Yakunin and Lev Regel′son,” in Letters from Moscow: Religion and Human Rights in the USSR, ed. Jane Ellis (San Francisco: H. S. Dakin, 1978), 1.

4. Anatolii Emmanuilovich Levitin-Krasnov, V poiskakh novogo grada: Vospominaniia, pt. 3 (Tel Aviv: Izdatel′stvo Krug, 1980), 222.

5. Elena Volkova, Glyba Gleba: Zapreshchenneishii ierei Iakunin (St. Petersburg: Renome, 2021), 42.

6. Volkova, 225.

7. Valerii Arkad′evich Alekseev, Illiuzii i dogmy (Moscow: Polizdat, 1991) 359–61; and Ol′ga Iur′evna Vasil′eva, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov′ v politike sovetskogo gosudarstva v 1943–1948 (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 1999), 121, 207.

8. Fr. Gleb Yakunin, interview by author, Moscow, May 10, 2007.

9. Levitin-Krasnov, V poiskakh novogo grada, 225–26. Knut Hamsun (Knud Pedersen, 1859–1952), a Norwegian novelist and poet, whose works had a profound influence on many twentieth-century authors, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. One of his most widely read novels, Pan, written in 1894, features Lieutenant Thomas Glahn, an ex-military man and hunter, who lives alone with his dog Aesop in the forest, apart from the social world.

10. Volkova, Glyba Gleba, 48.

11. Zoia Afanas′evna Maslenikova, Zhizn′ ottsa Aleksandra Menia (Moscow: Pristsel′s, 1995), 117–18.

12. Yakunin, interview by author.

13. Yakunin, interview by author.

14. Sergei Borisovich Filatov, ed., Religiozno-obshchestvenaia zhizn′ rossiiskikh regionov, vol. 2 (Moscow-St. Petersburg: Letnii sad, 2016), 3–4, 16–17, 23–24.

15. Zoia Afanasev′na Maslenikova, quoted in Wallace L. Daniel, Russia’s Uncommon Prophet: Father Aleksandr Men and His Times (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), 71.

16. The priests, Fr. Serafim (Batiukov) and Fr. Pyotr Shipkov, and the nun, Mother Mariia, are intimately portrayed in Women of the Catacombs: The Underground Church in Stalin’s Russia, ed. and trans. Wallace L. Daniel, preface Archpriest Aleksandr Men, foreword Roy R. Robson (Ithaca, NY: Northern Illinois University Press/Cornell University Press, 2021), and in Aleksandr Men′, O sebe … Vospominaniia, interv′iu, besedy, pis′ma (Moscow: Zhizn′ s Bogom, 2007), 27–60.

17. Yakunin, interview by author.

18. Aleksandr Men, Istoriia religii v semi tomakh: V poiskakh puti, istiny, i zhizni (Moscow: Slovo, 1991).

19. On this point, see Protoierei Aleksandr Borisov, “Dukhovnyi realizm ottsa Aleksandra Menia,” in Tserkovnaia zhizn′ XX veka: Protoierei Aleksandr Men′ i ego dukhovnye nastavniki; Sbornik materialov Pervoi nauchnoi konferentsii “Menevskie chteniia” (9-11 Sentiabria 2006 g.), ed. M. V. Grigorenko (Sergiev Posad: Izdanie prikhoda Sergievskoi tserkvi v Semkhoze, g. Sergiev Posad, 2007), 161.

20. Elena Volkova, “Poeticheskii manifest Pravoslavnoi reformatsii,” foreword to Gleb Pavlovich Yakunin, Khvalebnyi primitiv iurodivyi, v chest′ Boga, mirozdan′ia, rodiny: Poema (Moscow: Biblioteka PravLit, 2008), 5.

21. Yakunin, Khvalebnyi primitiv, 16.

22. Andrei Alekseevich Eremin, Otets Aleksandr Men′: Pastyr′ na rubezhe vekov, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Carte Blanche, 2001), 453.

23. Men′, Magizm i Edinobozhie, vol. 2 of Istoriia religii v semi tomakh, 57.

24. Men′, 58.

25. Lucien Lévy Bruhl, La mentalité primitive, 14th ed. (1923; repr., Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947), 12–16.

26. Lucien Lévy Bruhl, quoted by Men′, Magizm i Edinobozhie, 58.

27. Men′, Magizm i Edinobozhie, 405.

28. Wallace L. Daniel, “Father Aleksandr Men’s Son of Man,” in Voices of the Voiceless: Religion, Communism, and the Keston Archive, ed. Julie deGraffenried and Zoe Knox (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019), 30–31.

29. Eremin, Otets Aleksandr Men′, 454. These pagan secular rituals, which emphasized folk magic, witchcraft, and fertility, were the opposite of the veneration of relics in Orthodox Christianity, which, as Robert Greene has pointed out, accentuated love and respect for the holy deceased (Robert H. Greene, Bodies Like Bright Stars: Saints and Relics in Orthodox Russia [DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010], 160–71).

30. Men and Yakunin shared similar ideas about open and closed societies. According to both of them, Christianity teaches that one must always remain open to discovery and change.

31. Men′, O sebe, 87.

32. Men′, 88; and Yakunin, interview by author.

33. Aleksandr Men′, “Vospominaniia o studencheskikh godakh,” in Khronika neraskrytogo ubiistva, ed. Sergei Bychkov (Moscow: Russkoe reklamnoe izdatel′stvo, 1996), 146.

34. Men′, O sebe, 88.

35. Yakunin, interview by author.

36. Valentine Bibikova, quoted in Volkova, Glyba Gleba, 48.

37. Maslenikova, Zhizn′ ottsa Aleksandra Menia, 142.

38. Yakunin, interview by author.

39. The Russian historian Irina Ivanovna Osipova has identified large numbers of the catacomb churches in her “O, Premiloserdyi … Budi s nami neotstupno.…”: Vospominaniia veruiushchikh Istinno-Pravoslavnoi (Katakombnoi) Tserkvi: Konets 1920-kh–nachalo 1970-kh godov (St. Petersburg: Kifa, 2011); and Irina Ivanovna Osipova, “Dokumenty po regionam i godam: Iz istorii gonenii Istinno-Pravoslavnnoi (Katakombnoi) Tserkvi: Konets 1920-kh–nachalo 1970-kh godov,” Mezhdunarodnoe istoriko-prosvetitel′skoe pravozashchitnoe i blagotvoritel′noe obshchestvo MEMORIAL http://www.histor-ipt-kt.org/doc.html.

40. As late as the end of the twentieth century, catacomb churches received scant attention in history texts on the Orthodox Church. See Men, “Preface,” in Women of the Catacombs, xxxiii.

41. Aleksandr Men′, “Pis′mo k E. N.,” in “AEQUINOX”: Sbornik pamiati o. Aleksandra Menia, eds. I. G. Vishnevetskii and E. G. Rabinovich (Moscow: Carte Blanche, 1991), 182–202. See Elena Semenovna Men’s description of the catacomb community in her “My Journey,” in Women of the Catacombs, 101–35.

42. Yakunin, interview by author.

43. Yakunin, interview by author.

44. Yakunin, interview by author.

45. Aleksandr Men had long seen this ignorance, and in his teenage years had begun writing the story of the New Testament. It was published in 1968 in Brussels under the pen name of Immanuel Svetlov, with the title Syn chelovecheskii (Son of Man). See Immanuel Svetlov, Syn chelovecheskii (Brussels: Zhizn′ s Bogom, 1968). The Moscow Patriarchate’s recent publication of Fr. Aleksandr’s collected writings included Syn chelovecheskii as the first volume in the series (Protoierei Aleksandr Men, Sobranie sochinenii [Moscow: Izdatel′stvo Moskovskoi Patriarkhii Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi, 2015]).

46. Years later, when writing about the church’s role in society, Yakunin wrote, “The Orthodox Church, founded in Rus′ in 988, after 1927 existed only in the catacombs and in exile abroad.” Gleb Yakunin, Istoricheskii put′ pravoslavnogo talibanstva (Moscow: Profizdat, 2002), 12.

47. Yakunin, interview by author.

48. Maslenikova, Zhizn′ ottsa Aleksandra Menia, 133–35.

49. Maslenikova, 154; Yakunin told Elena Volkova, his close friend and helpmate, that Men introduced Berdiaev to him in Irkutsk, and, emphasizing Berdiaev’s importance, recommended that Yakunin should read him. Volkova, interview by author, September 12, 2015.

50. Nicolas Berdyaev, Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography, trans. Katherine Lampert (1950; repr., New York: Collier Books, 1962).

51. Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present (Downer’s Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015), 63.

52. Georgii Petrovich Fedotov, “Berdiaev the Thinker,” http://cheboto.ns.ca/Philosophy/Sui-Generis/Berdyaev/essays/fedotov.htm.

53. Volkova, interview by author, September 11, 2015.

54. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdiaev, Filosofiia svobody: Smysl tvorchestva; Opyt opravdaniia cheloveka (1911; repr., Moscow: Izdatel′stvo “Pravda,” 1989), 37, 95–96, 194–95, 255–57, 428.

55. Berdiaev, Filosofiia svobody, iv, 17, 28, 61.

56. Berdyaev, Dream and Reality, quoted in Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 67.

57. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. and annotated Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 255.

58. Berdiaev, Filosofiia svobody, 213–14.

59. Berdiaev, 223; and Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdiaev, The Destiny of Man, trans. Natalie Duddington (New York: Harper’s, 1960), 134.

60. For the context of and reasons for Men’s expulsion from the institute, see Daniel, Russia’s Uncommon Prophet, 86–88; and Men′, Khronika neraskrytogo ubiistva, 133–34n5.

61. Iraida Yakunina, “Znakomstvo s Glebom,” Arkhiv Yakunin, Moscow.

62. Iraida Yakunina, “Znakomstvo s Glebom.”

63. Iraida Yakunina, “Znakomstvo s Glebom.”

64. Iraida Yakunina, interview by author, October 28, 2016.

65. Yakunina, interview by author.

66. For a firsthand account of the beginning of Khrushchev’s antireligion campaign, see Michael Bourdeaux, One Word of Truth: The Cold War Memoir of Michael Bourdeaux and Keston College (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2019), 54–92.

67. Nathaniel Davis, A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003), 39–40.

68. In addition, as Davis reports, the restrictions on Orthodox religious institutions undermined the strength of the church at all levels. The number of theological seminaries declined from 8 to 3; more than two-thirds of the convents closed; in 1960 alone, 1,400 churches lost their registration in the Soviet Union. By 1961, according to official figures, the number of registered Orthodox communities declined from 13,415 to approximately 11,500. Between 1961 and 1966, 4,219 Orthodox societies suffered the loss of their registration. Parents were forbidden by law to bring up their children as religious believers (Davis, Long Walk to Church, 32, 38, 41–42).

69. Volkova, Glyba Gleba, 74.

70. Iraida Yakunina, “Znakomstvo s Glebom.”

71. Levitin-Krasnov, “Father Gleb Yakunin and Lev Regel′son,” 3.

72. Iraida Yakunina, “Znakomstvo s Glebom.”

73. Levitin-Krasnov, “Father Gleb Yakunin and Lev Regel′son,” 4.

74. Levitin-Krasnov, 4.

1. The letter addressed to Patriarch Aleksii I had an appendix offering some of the rationale for the submission of their letter, which was dated December 13, 1965. Eshliman and Yakunin sent copies of the letter to all active bishops in the Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union. The two priests sent copies of their letter to Chairman Podgorny, Prime Minister Aleksey Kosygin, and the Soviet prosecutor-general Roman Rudenko.

2. The articles from the international press cited in this paragraph are from the National Council of Churches, Department of Information, “News Release,” July 2, 1966, 1–3; Victor S. Frank, “Church and State in the USSR,” parts 1 and 2, Tablet, May 21 and 28, 1966, 580–81, 611–12; Editorial, “Russian Priests Condemn Soviet Council,” Christian Century, June 15, 1966, 767, 820; Edmund Stevens, “Priests Protest at Russian Church’s Ties with State,” (London) Times, May 9, 1969; “Some Questions about Religion and the Church,” an interview with Vladimir Kuroedov, published originally in Izvestiia, August 29, 1966, and reprinted in English in Religion in Communist Dominated Areas 5, no. 22 (November 30, 1966): 173–77.

3. The Soviet government closed more than ten thousand Orthodox Churches and scores of monasteries and convents from 1959 to 1964. Dimitry Pospielovsky, “Anti-Church Pressure in the Soviet Union,” European Service General News Talk, April 26, 1966, 1, in Keston Archive, USSR Ort C/32. According to Russian government sources, between 1958 and 1966, the number of registered Orthodox communities declined by 5,949, a loss of 44 percent (Nathaniel Davis, A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy, 2nd ed. [Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003], 43).

4. National Council of Churches, Department of Information, “News Release,” July 2, 1966, pp. 1–3; Frank, “Church and State in the USSR,” 580–81, 611–12; “Russian Priests Condemn Soviet Council,” 767, 820; Stevens, “Priests Protest at Russian Church’s Ties with State”; and “Some Questions about Religion and the Church.”

5. The English historian Jane Ellis provides an extensive analysis of the Parish Reform and its effects, in The Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History (London: Routledge, 1986), 53–77. An excerpt from the reform document was published in Religion in Communist Lands 9, no. 1 (1981): 24–27.

6. Pospielovsky, “Anti-Church Pressure,” 2.

7. Wallace L. Daniel, Russia’s Uncommon Prophet: The Life and Times of Father Aleksandr Men (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016); Pavel Volf′ovich Men, interview by author, Moscow, July 3, 2013; Zoia Afanas′evna Maslenikova, Zhizn′ ottsa Aleksandra Menia (Moscow: Pristsel′s, 1995), 204.

8. Aleksandr Vladimirovich Men′, O sebe … Vospominaniia, interv′iu, besedy, pis′ma (Moscow: Zhizn′ s bogom, 2007), 112.

9. Men, 115.

10. Anatolii Emmanuilovich Levitin-Krasnov, “Otets Dmitrii Dudko,” Posev 31, no. 1 (1975), 27.

11. Levitin-Krasnov, 27.

12. Levitin-Krasnov, 27.

13. A year later, in 1963, Dudko became a priest in the Moscow Church of St. Nicholas in the Preobrazhensky Cemetery, where a decade later he was well known for his sermons and his open-ended question-and-answer sessions that attracted large numbers of Russian youth.

14. Fr. Dmitrii Dudko’s early life, career, and personality are portrayed in his Podarok ot Boga: Kniga v piati chastiakh (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo Sretenskogo monastyria, 2002); Anatolii Emmanuilovich Levitin-Krasnov, “O tekh, kogo nedavno-sudili,” Posev 36, no. 11 (1980): 47–49; Sviashchenniki Gleb Yakunin and Iurii Ryzhkov, Tri razgovora o proshlom, nastoiashchem, i budushchem Pravoslaviia, s prilozheniem kratkoi povesti o Moskovskoi Patriarkhii (Moscow, 2006), http://krotov.info/library/28_ya/ku/nin_apz.htm; and Oliver Bullough, The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (New York: Basic Books, 2013).

15. Sergei Sergeevich Bychkov, Osvobozhdenie ot illiuzii (Moscow: Tetis Pablishn, 2010), 34. Bychkov’s biography of Yermogen is a detailed account of the archbishop’s life, accomplishments, and struggles with the political and religious authorities.

16. “Archbishop Yermogen: A Great Russian Pastor,” June 28, 1968, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2, box 24, Individual Clergy, folder 2: Yermogen file.

17. “Archbishop Yermogen”; Archimandrite Afanasii (Kudiuk), “Vysokopreosviashchennyi arkhiepiskop Ermogen (Golubev),” Zhurnal Moskovskoi Patriarkhii (November 1978), 21.

18. “Archbishop Yermogen.”

19. Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov, “Novosti iz Moskvy: Smert′ Arkhiepiskopa Ermogena Golubeva,” Russkaia mysl′, no. 3204 (May 18, 1978), 21.

20. Levitin-Krasnov, 21.

21. This account of Patriarch Aleksii’s response to Archbishop Yermogen is taken from Yakunin and Eshliman’s signed letter, which will be discussed later in this chapter.

22. Archpriest Afanasii (Kudiuk), “Vysokopreosviashchennyi arkhiepiskop Ermogen (Golubev),” 21.

23. Sesil′ Vess′e, Za vashu i nashu svobodu: Dissidentskoe dvizhenie v Rossii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2015) 242–43; Mikhail Vital′evich Shkarovskii, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov′ v XX veke (Moscow: Veche, Lepta, 2010), 273–74; and Ludmilla Alexeyeva, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights, trans. Carol Pearce and John Glad (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 249.

24. Michael Bourdeaux, “The Brave Stand of Archbishop Yermogen,” Liberty, September–October 1968, 23. See also Keston College, “Archbishop Yermogen (Golubev),” May 25, 1978, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2, box 24, Individual Clergy, folder 2: Yermogen file.

25. Men′, O sebe, 27; and Fr. Gleb Yakunin, interview by author, Moscow, May 10, 2007.

26. “Editorial,” Pravda, October 17, 1964, quoted in William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 620.

27. Shkarovskii, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov′, 274; and Mikhail Borisovich Danilushkin et al., Istoriia Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi, 1917-1970: Ot vosstanovleniia Patriarshestva do nashikh dnei, vol. 1 of Trudy Russkoi pravoslavnoi akademii bogoslovskikh nauk i nauchno bogoslovskikh issledovanii, 1917–1970 (St. Petershurg: Voskresenie), 944.

28. Danilushkin et al., Istoriia Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi, 944; Shkarovskii, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov′, 274; and Men′, O sebe, 145–46.

29. Men′, O sebe, 143.

30. Yakunin, interview by author.

31. Yakunin, interview by author.

32. According to Yakunin, “Fr. Aleksandr Men′, without reservation, shared our position, but we did not want to entangle him in this affair. I was a good priest; my parishioners liked me, but I never had the gift that Fr. Aleksandr had. I wasn’t a brilliant preacher, as he was” (Yakunin, interview by author).

33. Yakunin, interview by author.

34. Fr. Gleb Yakunin and Fr. Nikolai Eshliman, “Otkrytoe pis′mo Ego Sviateishestvu, Sviateishemu Patriarkhu Moskovskomu i vseia Rusi, Aleksiiu,” in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2, Yakunin file.

35. Yakunin and Eshliman, 34. See also Christian Föller, “Andersdenken (de) und Orthodoxie: Der Fall der Priester Nikolaj Ešliman und Gleb Jakunin: Inakomyliashchie and Orthodoxy: The Case of the Priests Nikolai Eshliman and Gleb Iakunin,” Jahrbücher Für Geshichte Osteuropas 66, no. 3 (2018): 418–42.

36. Jubilee Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, August 13–16, 2000, Moscow, “On the Fundamentals of the Social Conception of the Russian Orthodox Church,” section III, 4, Church and State, https://incommunion.org/fundamentals-of-the-social-conception-of-the-russian-orthodox-church/.

37. Yakunin and Eshliman, “Otkrytoe pis′mo,” 36.

38. Yakunin and Eshliman, 37.

39. Yakunin and Eshliman, 37.

40. Yakunin and Eshliman, 37–38.

41. Aleksandr Men′, “Khristianstvo i tvorchestvo,” in Radostnaia vest′ (lektsy), ed. M. V. Sergeeva (Moscow: Vita-Tsentr, 1992), 256, and, in the same volume, “Khristianskaia kultura na Rusi,” 249–50; Wallace L. Daniel, “Father Aleksandr Men and the Struggle to Recover Russia’s Heritage,” Demokratizatsiya 17, no. 1 (Winter 2009), 85; and Daniel, Russia’s Uncommon Prophet, 267.

42. Men′, “Khristianstvo i tvorchestvo,” 256.

43. Fr. Aleksandr castigated the church’s intolerance toward independent thought among its adherents, which, he argued, sharply limited the creativity it needed to thrive. Fr. Aleksandr Men′, “Mozhno li reformirovat′ pravoslavnuiu tserkov′: Neizvestnoe interv′iu Aleksandra Menia,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, January 2, 1992, also published as “Problemy tserkvi iznutri,” in Kul′tura i dukhovnnoe voskhozhdenie, ed. R. I. Al′betkova and M. T. Rabotiaga (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1992), 440–45.

44. Yakunin and Eshliman, “Otkrytoe pis′mo,” 38–41.

45. Gregory R. Freeze, “Handmaiden of the State? The Church in Imperial Russia Reconsidered,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36, no. 1 (January 1985): 82–102.

46. See Gregory R. Freeze, “ ‘Churching’ 1917: The Church Crisis and the Parish Revolution,” Gosudarstvo, religiia, tserkov′ v Rossii i za rubezhom 37, nos. 1–2 (2019): 30–52.

47. Yakunin and Eshliman, “Otkrytoe pis′mo,” 39–40.

48. Yakunin and Eshliman, 13.

49. Yakunin and Eshliman, 30.

50. Yakunin and Eshliman, 9.

51. Yakunin and Eshliman.

52. Sergei Bulgakov, The Orthodox Church, foreword by Thomas Hopko, revised translation by Lydia Kesich (1935; repr., Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988), 129.

53. Yakunin and Eshliman, “Otkrytoe pis′mo,” 32.

54. Yakunin and Eshliman, 7, 12–14, 18.

55. Yakunin and Eshliman, 23–24.

56. Yakunin and Eshliman, 11.

57. Chief among these obstacles to the priest’s duties were the policies and actions of the Council for Religious Affairs, which reported to the Council of Ministers of the USSR. Established in 1965, the Council for Religious Affairs (Sovet po delam religii) was created to oversee all religious activities in the Soviet Union. The council lasted until the dissolution of the USSR.

58. Yakunin and Eshliman, “Otkrytoe pis′mo,” 18, 46–47.

59. Yakunin and Eshliman, iii, 11, 61–62.

60. Yakunin and Eshliman, 223. See also Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdiaev’s The Destiny of Man, trans. Natalie Duddington (New York: Harper’s, 1960), 134.

61. Nikolai Nikolaevich Eshliman and Gleb Pavlovich Yakunin, “To the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Socialist Republics,” in Michael Bourdeaux, Patriarch and Prophets: Persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church Today (New York: Praeger, 1970), 189–90.

62. Eshliman and Yakunin, “To the Chairman of the Presidium,” 189.

63. Eshliman and Yakunin, 192.

64. Eshliman and Yakunin, 193–94.

65. Eshliman and Yakunin, 193.

66. Eshliman and Yakunin, 193. The letter to Chairman Podgorny referenced Articles 142 and 143 of the Penal Code of the USSR.

67. Eshliman and Yakunin, 191.

68. Yakunin, interview by author.

69. Men′, O sebe, 135.

70. Men′, 142.

71. Men′, 143.

72. By wanting to wait until a “more propitious time,” Men and others had in mind the political turmoil following the ouster of Premier Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964. Believing that the political uncertainties of the present time were not to their advantage, they thought the letters would be better received after the new government had taken shape and greater stability had returned.

73. Men′, O sebe, 143.

74. Men′, 145.

75. Men′, 146.

76. Lev Regel′son, “Dnevnik: Lev Regel′son otvechaet ottsu Aleksandru Meniu: O bogoslovskoi shkole Feliksa Karelina,” https://skurlatov.livejournal.com

77. Regel′son, “Dnevnik.”

78. Danilushkin et al., Istoriia Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi, 944–45; and Regel′son, “Dnevnik.”

79. Danilushkin et al., Istoriia Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi, 944; and Regel′son, “Dnevnik.”

80. Men′, O sebe, 148–49.

81. Men′, 144–45.

82. Men′, 149.

83. See their defense of the action, in Frs. Gleb Yakunin and Nikolai Eshliman, “Appeal to the Patriarch, the Holy Synod, and the Diocesan Bishops,” May 12, 1966, in Bourdeaux, Patriarch and Prophets, 224.

1. Fr. Gleb Yakunin, interview by author, Moscow, May 10, 2007.

2. Jane Ellis, The Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History (London: Routledge, 1988), 197.

3. “The Resolution of His Holiness Patriarch Aleksii I,” May 23, 1966, communicated through the office of the Metropolitan of Krutitsy and Kolomna, diocesan bishop of Moscow, in Michael Bourdeaux, Patriarch and Prophets: Persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church Today (New York: Praeger, 1970), 226–27.

4. Bourdeaux, 226–27.

5. Frs. N. Eshliman and G. Yakunin, “Appeal to the Patriarch, Holy Synod and the Diocesan Bishops,” May 12, 1966, in Bourdeaux, Patriarch and Prophets, 225. Eshliman and Yakunin wrote this appeal in response to an earlier accusation from Patriarch Aleksii I that by distributing their letter to Russian Orthodox bishops, they had violated canon law.

6. Yakunin, interview by author.

7. “Nikolai Eshliman, Russian Priest Dies at 57,” Special to the New York Times, June 14, 1985, in Keston Archive, SU Ort, Yakunin file.

8. Yakunin, interview by author.

9. Vladimir Il′ich Lenin, “O znachenii vointsvuiushchego materializma,” in Polnoe sobranie sochineniia (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1964), 45:28.

10. “Soviet Official Lectures on Religion,” Religion in Communist Lands 6, no. 1 (Spring 1978), 32.

11. “Soviet Official Lectures,” 33.

12. Igor Shafarevich, Zakonodatel’stvo o religii v SSSR (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1973); “Soviet Official Lectures,” 33.

13. Tat′iana Goricheva, quoted by Ellis, Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History, 392.

14. “Fr. Sergi Zheludkov Writes to Pavel Litvinov,” March 30, 1968, in Bourdeaux, Patriarch and Prophets, 341.

15. Sviashchennik Sergei Zheludkov, “K razmyshleniam ob intellektual′noi svobode (Otvet Akademiku A. D. Sakharovu),” Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/ 2, Fr. S. Zheludkov, box 27, folder 3. Zheludkov wrote his letter after reading Sakharov’s Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, in which the nuclear physicist discussed the nuclear age and called for freedom of thought and world government as the best means of preventing the nuclear destruction of the planet.

16. Zheludkov.

17. Zheludkov.

18. Zheludkov.

19. Details about Boris Talantov’s life are found at the end of his letter, “Zhaloba, General′nomu prokuroru SSSR ot gr. Talantova Borisa Vladimirovicha (g. Kirov),” Vestnik Russkogo studencheskogo khristianskogo dvizheniia, no. 3 (89–90) (1968): 49–68; Xenia Dennen, “A Forgotten Christian Martyr: Boris Talantov,” Keston Newsletter, no. 36 (2022): 28–34; and John B. Dunlop, “Dissent within the Orthodox Church: Boris Vladimirovich Talantov (1903–1971),” Russian Review 31 no. 3 (July 1972): 248–59.

20. Talantov wrote the first of the letters after he read the two open letters sent by Frs. Gleb Yakunin and Nikolai Eshliman to Patriarch Aleksii I and Chairman N. V. Podgorny in late 1965. “Bedstvennoe polozhenie Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi v Kirovskoi oblasti i rol′ Moskovskoi Patriarkhii (Iz otkrytogo pis′ma Borisa Talantova ot 19 noiabria 1966 g.),” Vestnik Russkogo studencheskogo khristianskogo dvizheniia, no. 1 (3) (1967): 29–64. Eleven other Orthodox believers signed the letter.

21. Gleb Yakunin, “Menia otluchili ot tserkvi, kak L′va Toltstogo,” interviewed by Andrei Morozov, September 3, 2004, in Keston Archive, SU Ort: Yakunin, Fr. Gleb.

22. On this problem, Talantov wrote a two-part essay, to which he gave the general title “The Moscow Patriarchate and Sergianism.” Part 1 is titled “Sergianism, or Adaptation to Atheism (The Leaven of Herod).” Part 2 is titled “The Secret Participation of the Moscow Patriarchate in the Battle of the CPSU against the Orthodox Christian Church (The Crisis of the Church Administration).” Both parts, in English translation, can be found at http:www.orthodoxinfo.com>cat_tal. In 1968, Talantov wrote another theoretical essay titled “Sovetskoe obshchestvo, 1965–68,” Posev 25, no. 9 (1969): 35–41.

23. Talantov, “Sergianism, or Adaptation to Atheism.”

24. Talantov (emphasis in the original).

25. Talantov.

26. Fr. Michael Aksenov-Meerson, “The Russian Orthodox Church, 1965–1980,” Religion in Communist Lands 9, nos. 3–4 (1981), 105.

27. Aksenov-Meerson, 106.

28. Yevgeni Pazukhin, “Charting the Russian Religious Renaissance,” Religion, State and Society 23, no. 1 (1995), 61.

29. Victoria Smolkin, A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 155.

30. Fr. Michael Aksenov-Meerson, interview by author, Bethesda, Maryland, May 27, 2019. Fr. Meerson emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 and is presently head priest of Christ the Savior Orthodox Church in the Diocese of New York and New Jersey. See also the Russian writer Ludmilla Evgen′evna Ulitskaia’s personal account of Fr. Aleksandr and his large influence on her in Sviashchennyi musor: Rasskazy, esse (Moscow: Astrel′, 2012), 94–100.

31. Aksenov-Meerson, interview by author.

32. Protoierei Aleksandr Borisov, “Dukhovnyi realism ottsa Aleksandra Menia,” in Tserkovnaia zhizn′ XX veka: Protoierei Aleksandr Men′ i ego dukhovnye nastavniki; Sbornik materialov Pervoi nauchnoi konferenstsii “Menevskie chteniia” (Sentiabria 2006 g.), ed. M. V. Grigorenko (Sergiev Posad: Izdanie prikhoda Sergievskoi tserkvi v Semkhoze, g. Sergiev Posad, 2007), 163–65, 170–71.

33. Iurii Mikhailovich Tabak, interview by author, Moscow, October 19, 2008. Tabak, a writer and member of the Moscow intelligentsia, often went to see Fr. Aleksandr at Novaia Derevna; Andrei Cherniak, interview by author, Moscow, May 24, 2007. Cherniak, a physicist and former atheist, spoke glowingly about his discussions with Fr. Aleksandr.

34. Anatolii Emmanuilovich Levitin-Krasnov was the first Orthodox Christian in the Soviet Union to join the movement for human rights. For the background and personality of Levitin-Krasnov, see Aleksandr Men′, O sebe … Vospominaniia, interv′iu, besedy, pis′ma (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo Zhizn′ s Bogom, 2007), 120–27; Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov, Likhie gody: 1924–1942 (Paris: YMCA Press, 1977); A. I. (Mikhail Meerson-Aksenov), “Arest Krasnova-Levitina,” Vestnik Russkogo studencheskogo khristianskogo dvizheniia, nos. 1–2 (95–96), 1970: 69–74; and Philip Walters, “Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov (1915–1991),” Religion in Communist Lands 19, vol. 3–4 (1991): 264–70. DOI: 10.1080/09637499108431520.

35. Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov, “Religion and Soviet Youth,” Religion in Communist Lands 7, no. 4 (Winter 1979), 232–33.

36. Levitin-Krasnov, 237.

37. See the details on the people who flocked to his community in Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov, “Otets Dimitrii Dudko,” Posev 31, 1 (1975), 26–36.

38. Fr. John Meyendorff, Foreword to Fr. Dmitrii Dudko, Our Hope, trans. Paul D. Garrett (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977), 9.

39. Sviashchennik Dmitrii Dudko, O nashem upovanii: Besedy (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1976), 235–36. Fr. Dmitrii’s ten conversational sermons with his parishioners are included in this volume in addition to a later eleventh session, which he conducted in his home. At the tenth session, two plainclothes police officers escorted Fr. Dmitrii out of the church. He was soon transferred to a rural church outside Moscow. For the threat that Fr. Dmitrii’s growing reputation posed to Soviet authorities both in the Soviet Union and abroad, see Nadieszda Kizenko, “Father Dmitri Dudko and the Intersection of Late Cold War Underground, Official, and Diaspora Russian Orthodox Church Opinion,” Review of Ecumenical Studies 14, no. 2 (2022): 289–309. DOI: 10.2478/ress-2022-0106. A collection of Fr. Dmitrii’s sermons over a twenty-five-year period, 1960 to 1985, is included in Sviashchennik Dmitrii Sergeevich Dudko, V ternine i pri doroge: Sbornik propovedei za 25 let (Moscow: D. S. Dudko, 1993).

40. Marco Sabbatini, “The Pathos of Holy Foolishness in the Leningrad Underground,” in Holy Foolishness in Russia: New Perspectives, ed. Priscilla Hunt and Svitlana Kobets (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2011), 337–52. See also Olga Tchepournaya, “The Hidden Sphere of Religious Searches in the Soviet Union: Independent Religious Communities in Leningrad from the 1960s to the 1970s,” Sociology of Religion 64, no. 3 (2003): 377–88.

41. J. H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History: New Views on History and Society in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (1961; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 38.

42. Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov, “Sol′ zemli (Molodaia Rossiia),” Russkaia mysl′, no. 3282, pt. 1 (November 15, 1979), 14; Koenraad de Wolf, Dissident for Life: Alexander Ogorodnikov and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in Russia (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2010), 55; and Jane Ellis, “USSR: The Christian Seminar,” Religion in Communist Lands 8, no. 2 (Summer 1980), 94–95.

43. De Wolf, Dissident for Life, 64–65.

44. Alexander Ogorodnikov and Boris Razveev, “Letter to Dr. Philip Potter, General-Secretary of the WCC,” August 5, 1976, Religion in Communist Lands 7, no. 1 (1979), 50.

45. The two individuals were Aleksandr Shchipkov, Tat′iana Shchipkova’s son and a student at the institute where she taught, and Viktor Popkov, a staff member of the Smolensk Exhibition Hall. Participants from Smolensk included Elena Kashtanova, also a student at the Pedagogical Institute.

46. Tat′iana Nikolaevna Shchipkova, “Imeet li pravo sovetskii prepodavatel′ na svobody sovesti,” July–September 1978, in Khristianskii komitet zashchity prav veruiushchikh v SSSR, Dokumenty khristianskogo komiteta zaschchity prav veruiushchikh v SSSR (San Francisco: Washington Street Research Center, 1978), 4:497. An excerpt from this document is published in Religion in Communist Lands 8, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 106–9.

47. Shchipkova, “Imeet li pravo,” 497–98.

48. Shchipkova, 498.

49. Tat′iana Shchipkova, “Spiritual Pilgrimage of Vladimir Poresh,” appendix in Ellis, “USSR,” 101–2.

50. Shchipkova, 101.

51. Shchipkova, 102.

52. Shchipkova, 102.

53. In October 1975, members of the “creative intelligentsia” in Leningrad formed a religious-philosophical seminar, which they called the “37,” named after the apartment in which it first met. The Leningrad seminar differed in size and focus from its fellow organization in Moscow. Preeminent among its leaders was a young, talented Orthodox woman named Tat′iana Goricheva. Born in Leningrad, twenty-eight years old in 1975, Goricheva spent her childhood years immersed in books, because, she said, “only in books did people not live constantly with lies” (Tat′iana Goricheva, Talking about God Is Dangerous: The Diary of a Russian Dissident [New York: Crossroad, 1987], 12). For Goricheva and the underground culture in Leningrad in the late 1970s and 1980s, see Elizabeth Skomp, “The Marian Ideal in the Works of Tat′iana Goricheva and the Mariia Journals,” in Framing Mary: The Mother of God in Modern, Revolutionary, and Post-Soviet Culture, ed. Amy Singleton Adams and Vera Shevzov (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), 227–45.

54. Regel′son has a Facebook page that contains a wealth of information about him, Russian culture, and various other subjects, htpps//:www.facebook.com./lregelson.

55. Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov, “Father Gleb Yakunin and Lev Regel′son,” in Letters from Moscow: Religion and Human Rights in the USSR, ed. Jane Ellis (San Francisco, CA: H. S. Dakin, 1978), 8.

56. Levitin-Krasnov, 8–9.

57. Lev Regel′son, Tragediia russkoi tserkvi, 1917–1945, afterword by Archpriest John Meyendorff (Paris: YMCA Press, 1977).

58. Alexander Ogorodnikov, “Pis′mo General′nomu Sekretariu Vsemirnogo Soveta Tserkvei D-ru Filippu Potteru,” July 27, 1976, Vestnik Russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniia, nos. 3–4 (119) (1976), 305. In English: Ogorodnikov and Razveev, “Letter to Dr. Philip Potter,” July 27, 1976, Religion in Communist Lands 4, no. 4 (1976), 46.

59. Tat′iana Lebedeva, interview by author, Moscow, May 17, 2018. Lebedeva grew up in Smolensk and attended the seminar under Shchipkova’s direction, before moving to Moscow and joining the seminar there.

60. Ogorodnikov and Razveev, “Letter to Dr. Philip Potter,” 49.

61. Mark Popovskii, “Khristianstvo molodeet,” Vol′noe slovo, no. 29 (1978), 53.

62. Popovskii, 54.

63. Popovskii, 54. Ogorodnikov wrote an essay on this topic in which he lauded the Christian commitment, which he observed in the catacomb churches; see his “Kul′tura katakom, k opytu istorii pokoleniia,” in Obschchina: Zhurnal Khristianskogo Seminara po problemam religioznogo vozrozhdeniia, ed. Aleksandr Ogorodnikov, no. 2 (1978): 28–31.

64. Ogorodnikov and Razveev, “Letter to Dr. Philip Potter,” 49; on Ogorodnikov’s journey, see also Philip Walters, “From Community to Isolation: Aleksandr Ogorodnikov,” Frontier, January–February 1987, 2–5.

65. Alexander Ogorodnikov, “Khristianskii kruzhok v Moskve,” Vestnik Russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniia, nos. 3–4 (119), 297.

66. Ogorodnikov, “Khristianskii kruzhok.” In addition to these writers and philosophers, Ogorodnikov cited Pavel Florenskii, Nikita Struve, and Semen Frank.

67. Fr. Gleb Yakunin et al., “Appeal for the Glorification of Russian Martyrs in the USSR,” May 25, 1975, in Yakunin and Regel′son, Letters from Moscow, 35. Yakunin, Regel′son, and Kapitanchuk asked Patriarch Pimen to take the lead in glorifying Russian martyrs, who, they said, served as lodestars for the kind of courageous, self-sacrificial models needed during difficult times.

68. Yakunin et al., 35.

69. Alexander Ogorodnikov, “Informatsionnoe soobshchenie (“Informational Message”), no. 5,” May 22, 1978, in Dokumenty khristianskogo komiteta, 4:487. In English: Dokumenty khristianskogo komiteta (Documents of the Christian Committee), 3:303–11.

70. Ogorodnikov, “Informatsionnoe soobshchenie,” 488.

71. Ogorodnikov, 490.

72. Ogorodnikov, 490.

73. Vladimir Sergeevich Solov′ev, Sobranie sochineniia, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol′za, 1911), 7:12.

74. Vladimir Sergeevich Solov′ev, God, Man, and the Church: The Spiritual Foundations of Life, trans. Donald Attwater (1937; repr., London: James Clarke, 2016), 102–5, 113–15, 118–20. God had endowed his creation with love and had given human beings the gift of freedom. When hate and revenge dominated human affairs, he emphasized, “they acted in opposition to the will of the Holy God.”

75. Aleksandr Men′, “Vladimir Solov′ev,” in Russkaia religioznaia filosofii: Lektsii (Moscow: Khram sviatykh bessrebrenikov Kosmu i Damiana v Shubine, 2003), 31.

76. Vladimir Poresh, “Dai krovi—priimi Dukh,” April 1977, Obshchina, no. 2: 21–23. Arkhiv samizdata, no. 3452, 123, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 11/10, box 28, Christian Seminar, folder 12.

77. Poresh, 22.

78. Ogorodnikov and Razveev, “Letter to Dr. Philip Potter,” 50.

79. Nicholas Zernov, Three Russian Prophets: Khomiakov, Dostoevsky, and Soloviev, 3rd ed. (1911; repr., Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1944), 60. Khomiakov, like several of his major predecessors, based his theological writings on the need for human transformation. Although set in distant, bygone days, his portrayals were timeless, particularly as they related to the spiritual confrontation with violence and power. See Aleksei Stepanovich Khomiakov, “Neskol′ko slov pravoslavnogo khristianina o zapadnykh veroispovedaniiakh,” in Izbrannye sochineniia, ed. N. S. Arsen′ev (New York: Izdatel′stvo imeni Chekhova, 1955), 252. When segregated, driven apart by violence and power, the organic community was shattered, misdirected, and profaned. Khomiakov viewed the isolated, self-directed individual as sick and fundamentally impotent (Khomiakov, 242–43).

80. Protoeirei Aleksandr Men′, Bibliia i literatura: Lektsii (Moscow: Khram sviatykh bessrebrenikov Kosmu i Damiana v Shubine, 2002), 141, also quoted in Wallace L. Daniel, Russia’s Uncommon Prophet: Father Aleksandr Men and His Times (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), 275.

81. Aleksei Stapanovich Khomiakov, Tserkov′ Odna (Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia publichnaia biblioteka, 1991), 22–23. Tserkov′ Odna was published in Berlin in 1867, and in Russia not until 1879, nineteen years after Khomiakov’s death.

82. Khomiakov, “Neskol′ko slov” 252. In Tserkov′ Odna, Khomiakov made clear the distinction between the individual as an isolated being and the person as a member of the corporate body of the church. “The wisdom that lives within the human being,” he wrote, “is not given to him individually, but as a member of the church, and it is given to him in part, without nullifying entirely his individual error, but to the church wisdom is given in the fullness of truth and without any mixture of error” (Khomiakov, Tserkov′ Odna, 11).

83. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton, with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1935).

84. Bergson, 266.

85. The closed society set narrow boundaries around morality and religion, excluded its members from interaction with outsiders, and exhibited little care regarding those outside the clan. These beliefs evolved from earlier pagan societies to which the closed society retained a close connection.

86. “The open society is one which is deemed in principle to embrace all humanity,” Bergson maintained (Bergson, Two Sources, 267).

87. Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (1951; repr., New York: Vintage International, Random House, 1990), 27–28.

88. Viktor Popkov and Tat′iana Lebedeva, interviews by author, Moscow, May 17, 2018.

1. Willem Adolph Visser ’t Hooft, “Message of the Assembly,” opening session, Report of the First Assembly of the World Council of Churches Held at Amsterdam, August 2 to September 4, 1948, ed. W. A. Visser ’t Hooft (London: SCM Press, 1949), 10.

2. David Kelly, “Nairobi: A Door Opened,” Religion in Communist Lands 4, no. 1 (Spring 1976), 4.

3. World Council of Churches, Central Committee, “Violence, Nonviolence, and the Struggle for Social Justice,” August 28, 1973, Ecumenical Review 25, no. 4 (1973), 430.

4. World Council of Churches, Central Committee, “Violence,” 430–46.

5. See also the helpful comments of Xenia Howard-Johnston [Dennen], “Editorial,” Religion in Communist Dominated Lands 4, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 2–3.

6. Michael Bourdeaux, “The Pushkino-Nairobi Connection,” in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2, Individual Clergy: Yakunin, Fr. Gleb (1974–1976), box 26, folder 4 (1 of 2); Michael Bourdeaux, One Word of Truth: The Cold War Memoir of Michael Bourdeaux and Keston College (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2019), 173.

7. In the 1970s, as Mark Philip Bradley has written, the emergence of the human rights movement signaled the growing belief in a “universal moral language.” Portrayed as the “idea of our times,” human rights had wide application; however, it also had a limited scope. Government leaders rarely related it to abuses in their own country but employed human rights almost exclusively to violations “outside the domestic sphere of the nation” (Mark Philip Bradley, The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016], 200–201).

8. Fr. Gleb Yakunin and Lev Regel′son, “Obrashchenie k delegatam V Assembleia Vsemirnogo Soveta Tserkvei,” October 16, 1975, Arkhiv Samizdata, No. 2380, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2, Yakunin file. An English-language translation is included in Fr. Gleb Yakunin and Lev Regel′son, Letters from Moscow: Religion and Human Rights in the USSR, ed. Jane Ellis (San Francisco, CA: H. S. Dakin Co., 1978), 41–50, and Religion in Communist Lands 4, no. 1 (1976): 9–14. (For accounts of the assembly’s reception of the “Appeal,” see Kelly, “Nairobi,” 4–8, and Elena Pozdreva, “The Report Card of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Delegation in Nairobi,” Radio Liberty Research, February 23, 1976, RL 104/76.)

9. Patriarch Tikhon, quoted in Yakunin and Regel′son, “Obrashchenie,” 3.

10. Bourdeaux, “Pushkino-Nairobi Connection.”

11. Yakunin and Regel′son, “Obrashchenie,” 4.

12. Yakunin and Regel′son, 4.

13. Yakunin and Regel′son, 7.

14. Yakunin and Regel′son, 10.

15. Yakunin and Regel′son, 10.

16. Yakunin and Regel′son, 8.

17. Yakunin and Regel′son, 9.

18. Yakunin and Regel′son, 9.

19. Yakunin and Regel′son, 9–11.

20. Yakunin and Regel′son, 9.

21. Fr. Gleb Yakunin and Lev Regel′son, “Obrashchenie k khristianam Portugalii,” April 3, 1975, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2, Yakunin, Fr. Gleb file. An English translation of the letter is included in Yakunin and Regel′son, Letters from Moscow, 29–31.

22. Yakunin wrote several other letters between his and Regel′son’s appeal to the church in Portugal and their next letter, which is discussed later in the text. They include Yakunin’s “Politburo TsK. KPSS—Oktrytoe pis′mo,” April 19, 1975, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2, Yakunin file, and in Yakunin and Regel′son, Letters from Moscow, 32–33. Yakunin protested the Soviet practice of the subbotnik, or “Red Saturday,” a day of voluntary labor required of citizens on Lenin’s birthday, April 22. In 1975, when it happened to fall on Easter Sunday, he requested that the subbotnik be moved to either May 1 or November 7. He, Lev Regel′son, and Viktor Kapitanchuk, wrote an additional letter, “Appeal for the Glorification of Russian Martyrs in the USSR,” May 25, 1975, in Yakunin and Regel′son, Letters from Moscow, 34–40. In the letter, they encouraged the patriarch and church leaders to begin preparations for the glorification of martyrs who had perished in the early years of the Soviet period.

23. Yakunin and Regel′son, “Obrashchenie,” 9.

24. Yakunin and Regel′son, 10.

25. “Iuvenalii, mitropolit eparkhii (Poiarkov, Vladimir Kirillovich),” www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/31765.html.

26. “Iuvenalii, mitropolit eparkhii.”

27. Metropolitan Yuvenalii, “Russian Orthodox Response,” Religion in Communist Lands 4, no. 1 (1976), 15. Metropolitan’s Yuvenalii’s letter is addressed to the editor of Target, the daily bulletin published by the Kenyan organizing committee of the WCC.

28. Yuvenalii, “Russian Orthodox Response,” 15.

29. Yuvenalii, 15.

30. See, for example, the “Documentary Record Compiled by Alan Nichols of the Australian Delegation’s Visit to the Soviet Union, Poland, and Yugoslavia,” June 14, 1976–July 4, 1976, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 9/9: Visits from Foreign Delegations, 1967–1977, box 27, folder 12 (1 of 2).

31. Yuvenalii, “Russian Orthodox Response,” 15.

32. Yuvenalii, 15–16.

33. “Russian Baptist Response,” Religion in Communist Lands 4, no. 1 (Spring 1976), 16.

34. For a detailed discussion of the formation, organization, and persecution of Baptist and other Protestant communities, see Michael Bourdeaux, Religious Ferment in Russia: Protestant Opposition to Soviet Religious Policy (London: Macmillan, 1968).

35. World Council of Churches, Breaking Barriers: The Official Report of the Fifth Assembly of the World Council of Churches, Nairobi, 23 November–10 December 1975, ed. David M. Paton (London: SPCK, 1976), 168. For summaries of the proceedings, see also Kelly, “Nairobi,” 4–8, and Bourdeaux, One Word, 172–76.

36. Bourdeaux, One Word, 172–76. Metropolitans Yuvenalii and Nikodim spoke in opposition to the amendment.

37. Mr. V. H. Davados (Church of North India) recommended closure. A vote then followed, but many of the delegates were unsure about what their vote actually entailed (Bourdeaux, One Word, 172–76).

38. They included Dr. T. B. Simatupang (Protestant, Indonesia), Mr. A. Buevskii (Russian Orthodox Church), and Dr. W. P. Thompson (Presbyterian Church, USA).

39. World Council of Churches, Breaking Barriers, 168.

40. Vitalii Borovoi, quoted in World Council of Churches, Breaking Barriers, 171.

41. World Council of Churches, 171.

42. Pimen, Patriarkh Moskovskii i vseia Rus, i chleny Sviashchennogo Sinoda, “Poslanie Sviashchennogo Sinoda o V Assemblee Vsemirnogo Soveta Tserkvei i ee rezul′tatakh,” March 3, 1976, Zhurnal Moskovskoi patriarkhii, no. 4 (1976): 11.

43. Helene Posdeeff, “Geneva: The Defense of Believers’ Rights,” Religion in Communist Lands 4, no. 4 (Winter 1976), 5.

44. World Council of Churches, Central Committee, “Helsinki Colloquium: Memorandum on the Church’s Role,” July 24–28, 1976, Ecumenical Review 28, no. 4 (1976): 450–56.

45. Philip A. Potter, “The Churches and Religious Liberty in the Helsinki Signatory States,” August 12, 1976, Ecumenical Review 28, no. 4 (1976), 450.

46. Jane Ellis, “The Background to Yakunin’s and Regel′son’s Activity,” in Yakunin and Regel′son, Letters from Moscow, 134–35.

47. “Interview with Metropolitan Nikodim,” Moscow News, February 7–14, 1976; extracts also published in Yakunin and Regel′son, Letters from Moscow, 136–38.

48. Yakunin and Regel′son, Letters from Moscow, 136.

49. Yakunin and Regel′son, 137. (In the interest of greater clarity, I have rearranged parts of this sentence.)

50. For a much different view, see the report of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Donald Coggan, who visited the Soviet Union in September 1977. He left a detailed account of his experiences in his “Communiqué on the Visit to the Russian Orthodox Church of His Grace Dr. Frederick Donald Coggan, the Archpriest of Canterbury, Primate of All England and Metropolitan,” September 26, 1977, Moscow, marked “Confidential,” in Keston Archive, SU Ort 9/9: Visits from Foreign Delegations, folder 13 (1977–1990) (2 of 2).

51. Ellis, “Background,” 138.

52. Bourdeaux, One Word, 183.

53. Bourdeaux, 183.

54. Erich Weingartner, Human Rights on the Ecumenical Agenda: Report and Assessment (Background Information of Commission of the Churches on International Affairs) (Geneva: Commission of the Churches on International Affairs, 1983); Bourdeaux, One Word, 176–77; and Michael Bourdeaux, “The Russian Church, Religious Liberty and the World Council of Churches,” Religion in Communist Lands 13, no. 1 (1985): 4–27.

55. Quoted in Bourdeaux, One Word, 177. On both theological and moral grounds, Canon Bourdeaux is especially critical of Weingartner’s approach. He argued that Weingartner totally misunderstood the motives of those who defended religious liberty in the Soviet Union (Bourdeaux, “Russian Church,” 21–24).

56. Bourdeaux, One Word, 188–89.

57. Rev. B. O. Fielding Clarke, “Letter,” Church Times, October 17, 1980, 12 (emphasis in the original). Rev. Fielding Clarke served the Anglican Church in the town of Wirksworth, in the Derbyshire district, and noted that he had visited the USSR twelve times, often as a guest of the Russian Church. See also the testimonies of David Y. K. Wong, a Hong Kong architect and engineer and president of the Baptist World Alliance, Bishop Ian Sheville of Newcastle, Australia, and Bishop Robert Runcie of St. Albans Cathedral in Great Britain and the future Archbishop of Canterbury (1980–1991). The interview with David Wong was published in Baptist Times, August 26, 1976. Summary accounts of the latter three visits to the USSR were published in Keston College, “Western Church Leaders Report on Religion in the Soviet Union,” Religion in Communist Lands 5, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 52–53.

58. See the collection of essays, Voices of the Voiceless: Religion, Communism, and the Keston Archive, eds. Julie deGraffenried and Zoe Knox (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019).

59. The journal Religion in Communist Lands began publication in 1973. It published a large number of extremely valuable primary and secondary source materials on religion, politics, and society in countries formerly under Communist rule.

60. “The world is now dominated by a new spirit,” President Jimmy Carter emphasized in his inauguration speech on January 20, 1977. “Peoples more numerous and more politically aware are craving, and now demanding, their place in the sun—not just for the benefit of their own physical condition, but for basic human rights” (quoted in Bradley, World Reimagined, 123). Although the United States trailed Western European countries in defining human rights as a primary concern, the president’s commitment likely strengthened the resolve of Yakunin and Regel′son to move more deliberately to seek support from sympathetic people in the United States. Henry Dakin would be one of those people (see chapter 5).

61. Others who called to testify in the hearings included David D. Klassen, a former prisoner in the Soviet Union, Lev E. Dobriansky, a professor in the Department of Economics at Georgetown University, and George Dobczansky, research director of Human Rights Research, Inc.

62. Felix Corley, “Obituary: Pastor Georgi Vins,” Independent, January 17, 1998, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries-pastor-georgi-vins-1139170.html; Georgi Vins, Testament from Prison, trans. Jane Ellis (Weston, Ontario: David C. Cook, 1975); “Georgi Vins (Wiens) (1928–1998),” https://cmbs.mennonitebrethren.ca/personal_papers/vins-wiensgeorgi-1928-1998/; and Albert W. Wardin Jr., “Jacob J. Wiens: Mission Champion in Freedom and Repression,” Journal of Church and State 28, no. 3 (Autumn 1986): 495–514.

63. Yakunin and Regel′son, “Obrashchenie,” 11. Yakunin and Regel′son also mentioned the Latvian Baptist elder Yanis Smits and his family who, like members of other congregations, had applied for permission to emigrate.

64. Representative Buchanan noted that human rights advocates in thirteen countries, including the United States, had petitioned for Vins’s release. Keston College in England, too, had taken a substantial interest in the case and petitioned for his release.

65. “Statement of Hon. John H. Buchanan, Jr., a Representative in Congress from the State of Alabama,” June 24, 1976, in US Congress, House Committee on International Relations, Religious Persecution in the Soviet Union. Hearings before the Subcommittees on International Political and Military Affairs and on International Organizations. Committee on International Relations, 94th Cong., 2nd. sess., June 24 and 30, 1976, 2.

66. Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, “Statement to the House of Representatives,” US Congress, Religious Persecution in the Soviet Union, 3.

67. Bociurkiw’s “Statement” and “Prepared Statement” were included in US Congress, Religious Persecution in the Soviet Union, 2–27.

68. Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov, quoted in Bociurkiw, “Statement,” 4.

69. Bociurkiw, “Statement” and “Prepared Statement,” 4, 9–10. Bociurkiw’s comments refer to the ferment among the intelligentsia that developed after Stalin’s death in March 1953, the loosening of censorship controls, and the publication of novels, poems, and other materials that represented a new wave of creative thought.

70. Bociurkiw, “Statement” and “Prepared Statement,” 4–5.

71. “Statement of Prof. John Dunlop, German-Russian Department, Oberlin College,” in US Congress, Religious Persecution in the Soviet Union, 53.

72. Dunlop, “Statement,” 52.

73. Dunlop, 52–54.

74. According to Fr. Dmitrii Dudko, “a believing child is subjected to badgering, mockery and there have been cases when teachers have ripped the crosses off children” (quoted in Dunlop, “Statement,” 55.

75. “Statement of Yanis Smits, Chairman, Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians and Baptists; Former Prisoner of the Soviet Union,” June 24, 1976, in US Congress, Religious Persecution in the Soviet Union, 28. Klassen spoke of the insecurities his fellow believers had to endure, and he gave concrete descriptions of the physical and psychological abuses they had suffered.

76. In the hearings, Professor Lev E. Dobriansky emphasized the discrepancy between external and internal behavior (US Congress, Religious Persecution in the Soviet Union, 80).

77. Professor Bohdan Bociurkiw, in the discussion following the testimonies of Bociurkiw, Yanis Smits) and David Klassen, in US Congress, Religious Persecution in the Soviet Union, 37.

78. Bociurkiw, “Statement” and “Prepared Statement,” 37–38.

79. In his criticism of church leaders, Fr. Gleb Yakunin had repeatedly claimed that they had lost the trust of the Russian people. See Yakunin and Regel′son, “Obrashchenie,” 11, and earlier, Yakunin and Fr. Nikolai Eshliman’s 1965 letter to Patriarch Aleksii, “Otkrytoe pis′mo Ego Sviateishestvu, Sviateishemu Patriarkhu Moskovskomu i Vseia Rusi, Aleksiiu,” 3, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2, Yakunin file.

80. Fr. Gleb Yakunin and Lev Regel′son, “To the General Secretary of the WCC, Philip Potter,” March 6, 1976, in Helene Posdeeff, “Geneva,” Appendix: “Russian Believers Write to WCC’s General Secretary,” Religion in Communist Lands 4, no. 4 (Winter 1976): 9–15.

81. US Congress, Religious Persecution in the Soviet Union, 88.

82. US Congress, 88.

83. In late April 1979, under President Jimmy Carter, an exchange of prisoners from the Soviet Union and the United States resulted in the release of Georgi Vins.

1. Khristianskii komitet zashchity prav veruiushchikh v SSSR, “Deklaratsiia,” in Dokumenty khristianskogo komiteta zashchity prav veruiushchikh v SSSR (San Francisco: Washington Street Research Center, 1977), 1:1.

2. “Deklaratsiia,” in Dokumenty, 1:1.

3. Mikhail Vital′evich Shkarovskii, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ v XX veke (Moscow: Veche, Lepta, 2010) 280–81.

4. Dimitry V. Pospielovsky, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov′ v XX veke (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo “Respublika,” 1995), 359–60; and Dimitry V. Pospielovskii, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998), 343.

5. Jane Ellis, “The Christian Committee for the Defence of Believers’ Rights in the USSR,” Religion in Communist Lands 4, no. 4 (1980): 279; and Jane Ellis, The Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History (London: Routledge, 1988), 291, 374.

6. Ellis, Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History, 374.

7. At Tarasovka, and later at Novaia Derevnia, Kapitanchuk regularly participated in the discussion sessions Fr. Aleksandr Men led about church reform. There, too, he developed a close relationship with Yakunin (Aleksandr Men′, O sebe … Vospominaniia, interv′iu, besedy, pis′ma [Moscow: Zhizn′ s Bogom) 2007], 170, 173).

8. Tat′iana Lebedeva, interview by author, Moscow, May 17, 2018.

9. Ellis, “Christian Committee,” 19.

10. The Moscow Group’s formal name was “Public Group to Promote Fulfillment of the Helsinki Accords in the USSR” (Obshchestvennaia gruppa sodeistviia vypolneniiu Khel′sinskikh soglashenii v SSSR). Its membership included, in addition to Orlov, Sakharov’s wife Elena Bonner, Liudmilla Alekseyeva, Aleksandr Ginzburg, Anatoly Marchenko, Anatoly Sharanskii, Petro Grigorenko, and others (Moscow Helsinki Group, “Ob obrazovanii obshchestvennoi gruppy sodeistviia vypolneniiu Khel′sinkskikh soglashenii v SSSR,” in Dokumenty Moskovskoi Khel′sinkskoi gruppy, 1976–1982, ed. G. V. Kuzovkin and I. Zubarev (Moscow: Zatsepa, 2006).

11. University of Minnesota, Human Rights Library, “The Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe,” August 1, 1975, 14 I.L.M. 1292 (Helsinki Accords), http//www1.umn.edu/humanrts/osce/basics/finact75.htm.; Peter Slezkine, “From Helsinki to Human Rights Watch: How an American Cold War Monitoring Group Became an International Human Rights Institution,” Humanity 5, no. 3 (Winter 2014), 348. See the interpretations by political leaders in the United States and the Soviet Union, in Patrick G. Vaughan, “Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Helsinki Final Act,” in The Crisis of Détente in Europe: From Helsinki to Gorbachev, 1975–1985, ed. Leopoldo Nuti (London: Routledge, 2009), 11–25, and, in the same volume, Svetlana Savranskaya, “Human Rights Movement in the USSR after the Signing of the Helsinki Final Act, and the Reaction of Soviet Authorities,” 26–40.

12. Fr. Gleb Yakunin, interview by author, Moscow, May 10, 2007.

13. A letter addressed to Pope John Paul II, sent on November 22, 1978, signed by Fr. Gleb Yakunin, Viktor Kapitanchuk, Vadim Shcheglov, and five members of the Catholic Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights, explained this contention by saying that the “highest sphere of the human being is that of spiritual life.” When spiritual freedom is violated, the core of human identity and purpose is also violated (“To Pope John Paul II, The Heads of the Autocephalous Orthodox Churches; Primate of the Anglican Church, Archbishop D. Coggan; The World Council of Churches; Community Christian Committees Which Defend Believers’ Rights; and President of the United States, J. Carter),” November 22, 1978, in Alan Scarfe, ed., Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights in the USSR: A Selection of Documents in Translation, trans. Maria Belaeffa [Glendale, CA: Door of Hope Press, 1982], 112).

14. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdiaev, Filosofiia svobody (Moscow: A. I. Mamontova, 1911).

15. Yakunin, interview by author.

16. Dokumenty, 1:vii.

17. See, for example, “Zhaloby ot veruiushchikh prikhozhan sv. Nikol′skogo khrama g. Nikolaeva,” December 25, 1975, in Dokumenty khristianskogo komiteta, 1:83–85; Prikhozhan sviato-nikol′skogo sobora, “Sviateishestvo Pimen, Patriarkh Moskvy i vseia Rossii: Zapros-Zhaloba,” in Dokumenty khristianskogo komiteta, 1:94.

18. According to his wife, Vergilia, Henry Dakin had also learned basic Russian and could read simple Russian texts. Vergilia Passache Dakin, interview by author, Ukiah, CA, Zoom, July 9, 2020.

19. In the 1960s, while working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Dakin created a pocket-size radiation detector that remained in use for the next fifty years. He was well on his way to a successful career in the sciences.

20. As the newsletter of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, mourned, “The annals of California history scarcely record a comparable family tragedy.” Dale L. Morgan, “Susanna Bryant Dakin,” Bancroftiana, no. 40 (May 1967), 1.

21. Susanna Dakin, speaking at Henry S. Dakin Memorial 2d, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ffyJRc1n9M.

22. Willis Harman, quoted in Kathleen Teltsch, “Fortune in Toys Helps to Put Americans and Russians in Touch,” New York Times, November 16, 1988. See also the testimony of Ed Ellsworth, a technician who worked with Henry Dakin on various projects, in Ed Ellsworth, “Ed Ellsworth Biography,” https://sunrisecenter.org/classes-events/core-teachers/ed-ellsworth/.

23. Adriana Dakin, interview by author, Ukiah, CA, Zoom, July 9, 2020.

24. Jim Hickman, interview by author, Cochabamba, Bolivia, Zoom, July 11, 2020.

25. Hickman, interview by author.

26. Henry Dakin’s father, Richard, the originator of the world-famous Dakin Stuffed Animals toys, had built these human relationships with Russians through his commercial ventures. The Dakin brown bear toys became the official symbol of the Olympic Games, held in Moscow in 1980 (Teltsch, “Fortune in Toys”).

27. Dakin believed in universal human rights, and he had a large interest in enhancing human relationships that strengthened those rights. In the mid-1970s, new forms of technology, such as desktop publishing, were only in their infancy, but Dakin used them to establish connections with the Soviet people.

28. See Nadezhda Beliakova, “Samizdat dlia tamizdata, ili Kak Kholodnaia voina povliiala na razvitie novogo zhanra pravoslavnogo samizdata,” in Acta samizdatika: Zapiski o samizdate: Al′manakh, no. 5, ed. M. Ia. Sheinker (Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia publichnaia istoricheskaia biblioteka Rossii, 2020), 77–91.

29. See A Chronicle of Current Events: Journal of the Human Rights Movement in the USSR 58 (1981), 24.

30. “Deklaratsiia,” in Dokumenty, 1:1.

31. “Zhaloby ot veruiushchikh prikhozhan sv. Nikol′skogo khrama g. Nikolaeva,” December 25, 1975, in Dokumenty, 1:83–85.

32. “Zhaloby,” 1:83.

33. “Zhaloby,” 1:83.

34. “Zhaloby,” 1:84. Chunikhin served as the local representative of the Council for Religious Affairs.

35. Archbishop Bogolep of Kirov and Nikolaev Diocese, “Ukaz,” November 5, 1976, in Dokumenty, 1:99. Issuing the order, Archbishop Bogolep wrote, “The Church is the Lord’s house, a temple of prayer and an assembly of peace creating people, where there must reign peace, love, unity of souls, and agreement, and not a place of brigandage, where rules evil, enmity, and contempt for one another.”

36. A. Goritsvet, “Pod sen′iu sobora,” Iuzhnaia Pravda, February 5, 1977.

37. “See “Zaiavlenie predsedatel′iu Tsentral′nogo raionogo suda g. Nikolaeva E. V. Pisaruk ot L. A. Mirchenko i drugikh prikhozhan,” February 10, 1977; “Zapros-Zhaloba; V Narodnyi sud Tsentral′nogo raiona goroda Nikolaeva ot prikhozhan sviato-nikol′skogo sobora, N. K. Martinova, Z. K. Kliukina, i L. V. Seredavina,” February 9, 1977; and Prikhozhan sviato-nikol′skogo sobora, “Sviateishchemu Patriarkhu Moskovskogo i vseia Rossii, Pimen, Zapros-Zhaloba,” May 28, 1977, in Dokumenty, 1:86–89, 94–96.

38. “Sviateishchemu Patriarkhu Moskovskogo i vseia Rossii,” May 28, 1977, in Dokumenty, 1:88–89. The May 28, 1977, letter represented the second of the two letters the Nikolaev parishioners sent to the patriarch.

39. “To Most Holy Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, Pimen,” December 16, 1978, in Scarfe, Christian Committee, 74–79.

40. “To Most Holy Patriarch,” 76.

41. “To Most Holy Patriarch,” 75.

42. “To Most Holy Patriarch,” 75.

43. “To Most Holy Patriarch,” 79.

44. See the pathbreaking book, Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism As a Civilization (Berkeley: University of Californian Press 1997), 218–21, 237.

45. For similar examples of “Bolshevik speak” and its purposes, see Andrew B. Stone, “ ‘Overcoming Peasant Backwardness’: The Khruschchev Antireligous Campaign and the Rural Soviet Union,” Russian Review 67 (April 2008): 296–320.

46. Anastasia Kleimionova and other parishioners of the Holy Convent of Pechersk, “To the Most Holy Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, Pimen,” October 27, 1978, in Scarfe, Christian Committee Documents, 74.

47. Vladimir Zelinskii, “Pastva i pastyri,” Russkaia mysl′, no. 3786 (July 28, 1979): 8–9.

48. Zelinskii, “Pastva i pastyri,” 8. See, for example, the difficulties Fr. Aleksandr Men had with older women when he first arrived at his Akulino parish in 1958 in Wallace L. Daniel, Russia’s Uncommon Prophet: Father Aleksandr Men and His Times (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), 100–1.

49. Daniel, Russia’s Uncommon Prophet, 74. Additional examples of the Church’s appointed leaders reveal the harsh, inhumane qualities of priests’ leadership roles. See, for example, Kleimionova et al., “To the Most Holy Patriarch,” 74.

50. Evgeny Barabanov, “The Schism between the Church and the World,” in From under the Rubble, ed. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, trans. A. M. Brock et al., under the direction of Michael Scammell, intro. Max Hayward (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 177.

51. Fr. Gleb Yakunin, “Doklad Sviashchennika Gleba Iakunina Khristianskomu komitetu zashchitu prav veruiushchikh v SSSR o sovremennom polozhenii Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi i o perspektivakh religioznogo vozrozhdeniia Rossii,” in Dokumenty khristianskogo komiteta (San Francisco: Washington Street Research Center, 1979), 11: 1128; English language copy (abridged): “The Russian Orthodox Church Today: Religious Revival in the USSR,” in Scarfe, Christian Committee Documents, 23–40.

52. See Barabanov’s comments in “Schism,” 178–79, 187.

53. Fr. Lev Konin, “Prekratit′ Psikhiatricheskie Repressii v SSSR,” May 6, 1977, in Dokumenty khristianskogo komiteta, 1:113. Fr. Lev’s biographical account is taken from a paper attached to the Christian Committee’s documents.

54. Konin, 113.

55. Konin, 113.

56. Konin, 114.

57. Konin, 115.

58. Fr. Lev Konin, “Zaiavelenie,” October 16, 1977, in Dokumenty khristianskogo komiteta, 1:111. Father Lev sent his “Appeal” for assistance to the Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights.

59. See also the case of Aleksandr Argentev, a member of the Moscow intelligentsia and a student in the process of finding his way, searching for his own identity, and expressing dissatisfaction with the Marxist-Leninist teachings of his schooling. He participated in the Christian Seminar, before the police sent him to a psychiatric clinic in the city in the summer of 1976. See his “Letter to Pimen, Most Holy Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia,” written from Psychiatric Clinic no. 14, Moscow, July 21, 1976, in Keston Archive, SU 12/11. I, Individual Clergy: Fr. Gleb Yakunin, Fr. Nikolai Eshliman, Fr. Nikolai Gainov.

60. Konin, “Prekratit′ Psikhiatricheskie Repressii,” 115–16.

61. Katolicheskii komitet zashchity prav veruiushchikh, “XXXIV Sessii General′noi Assemblei OON, Pravitel′stvam k Parlamentam vsekh Stran,” September 29, 1979, in Dokumenty khristianskogo komiteta, 12:1267. Conference participants recognized the Convention on the Rights of the Child, composed by the United Nations in 1959, as a foundational agreement.

62. Katolicheskii komitet zashchity prav veruiushchikh, “XXXIV Sessii General′noi Assemblei OON,” 1267–68.

63. Katolicheskii komitet, 1268.

64. Katolicheskii komitet, 1268.

65. Katolicheskii komitet, 1268.

66. Tat′iana Ivanovna Sorokina, “Zaiavlenie,” in Scarfe, Christian Committee Documents, 140.

67. After opening Sorokina’s case, the district court turned the proceedings over to the regional court for further adjudication.

68. Oktiabrskii District People’s Court, city of Taganrog, “Decision in the Name of the RSFSR,” October 12, 1978, in Scarfe, Christian Committee Documents, 143.

69. Sorokina, “Zaiavlenie,” 141.

70. Valeriia Petrovna Bondareko, “Letter to Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights in the USSR,” 1977, in Hoover Archive, Stanford University, Papers of Henry S. Dakin, box 1, folder 1.

71. “Zaiavlenie ot veruiushchikh Riazanskoi obshchiny EkhB,” August 19, 1979, in Hoover Archive, Stanford University, Papers of Henry S. Dakin, box 9, folder 3.

72. “Khristianam vsego mira, Komitetu zashchita prav cheloveka pri OON, Sovetu rodstvennikov uznikov,” August 1978, in Hoover Archive, Stanford University, Papers of Henry S. Dakin, box 4, folder 5.

73. Yakunin, “Doklad,” 1132.

74. Ellis, “Christian Committee,” 282.

75. Yakunin, “Doklad,” 1129, 1137.

76. Yakunin, 1128.

77. The great majority of Orthodox priests, Yakunin wrote, did little more than offer praises to God, paeans he considered useless (Yakunin, “Doklad,” 1160).

78. Yakunin, 1160.

79. Such a purpose did not fit into what Yakunin described as the “cult-pious pharisaical mentality” of the church’s present leadership. Yakunin, 1160; Father Gleb Yakunin, “The Present State of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Prospects for Religious Revival in Russia,” in Sergei Pushkarov, Vladimir Rusak, and Gleb Yakunin, Christianity and Government in Russia and the Soviet Union: Reflections on the Millennium (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), 110–13.

80. Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (1951; repr., New York: Vintage International, Random House, 1990), 201.

81. Yakunin, “Doklad,” 1142–43.

82. Yakunin, 1167.

83. Yakunin, 1139.

84. Yakunin, 1167.

85. Yakunin, 1163–64.

86. Yakunin, 1166.

87. Yakunin, 1165. The biblical quotation is from Mark 2:21.

88. Yakunin, “Doklad,” 1166.

89. The numbers of individuals and groups represented included Reformed Baptists—100; Catholics—49; True and Free Adventists—37; Reformed Baptists and Pentecostals—17, signing jointly; Georgian Orthodox—5; Jewish—2; various other groups—16. Letters, reports, and legal materials made up the remainder of the documents (Ellis, “Christian Committee,” 290–91n10).

90. Metropolitan Nikodim, “The Russian Orthodox Church and the Ecumenical Movement,” Ecumenical Review 21, no. 2 (1969): 116–29.

91. “Deklaratsiia,” in Dokumenty, 1:1.

92. Fr. Gleb Yakunin et al. “Pravoslavnomu Vselenskomu Patriarkhu Dmitriiu,” April 11, 1978, in Dokumenty, 1:159–63. An abridged copy of the letter was also published in Religion in Communist Lands 7, no. 3 (1979): 191–94.

93. Sviashchennik Gleb Yakunin, Viktor Kapitanchuk, and Vadim Shcheglov, “Ego Sviateishestu Pape Rimskomu, nasledniki Sviateishego Prestola Papy Ioanna-Pavla I,” October 1, 1978, in Dokumenty, 5, pt. 2: 700–721. The second, “Letter to Pope John Paul II,” November 22, 1978, in Scarfe, Christian Committee Documents, 111–15, proposed the creation of an international agreement on religious rights, corresponding to the 1975 Helsinki Accords on human rights. The third letter, “Pis′mo Pape Ioannu Pavlu II,” April 2, 1979, decried the false claims of the Orthodox hierarchy and state representatives about religious freedom in the Soviet Union (Ellis, Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History, 376–77).

94. Yakunin, “Doklad,” 1134.

95. Yakunin, 1167.

96. Yakunin et al., “Pravoslavnomu Vselenskomu Patriarkhu Dmitriiu,” 160.

97. “Deklaratsiia,” in Dokumenty, 1:1.

98. Yakunin et al., “Pravoslavnomu Vselenskomu Patriarkhu Dmitriiu,” 161.

99. James L. Rathenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 454.

100. When attached to the internet, which soon became a reality, telecommunications possessed, on many different levels, the capacity to bring people much closer together. For the political, economic, and social implications of this innovation, see Klaus Schwab, Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Redfern, New South Wales: Currency Press, 2018).

101. Anya Kucharev, a Russian émigré who began working for Dakin in 1980 as a translator and assistant, is a goldmine of information on the Esalen Institute in California, which hosted many Russian political leaders, cosmonauts, business executives, scientists, and others, bringing them together with Americans for relaxation and conversation (Anya Kucharev, interview by author, San Rafael, CA, email, July 24, 2020). Many details about Henry Dakin’s initiatives in person-to-person diplomacy are included in the book of reminiscences Henry S. Dakin: From Physics to Metaphysics and Guns to Toys, ed. Laura Gail Drewes, foreword Vergilia Paasche Dakin (Petaluma, CA: Happy Medium Productions, 2020).

102. See Birgit Menzel, “New Age Diplomacy: The Diplomatic Role of the Esalen Institute in Ending the Cold War,” in New Age in Russia, https://newageru.hypotheses.org/1903.

103. Vergilia Paasche Dakin, interview by author.

1. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements (New York: Harper, 1961), 314–15.

2. This anxiety was expressed in a variety of ways, including concerns about the Vatican’s efforts to appeal to Soviet youth and the increased sale of books and other printed materials that were available in secondhand bookstores. See Yuri Andropov, chair of the Committee for State Security, “To the CC CPSU,” Document 161. KGB, 25 March 1974; No. 788–A, Moscow; and “Decree of the Chairman of the State Commission of the USSR Council of Ministers for Publishing, Printing Presses and the Book Trade,” Document 162, I, No. 346/DSP,” Moscow, June 6, 1975, in Religion in the Soviet Union: An Archival Reader, ed. and trans. Felix Corley (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 267–69, 270–73.

3. Boris Roshchin, “Svobody religii i klepki,” Literaturnaia gazeta, April 13 and 20, 1977. English translation in Fr. Gleb Yakunin and Lev Regel′son, Letters from Moscow: Religion and Human Rights in the USSR, ed. Jane Ellis (San Francisco: H. S. Dakin, 1978), 78–83.

4. Roshchin, “Svobody religii,” 3, 11.

5. Roshchin, 8.

6. Roshchin, 7.

7. “Excerpts from the Transcript of a Press Conference at the House of Fr. Dmitrii Dudko, April 27, 1977, Referring to articles in Literaturnaia gazeta, April 13 and 20, 1977,” in Keston Archive Ort 8/2: Yakunin, 1.

8. “Excerpts,” 2.

9. “Excerpts,” 1–2.

10. “Excerpts,” 4.

11. “Excerpts,” 3–4.

12. Yakunin estimated attendance at church services at Easter, as well as at Prayers of the Departed, had grown by 25 percent from the previous year (“Excerpts,” 4).

13. See the letter written by two sympathizers who wrote in support of Fr. Gleb and other defenders of religious liberty and human rights: Alexei Zalesskii and Irina Zalesskaia, “Appeal to the Christians of Our Country,” Religion in Communist Lands 4, no. 4 (1980): 292–93; Jane Ellis, “The Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights in the USSR,” Religion in Communist Lands 8, no. 4 (1980), 287.

14. Fr. Gleb Yakunin, Hierodeacon Varsonofi Khaibulin, and Viktor Kapitanchuk, “Zaiavlenie Khristianskogo komiteta zashchity prav veruiushchikh v SSSR,” December 29, 1977, in Dokumenty khristianskogo komiteta zashchity prav veruiushchikh v SSSR (San Francisco: Washington Street Research Center, 1977), 1:3. English translation in Dokumenty khristianskogo komiteta zashchity prav veruiushchikh v SSSR, vol. 3: Izbrannye perevody dokumentov iz tomov 1, 2, 4 (San Francisco: Washington Street Research Center, 1977, 1978), 285.

15. For both Fonchenkov and Gainov, see “Avtobiografiia ottsa Vasiliia Fonchenkova,” in Dokumenty,10:1077, and “Biograficheskaia spravka sviashchennika o. Nikolaia Gainova,” Russkaia mysl′, no. 3292 (January 24, 1980), 5.

16. Ellis, “Christian Committee,” 288.

17. “Excerpts,” 2.

18. This fundamental point was emphasized in the founding of the Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights in the USSR, specifically “to assist in putting Soviet legislation into practice.” “Deklaratsiia,” December 30, 1976, in Dokumenty, 1:1.

19. Constitution (Fundamental Law) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Adopted at the Seventh (Special) Session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Ninth Convocation, on October 7, 1977, chap. 1, art. 6 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1977), https://constitution.org/cons/ussr77.txt.

20. Gleb Yakunin, Varsonofii Khaibulin, and Viktor Kapitanchuk, “Uvazhaemomu predsedateliu Konstitutsionnoi komissii Brezhnevy Leonidu Il′ichu” June 8, 1977, Moscow, in Dokumenty, 1:26–27. English translation in Dokumenty, 3:340–41.

21. Jane Ellis, The Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History (London: Routledge, 1988), 255.

22. Fr. Gleb Yakunin, Varsonofii Khaibulin, and Viktor Kapitanchuk, “Otkrytoe pis′mo rukovodstvy radioveshchatel′nykh stantsii Golos Ameriki, Bi–Bi–Si, Nemetskaia Volna,” November 11, 1977, in Dokumenty, 1:37–38; Ellis, Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History, 256.

23. Leonard Ternovskii, “Podvig protivostoianiia,”Posev 36, no. 1 (1980): 2.

24. Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, trans. Richard Lourie (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 499. On the moral challenges the Soviet Union faced, see Philip Boobyyer, Conscience, Dissent and Reform in Soviet Russia (London: Routledge, 2005), 222.

25. Constitution (Fundamental Law) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1977, chap. 1, art. 6.

26. As noted earlier, the KGB had Sakharov under observation for many years. The specific incident that resulted in his arrest was his leadership of a public demonstration protesting the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.

27. Ellis, Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History, 422.

28. Ellis, 422. As Ellis notes, the charge of “forgery” derived from a summer work project in which Popkov and Burtsov supposedly inaccurately filed a worksheet with the foreman; the charge covered up the foreman’s illegal assignment of long overtime hours that he had required the two young men to work.

29. “Appeal for the Release of Father Gleb Yakunin,” in Arkhiv Samizdata, 3853, November 4, 1979, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2: Individual Clergy, box 26, folder 6, Yakunin, Fr. Gleb (1978–1979).

30. Stanislav Zherdev, Anatolii Vlasov, and Nikolai Romanyuk, “ ‘Declaration’ (in Support of Fr. Gleb Yakunin),” November 4(?), 1979, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2: Individual Clergy, box 26, folder 6, Yakunin, Fr. Gleb (1978–1979).

31. The announcement of the service appeared in the Church of England Newspaper, February 29, 1980, and “Special Service of Prayer for Jailed Russian Christians,” Catholic Herald, February 29, 1980.

32. “Prayers of Protest in Montreal,” Orthodox Church, March 1980, 2.

33. A photograph and brief story of this event appeared in the Russian émigré newspaper Novoye Russkoe Slovo, February 26, 1980, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 9/4: Western Reactions (1980–2000), box 27, folder 8 (2 of 2).

34. “Einheitlicher christlicher Appell für sowjetischen Priester, Gleb Yakunin,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, February 26, 1980.

35. (Anonymous), “Snova o ‘dobrykh liudiakh novoi Rusi,’ ” Russkaia mysl′ (March 13, 1980), 4.

36. See Oliver Bullough, The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 193–201; Sesil′ Vess′e, Za vashu i nashu svobodu: Dissidentskoe dvizhenie v Rossii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2015), 393–95.

37. Fr. Gleb Yakunin, “Doklad Khristianskomu komitetu zashchity prav veruiushchikh v SSSR o sovremennom polozhenii Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi i o perspektivakh religioznogo vozrozhdeniia Rossii,” August 15, 1979, in Dokumenty Khristianskogo komiteta zashchity prav veruiushchikh v SSSR (San Francisco: Washington Street Research Center, 1979), 11:1155–56. English translation (abridged) in Alan Scarfe, ed., Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights in the USSR: A Selection of Documents in Translation, trans. Maria Belaeffa (Glendale, CA: Door of Hope Press, 1982), 23–39.

38. Nicholas Ganson, “Orthodox Dissidence as De-Atomization: Father Dmitrii Dudko and His Battle with Razobshchennost′,” Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 40 (2013): 100–103, 106–7.

Ganson further develops the theme of his earlier piece in his article on Fr. Vsevelod Shpiller, in which the well-known Orthodox priest contended that the inner spiritual life wrongly becomes objectified when it is mixed with political activism (Nicholas Ganson, “Truth Reveals Itself Through Love: Fr. Vsevelod Shpiller’s Critique of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as a Pastoral Admonition,” Soviet and Post-Soviet Review [2022]: 1–29, https://doi.org/:10.30965/18763324-BJA10075). See also Seraphim Rose (Father), “In Defense of Father Dimitry Dudko,” Orthodox Word 92, no. 16 (1980): 115–22, 127–28.

39. Iraida Yakunina, interview by author, Moscow, email, October 28, 2016.

40. Mark Popovskii, Zhizn′ i zhitie Voina-Iasentskogo arkhiepiskopa i khiruga, 2nd ed. (Tenafly, NJ: Hermitage, 1996). Yakunina, interview by author. Mark Popovskii, born in 1922 in Odesa, fought in World War II. After the war, he began working as a freelance writer. In 1977, Popovskii emigrated from the Soviet Union, eventually settling in New York (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/web/eresources/archives/rbm/BAR_Popovskii/main.html).

41. Yakunina, interview by author.

42. Yakunina, interview by author.

43. The details of this meeting were recounted by Elena Volkova, a close friend and confidant of Fr. Gleb, interview by author, Moscow, September 11, 2015.

44. Volkova, interview by author, Moscow, September 17, 2016. Whether or not Iraida Georgievna made this decision, as Yakunin claimed, is a matter of dispute. Under the complex circumstances in which he found himself, Yakunin may have decided against confessing his alleged wrongdoing, but attributed this courageous decision to his wife Iraida (Elena Volkova, Glyba Gleba: Zapreshchenneishii ierei Iakunin [St. Petersburg: Renome, 2021], 328–29).

45. See Rodric Braithwaite, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979–89 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

46. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, “Poland: Solidarity—The Trade Union That Changed the World,” August 24, 2005, https://www.rferl.org/a/1060898.html.

47. CPSU CC Politburo, Protocol No. 210, “Decision Setting Up the Suslov Commission,” August 25, 1980, and “Special Dossier on the Polish Crisis of 1980,” August 28, 1980, Wilson Center Digital Archive, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Dmitriǐ Antonovich Volkogonov papers, 1887–1995, mm97083838, Reel 18, Container 27. Translated by Malcolm Byrne. https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/111230.

Newspapers in the Soviet Union carried no information about the size of the workers’ strikes, noting only that the Polish Party and government were actively in combat against certain “negative phenomena” taking place in Poland (David Willis, “Moscow Stays Cool While Polish Order Yields; So Far, Kremlin Keeps Reign on Itself—and Hopes It Can Ride Out Crisis,” Christian Science Monitor, August 25, 1980, 1).

48. “The Trial of Gleb Yakunin, 25–28 August 1980,” Chronicle of Current Events, no. 58 (November 1980), https://chronicle-of-current-events.com/2016/01/12/58-3-the-trial-of-gleb-yakunin/.

49. Kevin Klose, “Orlov Trial Opens,” Washington Post, May 16, 1978.

50. Criminal Code of the RSFSR (Washington, DC and Russian SFSR: United States Joint Publication Service, 1961).

51. “Trial of Gleb Yakunin.”

52. Lev Regel′son, quoted in “Protsess nad sviashchennikom G. Iakuninym: Po vospominaniia rodnyk i znakomykh,” in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2: Yakunin Trial (1980), box 50, folder 2 (2 of 2).

53. “Protsess nad sviashchennikom G. Iakuninym.”

54. Viktor Popkov, in “Protsess nad sviashchennikom G. Iakuninym,” and “Trial of Gleb Yakunin.” David Atkinson (1940–2012) served as a conservative member of the UK Parliament and was elected seven times from 1977 to 2005. He often voiced strong criticism of the Soviet Union, in particular on human rights issues, and he played an active role in several international forums that highlighted human rights abuses.

55. When I interviewed him near his office in Sergiev Posad in the summer of 1994, Andrei Il′ich Osipov was serving as head of the Department of Graduate Studies at the Theological Academy of the Moscow Patriarchy and chief editor of the Orthodox journal Bogoslovskii Vestnik. He changed his views to fit the times. He had become a strong nationalist who viewed the church as the central institution in Russia’s national identity (Andrei Il′ich Osipov, interview with author, Sergiev Posad, June 11, 1994).

56. A. I. Osipov, in “Protsess nad sviashchennikom G. Iakuninym,” and “Trial of Gleb Yakunin,” August 25–28, 1980.

57. “Interview with Archimandrite Iosif: Reply to ‘Western Propaganda,’ ” TASS, in Russian for Abroad, September 19, 1980, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2: Yakunin; “Trial of Gleb Yakunin.” Shortly after the trial, Archimandrite Iosif gave this interview in order to elaborate on what he had said at the trial and how, he maintained, Western accounts distorted his testimony.

58. “Interview with Archimandrite Iosif.”

59. Feliks Karelin in “Protsess nad sviashchennikom G. Iakuninym,” and “Trial of Gleb Yakunin.” Karelin, the reader will recall, came to Fr. Aleksandr Men’s church in the early 1960s, brought there by Yakunin, and was the chief writer of the letters Yakunin and Nikolai Eshliman sent to Patriarch Aleksii I and chair of the Presidium Nikolai Podgorny in 1965.

60. “Trial of Gleb Yakunin.” Fr. Krivoi also testified that Fr. Gleb had once sold him an icon.

61. “Trial of Gleb Yakunin.” According to the account in A Chronicle of Current Events, Yakunin and his associates knew Shushpanov to be a member of the KGB and had written to Patriarch Pimen about his danger to the church.

62. “Trial of Gleb Yakunin.”

63. “Trial of Gleb Yakunin.”

64. “Trial of Gleb Yakunin.”

65. All quotes in this paragraph are from “Protsess nad sviashchennikom G. Iakuninym,” and “Trial of Gleb Yakunin.”

66. See Nigel Wade’s excellent article “Dissident Priest Jailed,” Daily Telegraph, August 29, 1980, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2: Yakunin.

67. Wallace L. Daniel, “ ‘I Am a Fighter by Nature’: Fr. Gleb Yakunin and the Defense of Religious Liberty,” in The Dangerous God: Christianity and the Soviet Experiment, ed. Dominic Erdozain (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2017), 77.

68. Leonid Kolosov, “Komu sluzhil ‘otets’ Gleb,” Trud, September 2, 1980.

69. Gregory of Nazianzus, Select Orations, trans. Martha Vinson (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003; John A. McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography (Crestwood NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001.

70. Aleksandr Men′, “Poeziia sv. Grigoriia Bogoslova,” in Navstrechu khristu: Sbornik statei, eds. Nataliia Grigorenko and Pavel Men (Moscow: Zhizn′ s Bogom, 2009), 7–30, originally published in Zhurnal Moskovskoi Patriarkhii 3 (1959): 62–67.

1. Nigel Wade, “Dissident Priest Jailed,” Daily Telegraph, August 29, 1980, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2: Yakunin. The journalist’s reporting of Yakunin’s case includes information on Velikanova’s trial.

2. Andrei Sakharov et al., “Kto osuzhden?” August 29, 1980, Arkhiv samizdata, no. 4076, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2: Yakunin.

3. Sakharov et al., “Kto osuzhden?”

4. Igumen Innokentii, “Rasprava,” September 1980, p. 1, in Arkhiv samizdata, no. 1–6, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2: Yakunin.

5. Igumen Innokentii, 3.

6. Igumen Innokentii, 4–5.

7. Igumen Innokentii, 6.

8. Igumen Innokentii, 6.

9. Sakharov et al., “Kto osuzhden?”

10. Mikhail Evgen′ev, “Prigovor Glebu Iakuninu,” TASS, no. 50–54, August 28, 1980, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2: Individual Clergy: Yakunin, box 24, folder 8, 1980.

11. Evgen′ev.

12. Evgen′ev.

13. Both Yakunin’s associates, Regel′son and Kapitanchuk, admitted to being willing participants in writing a large number of letters and other documents sent to the West. But neither confessed to any illegal acts or to implicating Fr. Gleb in them.

14. Leonid Kolosov, “Komu sluzhil ‘otets’ Gleb?” Trud, September 2, 1980.

15. Kolosov.

16. Anya Kucherov, interview by author, San Rafael, CA, telephone, July 24, 2020 ; Adriana Dakin, interview by author, Ukiah, CA, Zoom, July 9, 2020.

17. Regel′son actively participated in the student seminars. He attended many of their meetings, and his views on Orthodox Christianity and the importance of the church’s social role were shaped by the seminar sessions (Tat′iana Lebedeva, interview by author, Moscow, May 17, 2018). After the arrest of Alexander Ogorodnikov, Regel′son, older in age than most of the other participants, assumed the leadership position in the Christian Seminar. See Jane Ellis, “USSR: The Christian Seminar,” Religion in Communist Lands 8, no. 2 (Summer 1980), 95–96.

18. Brothers in Christ, “Molodaia Rossiia–K Molodoi Amerike,” dated late November to early December 1979, Arkhiv Samizdata, no. 4021, in Keston Archive, SU 12/11: Christian Seminar.

19. Vladimir Sergeevich Solov′ev, God, Man, and the Church: The Spiritual Foundations of Life, trans. Donald Attwater (1937, repr., London: James Clarke, 2016), xii–xv, 97–103.

20. Fr. Gleb Yakunin and Lev Regel′son, “Appeal to the Delegates of the 5th Assembly of the World Council of Churches,” Religion in Communist Lands 4, no.1 (Spring 1976), 13.

21. “3,500 Clergy Petition Soviets,” Universe, October 3, 1980.

22. Michael Bourdeaux, One Word of Truth: The Cold War Memoir of Michael Bourdeaux and Keston College (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2019), 238–39.

23. Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov, “O tekh, kogo nedavno sudili,” Posev 36, no. 11 (November 1980), 47. In addition to Yakunin, Levitin-Krasnov included in his article sketches of Fr. Dmitrii Dudko, Lev Regel′son, Aleksandr Ogorodnikov, Tat′iana Velikanova, Tat′iana Shchipkova, and Vladimir Poresh.

24. Orthodox Church of Australia, “In Defense of Fr. Gleb Yakunin,” October 7, 1980, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2; Individual Clergy, box 26, folder 7: Yakunin, Fr. Gleb.

25. “Yakunin Appeal,” Keston News Service, no. 119, March 12, 1981, and “Yakunin Appeal Reportedly Rejected,” Keston News Service, no. 120, March 26, 1981.

26. Masha Gessen, “Inside the Gulags of the Soviet Union,” Literary Hub, March 26, 2018, https:lithub.com/masha-gessen-inside-the-gulags-of-the-soviet-union/; and Masha Gessen and Misha Friedman, Never Remember: Searching for Stalin’s Gulags in Putin’s Russia (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2018), 94.

27. Anne Applebaum, “Tales from the Gulag,” World Monuments Fund (Fall 2003), 26.

28. Gessen and Friedman, Never Remember, 96.

29. See Colin McMahon, “Grim Prison Restored as a Reminder of Soviet-Era Cruelty,” Chicago Tribune, July 26, 2000, https:www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2000-07-0007260337-story.html. Yuri Orlov had arrived at Perm no. 37 a year before Yakunin. He penned a graphic description of the physical setting of the camp in Dangerous Thoughts: Memoirs of a Russian Life, trans. Thomas P. Whitney [New York: William Morrow, 1991] 236, 238). Yakunin as well as Orlov spent many days in the isolation house and in similar conditions.

30. Orlov, Dangerous Thoughts.

31. “Fr. Gleb Yakunin Joins Protest Fast,” Keston News Service, no. 124, May 21, 1981.

32. Fr. Gleb Yakunin Joins Protest Fast.”

33. Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 542–43.

34. This fragment of life and labor in Perm-37 was written by Vardan Arutiunian, an Armenian, who served in the camp during the same period as Yakunin (Elena Ivanovna Volkova, Glyba Gleba: Zapreshchenneishii ierei Iakunin [St. Petersburg: Renome, 2021], 353).

35. Volkova, 353.

36. Volkova, 353.

37. The capacity to uphold one’s personal dignity and resolve is emphasized in Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Crest, Fawcett, 1963), and The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, vol. 2, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 656–64; Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, trans. John Glad (London: Penguin, 1994), 210–16; and Orlov, Dangerous Thoughts, 253.

38. Response of A. N. Bolshakov, junior counsel, head of the Perm Regional Procuracy, May 28, 1981, quoted by Fr. Gleb Yakunin, “Appeal to Western Christians,” Keston News Service, no. 135, October 22, 1981.

39. Fr. Gleb Iakunin, “ ‘Zaiavlenie’ L. I. Brezhnevu o namerenii nachat′ golodovku protesta protiv iz′iatiia i nego i drugikh veriushchikh religioznoi literatury,” September 16, 1981, Samizdat, no. 4480, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2: Yakunin, Fr. Gleb: Letters of Support (1979–1982), box 50, folder 1.

40. Yakunin, “Appeal.”

41. Yakunin.

42. Yakunin.

43. Yakunin.

44. Mahatma Gandhi, My Soul’s Agony (1933), in Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Writings, ed. and intro. Judith M. Brown, Oxford World Classics, New Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 224–25.

45. Yakunin, “Appeal.”

46. “Priest Is Force-fed,” Church Times, November 4, 1981.

47. “Fr. Gleb Yakunin Moved to Hospital,” Keston News Service, no. 136, November 16, 1981; and “News of Fr. Gleb Yakunin’s Health,” Keston News Service, no. 137, November 19, 1981.

48. “Bible Is Returned,” Universe, February 4, 1983, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2: Yakunin, Fr. Gleb.

49. “Solitary Confinement for Fr. Gleb,” Keston News Service, no. 166, January 27, 1983.

50. “Solitary Confinement for Fr. Gleb”; “Bible Is Returned”; “Izdevatel’stvo nad pravoslavnym sviashchennikom ottsom Glebom Iakuninym,” dictated in the office of Keston College by Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov, August 2, 1982, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2: Yakunin, Fr. Gleb.

51. In February 1973, Baptists in the United States awarded the Religious Freedom Award to the Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights, with Natal′ia Solzhenitsyn receiving the award on behalf of Fr. Gleb in a ceremony in New York. Later, Yakunin learned that the Church of England’s Ross McWhirter Award for civic bravery would be given to him in a ceremony in London. Michael Bourdeaux accepted the award on Fr. Gleb’s behalf and 250 British pounds were to be held in trust for Yakunin. Baptist Times, February 17, 1983, and Church of England Newspaper, April 12, 1985, in Keston Archive, SU Ort 8/2: Yakunin, Fr. Gleb.

52. Bella Bychkova Jordan and Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov, Siberian Village: Land and Life in the Sakha Republic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 3–9; and James Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian Colony, 1581–1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 167, 194–95, 317–18.

53. “Fr. Gleb in Exile,” Keston News Service, no. 214, December 6, 1984.

54. “Correction to Fr. Gleb’s Exile Address,” Keston News Service, no. 217, January 24, 1985.

55. Iraida Yakunina, interview with author, Moscow, email, October 28, 2016.

56. Levitin-Krasnov, “Izdevatel′stvo.”

57. Elena Volkova, “To vasha Mama,” Pamiati ottsa Gleba Yakunina, March 5, 2019, https://www.facebook.com/elenavolkova/posts.

58. Elena Volkova, interview by author, Moscow, September 17, 2016.

59. Volkova, “To vasha Mama.” Volkova mentions a nun, Sister Agaf′eia, who also provided the children with significant assistance.

60. Volkova, interview by author, September 17, 2016.

61. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope: A Memoir, trans. Max Hayward, with an introduction by Clarence Brown (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 33.

62. Volkova, interview by author, September 12, 2015.

63. Gleb Pavlovich Yakunin, Khvalebnyi primitiv iurodivyi, v chest′ Boga, mirozdan′ia, rodiny: Poema, with an introductory article by Elena Volkova (Moscow: Biblioteka PravLit, 2008).

64. Yakunin, Khvalebnyi primitiv, 11.

65. Mariia Glebovna Yakunina, interview by author, May 23, 2018, Moscow.

66. Elena Volkova, “Poeticheskii manifest Pravoslavnoi reformatsii,” in Yakunin, Khvalebnyi primitivi, 6.

67. Volkova, “Poeticheskii manifest,” 6.

68. Volkova, 34–36.

69. Volkova, 40.

70. Yakunin, Khvalebnyi primitiv, 34–35.

71. Protoierei Aleksandr Borisov, “Dukhovnyi realizm ottsa Aleksandra Menia,” in Tserkovnaia zhizn′ XX veka: Protoierei Aleksandr Men′ i ego dukhovnie nastavniki: Sbornik materialov Pervoi nauchnoi konferentsii. “Menevskie chteniia (9–11 Sentiabria 2006 g.),” ed. M. V. Grigorenko (Sergiev Posad: Izdanie prikhoda Sergievskoi tserkvi v Semkhoze, g. Sergiev Posad, 2007), 167.

72. Yakunin, Khvalebnyi primitiv, 35.

73. Yakunin, 35.

74. Yakunin, 22.

75. Yakunin, 109.

76. Yakunin, 114.

77. Yakunin, 97.

78. Yakunin, 88, 90–91. Yakunin quoted Iudushka Golovyov in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s novel The Golovyov Family, who remarked that the Russian clergyman is “very devout, but in his affairs, he is ungodly, and in the lives of our native clergy, the spiritual is not primary” (Yakunin, Khvalebnyi primitiv, 90; and Volkova, “Poeticheskii manifest,” 8).

79. Yakunin, Khvalebnyi primitiv, 88.

80. Yakunin, 42, 44, 52, 115.

1. The rapidly shifting political landscape in the late 1980s and afterward is documented and analyzed in Geoffrey Hosking, The Awakening of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); William Taubman, Gorbachev: His Life and Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017); Stephen F. Cohen, The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin (Bloomsbury: I. B. Tauris, 2011); Geraldine Fagan, Believing in Russia: Religious Policy after Communism (London: Routledge, 2013); Irina Papkova, The Russian Orthodox Church and Russian Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); John Matlock, Autopsy of an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of an Empire (New York: Random House, 1995); and Archie Brown, Seven Years That Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

2. Gleb Pavlovich Yakunin, Khvalebnyi primitiv iurodivyi, v chest′ Boga, mirozdan′ia, rodiny: Poema, with an introductory article by Elena Volkova (Moscow: Biblioteka PravLit, 2008), 17.

3. Richard Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 9–13.

4. Taubman, Gorbachev, 353.

5. Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 91.

6. Sergii Chetverikov, Optina Pustyn′, 2nd ed. (Paris: YMCA Press, 1988), 81–82,84–85, 89, 101 ; Leonard J. Stanton, The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination: Iconic Vision in the Works by Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Others (New York: Peter Lang, 1955), 81–82, 89, 101, 251.

7. Quoted in Michael Bourdeaux, Gorbachev, Glasnost, and the Gospel (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1990), 44; see also Wallace L. Daniel, The Orthodox Church and Civil Society in Russia (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006), 36.

8. Mikhail Vital′evich Shkarovskii, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov′ v XX veka (Moscow: Veche, Lepta, 2010), 404.

9. Shkarovskii, 406.

10. Yakunin, Khvalebnyi primitiv, 93, 111, 117. Wallace L. Daniel, “ ‘I Am a Fighter by Nature’: Fr. Gleb Iakunin and the Defense of Religious Liberty,” in The Dangerous God: Christianity and the Soviet Experiment, ed. Dominic Erdozain (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2017), 95.

11. A. Iu. Poslykhalin, Istoriia gorodakh Shchyolkovo: Almanakh internet-zhurnala “Podmoskovnyi kraeved” (Moscow: Akademizdat′sentr “Nauka,” RAN, 2015), 5–6.

12. Georgii Rovenskii, Gleb Iakunin (1934–2014): Pravoslavnyi pravozashchitnik, sviashchennik, deputat, poet (Shchyolkovo: Shchyolkovskii kraevedcheskii klub, 2021), 8, 92–93.

13. Rovenskii, Gleb Iakunin, 8; and Poslykhalin, Isoriia gorodakh, 15–16. Shchyolkovo developed from the merger of four settlements and villages, including the village of Zhegalovo, where St. Nicholas Cathedral was located.

14. Natal′ia Pavlova, “Dolgaia doroga v mart,” Moskovskie novosti, March 4, 1990.

15. Pavlova.

16. Evgeny Barabanov, “The Schism between the Church and the World,” in From Under the Rubble, ed. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, trans. A. M. Brock et al., under the direction of Michael Scammell, intro. Max Hayward (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 176.

17. Pavlova, “Dolgaia doroga.”

18. V. Kuzmenkii, “V poiskakh putevodnoi zvezdy: Inter′viu s Glebom Iakuninym,” Vechernii Novosibirsk, August 14, 1990. A prominent human rights defender, author, and dissident, Anatoly Tikhonovich Marchenko (1938–1986) died during a hunger strike while in prison in Chistopol, Tatarstan. See Marchenko’s autobiography, My Testimony, trans. Michael Scammell (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1969).

19. Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society, 141.

20. Sakwa, 141.

21. Oxana Antic, “The Russian Orthodox Church Moves towards Coming to Terms with Its Past,” RFE/RL, Report on the USSR (March 8, 1991): 4.

22. Antic, “Russian Orthodox Church.” One of these voices, the outspoken critic of the church’s past complicity, Zoia Krakhmal′nikova, forcefully argued that church leaders had to admit their complicity with the police authorities. The regeneration of the church, she said, would only take place “when believers learn the whole truth about their pastors, who at the present are trying are trying to conceal this truth” (Zoia Krakhmal′nikova, “Skandal v blagorodnom semeistve: Prodolzhenie sleduet,” Stolitsa, no. 14 (1992), 10.

23. Pavlova, “Dolgaia doroga.”

24. Pavlova.

25. James J. Sheehan, “How History Can Be a Moral Science,” in Perspectives on History, October 2005, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/october-2005/how-history-can-be-a-moral-science. In 2005, Sheehan served as president of the American Historical Association. His remarks followed those of his former teacher and colleague Gordon Wright, whose presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1975, “History as a Moral Science,” had stimulated a great deal of discussion about the moral lessons of history and whether historians should render moral judgments.

26. Petr L. Vail and Aleksandr A. Genis, 60-x: Mir sovetskogo cheloveka (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1988), 180. Philip Boobbyer similarly emphasized this point in his Conscience, Dissent and Reform in Soviet Russia (London: Routledge, 2005), 223.

27. See Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (New York: New Directions, 1961); and Dian Laily Rachmawati, “Leo Tolstoy’s Idea of Morality in His Short Stories’ Characters,” Litera kultura 2, no. 2 (2014): 1–18, https://cupdf.com>Documents.

28. Aleksandr Men′, “Poeziia Sv. Grigoriia Bogoslova,” in Men′, Navstrechu khristu: Sbornik statei, ed. Nataliia Grigorenko and Pavel Men (Moscow: Zhizn′ s Bogom, 2009), 7–30, originally published in Zhurnal Moskovskoi Patriarkhii 3 (1959): 62–67; Aleksei Vasil′evich Govorov, Sv. Grigorii Bogoslov, kak khristianskii poet 1886 (1886; repr., New York: Generic, 2019).

29. Kuzmenkii, “V poiskakh putevodnoi zvezdy.”

30. R. Safarov, “Looking Around at the Pass,” in Perils of Perestroika: Viewpoints from the Soviet Press, 1989–1991, ed. Isaac J. Tarasulo (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1992), 77. Safarov’s article appeared in Pravda on July 28, 1990.

31. Patriarch Aleksi II, quoted by Serge Schmemann, “An Awakened Church Finds Russia Searching for Its Soul,” New York Times, April 26, 1992, section 4.

32. Yevgenia Albats, The State within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia—Past, Present, and Future, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 314. The church’s connections to the KGB will be examined in chapter 9.

33. The symposium on “The Individual and Mass Consciousness” represented the third of a series of international conferences, cosponsored by the Catholic Academy of the episcopate of Rottenburg-Stuttgart and the Russian journal Inostrannaia literatura and held in the German town of Weingarten in May 1989. The materials of the three symposia can be found in Inostrannaia literatura, no. 5 (1989): 203–24; no. 5 (1990): 177–201; and no. 11 (1990): 203–22.

34. “Individual′noe i massovoe soznanie,” Inostrannaia litertura, no. 11 (1990): 205.

35. “Individual′noe i massovoe soznanie,” 213.

36. “Individual′noe i massovoe soznanie,” 213.

37. See Jane Ellis’s analysis of the 1929 law on religious associations and its social effects in The Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History (1986; repr., London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 42–48.

38. According to Konstantin Kharchev, chair of the Council for Religious Affairs, six offices participated in the preparation and review of the new Soviet law: the Council for Religious Affairs, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Committee for State Security (KGB), the Ministry of the Interior, and the state’s prosecutor’s office. Aleksandr Nezhnyi, “Treti razgovor s Kharchevem,” Ogonek no. 44, October 1989, 11; and Nathaniel Davis, A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003), 284n78.

39. See Giovanni Codevilla, “Commentary on the New Soviet Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations,” Religion in Communist Lands 19, nos. 1–2 (Summer 1991), 119. Codevilla provides the text of the Soviet law, published in Pravda on October 9, 1990.

40. Jane Ellis, The Russian Orthodox Church: Triumphalism and Defensiveness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 159–60.

41. Richard Sakwa, “Christian Democracy in Russia,” Religion, State and Society 20, no. 2 (1992), 138–40. See Sakwa’s informative history of Christian Democracy in Russia, its hope to develop civil society, and its desire to rebuild the political and economic structures in Russia. Richard Sakwa, “Christian Democracy and Civil Society in Russia,” Religion, State and Society 22, no. 3 (1994): 273–303.

42. Yakunin served on the Committee on Freedom of Conscience, Denominations, Welfare, and Charity (Komitet po svobode sovesti, veroispovedaniyam, miloserdiiu i blagotvoritel′nosti). Fr. Polosin served as official chair.

43. The concurrent existence of the Russian and Soviet laws led to what Jane Ellis referred to as a “war of laws,” in which Russian citizens remained uncertain over which to follow (Ellis, Russian Orthodox Church: Triumphalism, 163).

44. Harold J. Berman, Justice in the USSR: An Interpretation of Soviet Law, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1963), 284.

45. See Jane Ellis’s discussion of Konstantin Kharchev: “Some Reflections about Religious Policy under Kharchev,” in Religious Policy in the Soviet Union, ed. Sabrina Petra Ramet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 90. Kharchev served as chair of the Council for Religious Affairs until June 1989.

46. Codevilla, “Commentary,” 119.

47. On this question of independence, the Russian and Soviet laws affirmed the right of individuals to make their own judgment about religious belief without state interference. See Codevilla, “Commentary,” 130. See also Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov’s optimistic perspectives on religious life in the Soviet Union following his return in April 1990, after twenty-four years in forced emigration. While positive about the Soviet Union’s casting aside the Stalinist framework, he nevertheless viewed his former country as standing on the edge of a precipice (Nadezhda Beliakova, “ ‘I sviashchennik stanovitsia dobrym gostem v sovetskom obshchestve …’: Religioznaia zhizn′ Moskvy i Podmoskov′ia vesnoi 1990 goda v opisanii A. E. Levitina-Krasnova,” Istoricheskii kur′er 2 [10], 2020]: 215–25, https://doi.org/10.31518/2618-9100-2020-2-17).

48. Codevilla, “Commentary,” 130.

49. Codevilla, 130; Zakon Rossiiskoi Sovetskoi Federativnoi Sotsialiticheskoi Respubliki, “O svobode veroispovedanii,” part 1, article 5, in Sovetskaia Rossiia, November 10, 1990.

50. See Codevilla, “Commentary,” 131.

51. The 1990 Soviet law set forth a similar statement, although it did not underscore the right to atheistic teaching in the home, as proclaimed in the 1990 Russian law (Codevilla, “Commentary,” 121, 134).

52. Zakon Rossiiskoi Sovetskoi Federativnoi, “O svobode veroispovedanii,” part 1, article 21, Sovetskaia Rossiia, part 1, article 6.

53. Zakon Rossiiskoi Sovetskoi Federativnoi, “O svobode veroispovedanii”; and Codevilla, “Commentary,” 121, 138–39.

54. Ellis, Russian Orthodox Church: Triumphalism, 160.

55. Liudmila Mikhailovna Vorontsova, “Razrushat′ li muzei radi tserkovnogo vozrozhdeniia?” in Religiia i demokratiia: Na puti k svobode sovesti, vol. 2, ed. S. B. Filatov and D. E. Furman (Moscow: “Progress—Kul′tura,”1993), 69–82; Sergei Borisovich Filatov, “Russkaia Pravoslovnaia Tserkov′ i politicheskaia elita,” in Religiia i politika v postkommunisticheskoi Rossii, ed. L. N. Mitrokhin (Moscow: Institut filosofii RAN, 1994), 108–9. Both Vorontsova and Filatov vividly portrayed the dilemmas involved in the process, particularly those related to the return of valuables.

56. Daniel, Orthodox Church and Civil Society, 56–59.

57. Filatov, “Russkaia Pravoslovnaia Tserkov′,” 108–9.

58. Polosin’s opening speech was published in Sovetskaia Rossiia, September 30, 1990.

59. For the vote and an account of the parliament chair Ruslan Khasbulatov’s belief that the law needed to move forward quickly and with the support of a large majority of the deputies, see Ellis, Russian Orthodox Church: Triumphalism, 162.

60. Yakunin’s comments were published in the stenographic account of the draft law’s first reading, in Sovetskaia Rossiia, September 30, 1990.

61. Mariia Glebovna Yakunina, interview by author, Moscow, May 23, 2018.

62. See the comments by Deputy A. P. Surkov, from the Panfilovskii district of Moscow, during the first reading of the proposed new law, in Sovetskaia Rossiia, September 30, 1990. See also the comments of M. L. Malei, from the Pervomaiskii district of Moscow in the first session (Sovetskaia Rossiia, September 30, 1990).

63. Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (1951; repr., New York: Vintage International, Random House, 1990), 175, 199.

64. Fr. Gleb Yakunin, “V sluzhenii kul′tu (Moskovskaia Patriarkhiia i kult′ lichnosti Stalina)” in Na puti k svobode sovesti, ed. D. E. Furman and Fr. Mark (Smirnov) (Moscow: Progress, 1989), 172–206.

65. Yakunin, “V sluzhenii kul′tu,” 173.

66. Yakunin, 174.

67. For more recent research on the complexities of the challenges facing Patriarch Tikhon and his attempted resolutions of them, see the observations of Scott M. Kenworthy, “Rethinking the Russian Orthodox Church and the Bolshevik Revolution,” Revolutionary Russia, https://doi.org/10.1080/09546545.2018.1480893.

68. Yakunin, “V sluzhenii kul′tu,” 184.

69. Yakunin, 193; citing Sviashchennik M. Zernov, “Moskva,” Zhurnal Moskovskoi Patriarkhii, no. 10 (1947): 11–12.

70. Yakunin, “V sluzhenii kul′tu,” 193.

71. Yakunin, 201. The church’s seeming indifference to these holy martyrs offered clear proof, Yakunin said, of its spiritual apathy about one of the richest sources of moral regeneration in the church’s treasury. Instead of spiritual connections to the martyrs, in its recent history, the church exhibited spiritual solidarity with their persecutors.

72. Fr. Gleb Yakunin, Viktor Kapitanchuk, and Lev Regel′son, “Appeal for the Glorification of Russian Martyrs in the USSR,” May 25, 1975, in Fr. Gleb Yakunin and Lev Regel′son, Letters from Moscow: Religion and Human Rights in the Soviet Union, ed. Jane Ellis (San Francisco: H. S. Dakin, 1978), 34–40.

73. Yakunin, Kapitanchuk, and Regel′son, “Appeal for the Glorification,” 35.

74. Yakunin, Kapitanchuk, and Regel′son, 35.

75. Yakunin, “V sluzhenii kul′tu,” 203.

76. Yakunin, 203.

1. “Zoia Krakhmal′nikova,” in Xenia Dennen papers, Keston Archive, Soviet Union, Orthodox Subject Files; and Michael Bourdeaux, “Zoia Krakhmal′nikova,” Guardian, May 12, 2008.

2. The authorities offered Krakhmal′nikova clemency if she agreed to sign papers stating she would no longer violate official policies, an agreement she refused to sign. After some delay, she was allowed to return to Moscow. Her husband, who had joined her in exile, was similarly released. “Zoia Krakhmal′nikova,” in Xenia Dennen papers, Keston Archive.

3. Zoia Aleksandrovna Krakhmal′nikova, Gor′kie plody sladkogo plena (Montreal: Monastery Press, 1989), 10. As a spiritual daughter of Fr. Dmitrii Dudko, Krakhmal′nikova, whether in prison, the labor camp, or everyday life, maintained a constant “struggle for freedom,” which she believed was a central theme of Orthodox Christianity. See Iakov Krotov, “S khristianskoi tochki zreniia,” interview with Krakhmal′nikov’s daughter Zoia Feliksovna Svetova and the writer and poet Vladimir Il′ich Iliushenko, http://krotov.info.library/17_r/radio_svoboda/20090117.htm; and Vladimir Iliushenko, “Geroi dukhovnogo soprotivleniia,” https://old.prison.org/personal/krakmalnikova.shtml.

4. Krakhmal′nikova, Gor′kie plody, 10.

5. Iurii Sergeevich Sidorenko, Tri dnia, kotorye oprokinuli bol′shevism: Ispoved′ svidetelia, pokazaniia ochevidtsa (Rostov-na-Donu: Izdatel′stvo Periodika Dona, 1991), 31; and James H. Billington, Russia Transformed: Breakthrough to Hope, Moscow, August 1991 (New York: Free Press, 1992), 127–28. For a concise analysis of religion and the end of the Soviet government, see Michael Bourdeaux, “The Role of Religion in the Collapse of Communism,” Archiva Moldoviae 5 (2013): 335–42.

6. “After the Coup,” Frontier, September–October 1991, 15.

7. Vera Tolz, “Access to KGB and CPSU Archives in Russia,” RFE/RL Research Report 1, no. 16 (April 17, 1992), 1.

8. Tolz, 1.

9. “Lev Ponomarov, “Za prava cheloveka,” https://lenta.ru/lib/14163044. Ponomarov was also a member of the Helsinki Human Rights Watch and a founder of Memorial, the human rights organization created to honor the persecuted in the Soviet Union.

10. For biographical information on Fr. Viacheslav, see https:discoveringislam.org/dr_polosin.htm. See also Ali Viacheslav Polosin, “My Journey to Islam,” https://www.islam.ru/en/content/story/polosin-ali-vyacheslav-my-journey-islam.

11. Iakov Krotov, “Religion and the Russian Press Since 1990: Journalists Most Actively Writing on Church Subjects,” East-West Church and Ministry Report 10, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 10–13.

12. Aleksandr Nezhnyi, “Tret′e imia,” Ogonek 4, January 25–February 1, 1992, 2–3.

13. Sergei Sergeevich Bychkov, Sviashchennik Gleb Iakunin. Nelegkii put′ pravdoiskatelia (Moscow: Eksmo, 2021), 325.

14. Konstantin Mikhailovich Kharchev (b. 1934, in Gorky [Nizhnii Novgorod]), served as Soviet ambassador to Guyana and awaited an ambassadorship to the United Arab Emirates before he was appointed, in December 1984, to the chairmanship of the Council for Religious Affairs.

See Aleksandr Nezhnyi, “Tretii razgovor s Kharchevem,” Ogonek, no. 44, October 1989, 9–11; John B. Dunlop, “KGB Subversion of the Russian Orthodox Church,” RFE/RL Research Report 1, no. 12 (March 20, 1992), 51; Jane Ellis, “Some Reflections about Religious Policy under Kharchev,” in Religious Policy in the Soviet Union, ed. Sabrina Petra Ramet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 84–104.

15. “Govorit′ vsiu pravdu—edinstvennyi put′ Tserkovi,” po materialam press-konferentsii v redaktsii zhurnal Stolitsa, posviashchennoi polozheniiu RPTs,” Stolitsa 19, no. 2 (1992), quoted in Bychkov, Sviashchennik Gleb Iakunin,, 396.

16. Lev Ponomarev believed that this meeting resulted in Khasbulatov’s decision to abort the commission’s access to KGB archives (Aleksandr Nezhnyi, “Kamo griadeshi, sviataia tserkov′,” Ogonek, nos. 18–19, May 1992, 12; and Yevgenia Albats, The State within a State: The KBG and Its Hold on Russia: Past, Present, and Future, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994], 314).

17. V. I. Lenin, quoted by Fr. Viacheslav Polosin, “Vechnyi rab ChK,” Izvestiia, January 22, 1992.

18. Tsentral′nyi Arkhiv KGB, f. 6, op. 6/16, d. T-175, t. 1, l. 291, March 1983, in Keston Archive, SU Ort: Yakunin, Fr. Gleb (1991–1996), folder 4. Printed copies of Fr. Gleb’s notes on his research in KGB archives may also be found on Iakov Krotov’s website, http://krotov.info/4/texts/03_v/Vypiski_1992.htm.

19. Polosin, “Vechnyi rab.” Polosin’s citation of the fourth dream of Vera Pavlova referred to the most radical part of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? (1863).

Her fourth dream is a modification of the European utopian ideal of the Crystal Palace and a society in which phalansteries, grand hotels that housed workers, and equality of the sexes predominated.

20. Polosin, “Vechnyi rab.”

21. Mariia Glebovna Yakunina, interview by author, Moscow, May 23, 2018. Yakunin’s attitude is confirmed by an example discussed later in this chapter.

22. Gleb Yakunin, “Abbat′ vykhodit na sviaz ′,” interview by P. Vasil′ev, Argumenty i fakty, no. 1, January 8, 1992.

23. Nezhnyi, “Tret′e imia,” 3.

24. Nezhnyi, 3.

25. Yakunin did not disclose “Drozdov” in his public revelation of the code names of agents. According to the English journalist Bruce Clark, Yakunin may have thought the patriarch a more enlightened leader and proponent of reform than the others whose names he revealed (Bruce Clark, An Empire’s New Clothes: The End of Russia’s Liberal Dream [London: Viking, 1995], 112). Moreover, as the newly elected patriarch, Aleksii II, represented to Yakunin a promising break from his predecessor Patriarch Pimen.

26. Nathaniel Davis, A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003), 86.

27. Tsentral′nyi Arkhiv KGB, f. 1, op. 1, d. 360, l. 6, in Keston Archive, SU Ort: Yakunin, Fr. Gleb (1991–1996), folder 4.

28. A copy of the official document honoring Aleksii II by the KGB is published in Nezhnyi, “Kamo griadeshi,” 13.

29. Albats, State within a State, 46.

30. “Dokumenty KGB,” Tsentral′nyi Arkhiv KGB, February1984, f. 6, op. 7/16, U–175, t. 2, l. 163, in Keston Arhive, SU Ort: Yakunin, Fr. Gleb (1989–1993), folder 4.

31. “Dokumenty KGB,” Tsentral′nyi Arkhiv KGB, February1984.

32. “Dokumenty KGB,” Tsentral′nyi Arkhiv KGB, August 1988, f. 6, op.11, d. U–175, t. 3, l. 75, in Keston Archive, SU Ort: Yakunin, Fr. Gleb (1989–1993), box 50, folder 4; and Koenraad de Wolf, Dissident for Life: Alexander Ogorodnikov and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in Russia, trans. Nancy Forest-Flier, foreword David Alton (Grand Rapids, MI, 2010: Eerdmans), 199.

33. “Report on the Results of the Organisational and Agent-Operational Activity of the 4th Department of the 5th Directorate of the KGB,” January 1986, in Religion in the USSR: An Archival Reader, ed. and trans. Felix Corley (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 375.

34. Religion in the USSR: An Archival Reader, 375.

35. Wallace L. Daniel, Russia’s Uncommon Prophet: Father Aleksandr Men and His Times (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), 232–33.

36. “Report on the Work of the 4th Department,” January 1977, in Religion in the USSR, 365.

37. “Dokumenty KGB,” Tsentral′nyi Arkhiv KGB, June 1988, f. 6, op. 10, d. Ts–175, t. 2, l. 111, in Keston Archive, SU Ort: Yakunin, Fr. Gleb (1989–1993), box 50, folder 4.

38. The KGB’s report referred to the case of Fr. Georgii Edel′stein, “Dokumenty KGB,” Tsentral′nyi Arkhiv KGB, June 1988, f. 6, op. 11, d. Z–175, t. 1, l. 239, in Keston Archive, SU Ort: Yakunin, Fr. Gleb (1989–1993), box 50, folder 4.

39. “Dokumenty KGB,” Tsentral′nyi Arkhiv KGB, June 1988.

40. Tsentral′nyi Arkhiv KGB, f. 1, op. 5, d. 360, l. 32, January 1973, in Keston Archive, SU Ort: Fr. Gleb Yakunin (1989–1993), box 50, folder 4.

41. Tsentral′nyi Arkhiv KGB, f. 6, op. 6/16, d. T–175, t. 4, l. 256, October 1983; f. 6, op. 7/16, d. Y–175, t. 2, l. 32, January 1984; and f. 6, op. 12, d. Sh–175, t. 2, l. 233, July 1989, l. 32, in Keston Archive, SU Ort: Fr. Gleb Yakunin (1989–1993), box 50, folder 4.

42. Tsentral′nyi Arkhiv KGB, f. 6, op. 12, d. Sh–175, t. 2, l. 233, July 1989. Lieutenant-Colonel Evgenii Dmitrievich Kubyshkin, head of the 4th Department of the 5th Directorate of the KGB of the KGB, submitted the report to the Soviet Council of Ministers.

43. See Zoe Krakhmal′nikova, “Bliud uma: Revoliutsiia vsegda sut′ iazycheskii bunt protiv Khrista,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, January 10, 1992; Aleksandr Men′, Russkaia religioznaia filosofiia: Lektsii, ed. Marina Nasonova (Moscow: Khram sviatykh bessrebrenikov Kosmy i Damiana v Shubine, 2003); Boris Viktorovich Raushenbakh, “Religiia i nravstvennost′,” Znamia, no. 1 (January 1991): 204–16; and Dmitrii Sergeevich Likhachev, “Russkaia kul′tura: nasledie proshloe i real′naia sila segodnia,” no. 24, Sem′ia 24 (June 15, 1988): 14–15.

44. Nezhnyi, “Tret′e imia,” 2.

45. Nezhnyi, 3. For the security police’s infiltration of the church in Ukraine and the delegation the police sent to the Church Council held soon after World War II, see Mark Krutov, “Episkopy na sluzhbe Lubianki: Istorii ierarkhoi ukrainskoi tserkvi, zaverbovannykh NKGB SSSR,” January 23, 2018, https://www.svoboda.org/a/28989881.html.

46. Aleksandr Nezhnyi, “Ego blazhenstvo bez mitry i zhezla,” Ogonek no. 48, November 1991, 8–10 and no. 49, December 1991, 21–22.

47. Nezhnyi, “Ego blazhenstvo,” no. 48, 8–9 and no. 49, 20.

48. Nezhnyi, no. 49, 21.

49. Nezhnyi, no. 49, 21.

50. Nezhnyi, no. 49, 21.

51. Nezhnyi, “Tret′e imia,” 2.

52. Nezhnyi, 2.

53. Nezhnyi, 3.

54. Bychkov, Sviashchennik Gleb Iakunin, 327.

55. Khrizostom (Martishkin), Archbishop of Vilnius and Lithuania, “Ia sotrudnichal s KGB … no ne byl stukachem,” interview by Mikhail Pozdniaev, Russkaia mysl′, no. 3926 (April 24, 1992): 8–9.

56. Khrizostom (Martishkin), “Ia sotrudnichal,” 8.

57. Khrizostom (Martishkin), “Ia sotrudnichal,” 8.

58. Khrizostom (Martishkin), 8.

59. The biographical information on Archbishop Khrizostom is drawn from his later interview “Ia dobrovol′no sotrudnichal s KGB,” Moskovskii komsomolets, November 30, 1993, parts of which are published in Bychkov, Sviashchennik Gleb Iakunin, 396–97.

60. Khrizostom (Martishkin), “Ia sotrudnichal,” 8–9.

61. Khrizostom (Martishkin), 8–9.

62. Fr. Georgii Edel′stein, “Chekisty … v riasakh,” interview by P. Lik′ianchenko,” Argumenty i fakty, no. 36, September 12, 1991.

63. Yakunin, “Abbat′ vykhodit na sviaz′.”

64. John P. Burgess, Holy Rus′: The Rebirth of Orthodoxy in the New Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 8–23.

65. Khrizostom (Martishkin), “Ia sotrudnichal,” 8–9.

66. In his later study of Orthodox priests, Ralph Della Cava drew important distinctions among members of the Russian Orthodox clergy, “Reviving Orthodoxy in Russia: An Overview of the Factions in the Russian Orthodox Church in the Spring of 1996,” Cahiers du Monde russe 38, no. 3 (1997): 387–414.

67. A. Shushpanov, “Ispoved′ byvshego agenta,” interview by P. Luk′ianchenko, Argumenty i fakty, no. 8, February 26, 1992.

68. All the translators submitted five copies of each report. The first, Shushpanov said, “we left on the desk of the chairperson of the Department for External Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate (formerly Metropolitan Nikodim, later Metropolitan Yuvenalii), a second we sent to the Council for Religious Affairs, which was affiliated with the secret police, and the three remaining copies we provided for the KGB” (Shushpanov, “Ispoved′ byvshego agenta”).

69. Asked about his coworkers in the department, Shushpanov said that the majority of them either worked for the KGB or were allies of the agency. The Department for External Church Relations had a resident official of the KGB named “Colonel Vladimirov,” whose real name was Aleksei Alekseevich Pogodin. “Colonel Vladimirov” arranged the special assignments for employees in the department (Shushpanov, “Ispoved′ byvshego agenta”).

70. Shushpanov.

71. Shushpanov.

72. “Vyvody Komissii: Ispol′zovanie TsK KPSS i KGB SSSR religioznykh organizatsii v antikonstitutsionnykh tseliakh” and “Chastnoe opredelenie Komissii Prezidenta Verkhovnogo Soveta Rossiisskoi Federatsii po rassledovaniiu prichin i obstoiatel′stv GKChP,” March 6, 1992.

Typewritten copies in Keston Archive, SU Ort: Yakunin, Fr. Gleb (1989–1993), box 50, folder 4.

73. “Vyvody Komissii.”

74. “Vyvody Komissii.”

75. “Vyvody Komissii,” 2.

76. “Vyvody Komissii,” 2.

77. “Vyvody Komissii,” 3.

78. “Vyvody Komissii,” 5–6.

79. Jane Ellis, Russian Orthodox Church: Triumphalism and Defensiveness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 150–51.