Introduction

Gleb Yakunin’s arrest on November 1, 1979, represented a turning point in his efforts to secure freedom of thought and belief for religious groups in the Soviet Union. Serving as a priest until he was suspended by Patriarch Aleksii I, Yakunin’s activism for freedom of conscience included sending letters and appeals to Soviet political and religious authorities within the Soviet Union and abroad. His arrest and the story underlying it offer insights into the challenges he posed to the Orthodox Church and the Soviet state.

On September 27, a month before his arrest, KGB offices in Leningrad had issued an order for a search of his home in Moscow.¹ The next morning, at a quarter to nine, KGB officers knocked at the door of his house at 30 Dubenko Street in a quiet neighborhood of the city. When he opened the door, the officers showed him their search warrant, entered, and began searching for potentially seditious materials.

They started with Yakunin’s brown corduroy jacket on a hanger in the vestibule, and in it they discovered a small telephone book containing a list of foreign names, business cards, and several handwritten notes, all of which they confiscated.² These items, Elena Volkova writes, “represented a veritable portable office.”³ The officers then moved through the living rooms, searching the bookshelves, a secretary desk, and a bedside table. They looked under the television, under the bed, in a sideboard, and in the kitchen, where they found Yakunin’s dark brown leather briefcase and its trove of provocative materials.⁴

By the end of their search, the KGB officers had confiscated more than eighty items. Their official report listed envelopes crammed with letters, folders of diverse documents, a bag and a suitcase stuffed with writings and émigré journals, and the archive of the Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights. They had pulled numerous volumes from the bookcase, many of which were published abroad and brought into the country by foreign guests—Russian copies of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Conversations with the Priest Dmitrii Dudko, Alexander Zinov’ev’s Notes of a Night Watchman, E. Svetlov’s (Aleksandr Men’s) Messengers of the Kingdom of God, and a 704-page volume of hymns.⁵ Before leaving Yakunin’s home at eight-thirty that evening, the officers stamped the KGB’s seal on the bundle of confiscated items and presented a list of the materials for Yakunin and his wife Iraida to sign. Both refused.⁶ KGB officials had searched his home twice before—in the spring and earlier that same month.⁷ The third search on September 27 served as the basis for a criminal charge against him for allegedly seeking to undermine the Soviet state.

Fr. Gleb might have anticipated the events of that late September evening. A year earlier, state officials, who were well acquainted with his activities on behalf of religious believers of different faiths, had offered him and his family the opportunity to emigrate. Unlike many others given the choice, he elected to remain in his country, believing that he had the responsibility to stay.⁸ The police issued a stern warning to Yakunin to desist in his activities or face severe consequences. He persisted, maintaining that he only intended to redress the illegal transgressions committed by local officials against the Soviet Constitution and its guarantee of freedom of conscience.

For some time, state officials had been monitoring the meetings of Moscow’s Christian Seminar.⁹ Yakunin was a friend of several members and had attended some of their gatherings.¹⁰ KGB arrests of seminar members in the summer of 1979 held ominous foreboding for Yakunin, as did two earlier events suggesting that the KGB’s relative tolerance of Yakunin’s activities was coming to a head. The Soviet government aimed to undermine such activism before what a Soviet journalist called an “infection of the body politic” spread into the country’s “life blood.”

In 1976, the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, labeled the prominent Soviet physicist and leading human rights advocate Andrei Sakharov “Domestic Enemy Number One” of the Soviet Union.¹¹ Although the Nobel Prize winner remained free (temporarily), other people associated with the human rights movement suffered a different fate. In 1977 and 1978, the police arrested Yuri Orlov, Aleksandr Ginzburg, and Anatolii Shcharansky, well-known human rights activists.¹² Up to that point, the arrests had focused primarily on the leading participants in the Helsinki Monitoring Group organized by Sakharov in his apartment on May 12, 1976. The circle soon widened. From people who publicized violations of human rights, it moved on to principal spokespersons for the resurgence of religion in the Soviet Union. On November 20, 1978, the KGB jailed Aleksandr Ogorodnikov and, shortly thereafter, sought to suppress the discussion circles he had created. Given this tightening band of arrests, Fr. Gleb had to understand that the secret police would soon come for him.

The late 1970s and the spring of 1980 were times of high political tensions. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 received world condemnation six months before the Olympic Games, scheduled for the summer in Moscow. Roughly three hundred thousand visitors were expected and what the Soviet leadership under President Leonid Brezhnev emphatically did not want to see were local citizens protesting Soviet violations of human rights and religious liberty. Perhaps even more important, the leadership wished to prevent the further spread of religious belief among its citizenry, an “infection” that the massive incursion of foreigners could exacerbate.

As part of the leadership’s efforts, two people whose names had become synonymous with human rights and religious liberty were arrested on the same day in November 1979: Tat′iana Mikhailovna Velikanova (1932–2002) and Fr. Gleb. Velikanova was the coeditor of the widely distributed samizdat publication A Chronicle of Current Events, a bimonthly publication that exposed violations of civil liberties by the political authorities.¹³

Like Velikanova, Yakunin’s writings transcended national boundaries, reaching out to organizations in the defense of freedom of conscience. His was a searing voice that came not from secular society, but from within the Orthodox Church. Yakunin criticized the church for its complicity with the Soviet government, for its refusal to stand up for the persecuted, and, above all, for its silence. The church, he maintained, had betrayed its sacred mission.

When the police arrested Fr. Gleb, he left behind his wife and three children. Incarcerated in the infamous Lefortovo Prison in Moscow to await trial, he had little doubt that he faced a long and torturous road. With Fr. Gleb imprisoned and vilified in the press, his young family was left without visible means of support as winter approached. They relied on their faith, along with their closest friends and supporters, to provide material aid and psychological sustenance.

Yakunin’s arrest and subsequent trial, and his activities leading up to them afforded an opportunity for various people to speak about him, and they offered different perspectives on the man and his significance. Three of them bear mention because they exemplify the diversity of views. Collectively, they raise issues that provide the touchstones for this book.

The first, Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov, was a well-known Orthodox layperson and public intellectual, who had written many incisive articles on church and state in the Soviet Union. Although he emigrated from the Soviet Union in September 1974 and settled in Switzerland, he remained in touch with prominent members of the intelligentsia and continued to write on religion and politics. In February 1977, he published a widely read article analyzing religious life in the Soviet Union in which he noted that he had read “with great sadness” the speeches of Orthodox Church leaders and the vapid articles in the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate. They repeatedly distorted the nature of religious life in the Soviet Union, he wrote, and offered an idealized fantasy about the peaceful conditions that existed throughout the country. He referred to what he called the “semi-comical pronouncements of the Patriarch,” which presented a false picture of reality.¹⁴ “It appears,” Levitin-Krasnov wrote, “that religious life in Russia is dead, silent, covered by a thick layer of ice. And then suddenly an ice hole, a source of living waters.”¹⁵

Levitin-Krasnov attributed the breakthrough to three people whose activities provided a picture of living realities, as opposed to the fictitious images presented by church and government authorities: he named the physicist Lev Regel′son, the popular priest Fr. Dmitrii Dudko, and Fr. Gleb Yakunin. Levitin-Krasnov praised all three for their courage, breadth of vision, insistence on facts, and challenges to the state-imposed ideology. He objected to the portrait of Yakunin represented in the press, maintaining that this depiction bore little resemblance to reality. By describing Yakunin as an enemy of the Soviet system and a degenerate member of the Orthodox priesthood, the press was creating a fantasy.

Levitin-Krasnov portrayed Fr. Gleb as a dedicated Orthodox priest whose actions in defense of religious believers came from a deep-seated adherence to his Orthodox faith. Married to Fr. Gleb’s aunt, Levitin-Krasnov related how he had known Yakunin since childhood and characterized the priest as a seeker of truth, a person of integrity, and a man committed to public service, with a particular interest in serving the dispossessed. Levitin-Krasnov cited Fr. Gleb’s many appeals to state authorities and the patriarch on behalf of religious believers of diverse faiths. These numerous appeals had both angered the government and incurred the Moscow Patriarchate’s “violent hatred. Persecuted by civil and religious authorities, this Fr. Gleb Yakunin—a noble man and a true Christian—continued his work,” Levitin-Krasnov wrote. “He has earned his name in the annals of his church and his country forever.”¹⁶

A second assessment of Gleb Yakunin came from the writers Feliks Svetlov and Zoia Krakhmal′nikova, husband and wife, who were Orthodox Christians. Their article about Yakunin, written immediately after his arrest and that of Tat′iana Velikanova, was published in samizdat.¹⁷

Both, Svetlov and Krakhmal′nikova maintained, had endeavored to create a more compassionate and humane Russia. Both had done so in the name of a higher form of Christianity than the church itself practiced. “The lives and activities of these remarkable individuals,” they wrote, “had served to revive what seemed to be forgotten in Russia, the living tradition of Christian compassion, which from time immemorial Orthodox Christians had conferred on the Russian people, regardless of their social rank.”¹⁸ Svetlov and Krakhmal′nikova attributed the roots of this ancient wisdom to the Holy Scriptures, which were deeply embedded in Velikanova and Yakunin:

For I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; … I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.… And the King will say to them, “Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.” There is not one person—whatever religion one confessed—not one person—whatever the nationality to which one belonged—who has not found in them help, support, and defense. Not tens, not hundreds, but thousands of people know this.¹⁹

Their article made a strong plea that the sacrifices of Velikanova and Yakunin must not be forgotten. They concluded by emphasizing that the arrests of these two people were not personal matters but had broader significance: “They were a blow that struck at the living, suffering heart of Russia.”²⁰

A third perspective comes from a much different source. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Vladimir Alekseevich Kuroedov was a prominent Soviet historian and chair of the Council for Religious Affairs.²¹ Kuroedov’s published works mainly dealt with church and state relations. His Religion and the Church in Soviet Society (Religiia i tserkov′ v Sovetskom gosudarstve), issued in a large number of copies, devoted several pages to Fr. Gleb Yakunin.²²

In this book, as in many of his other writings, Kuroedov invariably placed his main arguments within the context of Soviet principles on religious liberty. Soviet legislation, he claimed, fully protected and guaranteed freedom of conscience, a fundamental right enshrined in Article 52 of the Soviet Constitution. The founders of Marxism-Leninism, Kuroedov pointed out, repeatedly warned against using any form of violence or taking discriminatory actions against religious believers, and while they had emphatically viewed religion as anachronistic, the founders respected the rights of individuals to their own religious beliefs. Yet bourgeois propagandists, Kuroedov maintained, had spread every “cock and bull” story about the policies of the Soviet Union and the suppression of freedom of conscience.²³ Religion, supported and generously financed by capitalist interests, served as a major tool in the ideological assault of Western powers against the Soviet Union.

In Kuroedov’s view Yakunin was not a positive character, either in his upbringing, his role as a priest, or in his conflict with the church. He questioned the purity of Yakunin’s motives in his desire to become a priest. Citing a letter from several parishioners of Yakunin’s former church, Kuroedov claimed that as a young cleric Fr. Gleb always had an eye for “calculating the value of an icon and the money in the church’s collection plate.”²⁴ Yakunin had become known as a “great martyr” to the cause of truth in the Western world, but, the parishioners charged, “we see Yakunin not as a shepherd of God, but as a felon.” Kuroedov targeted Yakunin’s connection to the American entrepreneur Henry Dakin’s Washington Research Center in San Francisco, his letters to Western political leaders, his outreach to world religious organizations, and the relationships he forged with Russian émigré journals such as Posev, Russkaia mysl′, and others. He asserted that these efforts had one ultimate goal: the subversion of the Soviet Union.²⁵

The perspectives on Yakunin summarized above raise several questions about his motivations, activities, and place in the political and religious history of Russia in the second half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first. Did Kuroedov’s portrayal of Fr. Gleb as an extremist, an enemy of the church and the Soviet state, represent an accurate assessment, or did it conceal another purpose—an effort to stigmatize a growing religious awakening that threatened the state’s ideological foundation? Also, why did Gleb Yakunin, originally educated as a wild-game biologist, become an Orthodox priest during a time when his society strongly discouraged that vocation? What persons and writers shaped Yakunin’s commitments and made him a primary spokesperson for religious freedom? How did the social, political, and religious setting in which he lived influence his decisions and lead him to rebel against the church and the state? How and why did Fr. Gleb Yakunin seek to cultivate relationships with the West and particularly with a certain person in the United States? What did Yakunin mean by “freedom of conscience” in the context of the Soviet Union, and later, in post-Soviet Russia, and what obstacles did he face in defending it?

Gleb Yakunin’s life spans many of the most important events in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia in the past century. Born in 1934 in Moscow, at the beginning of Stalin’s Great Purges, he lost his father during World War II. He was raised by his mother, a staunch Orthodox believer, and two aunts, who held fast to the ritualistic practices of the Russian Church. Fatherless and like other Russian youths in the late 1940s, he spent his early teenage years roaming the streets of Moscow. Taught in the dull, conventional Soviet educational system, he had an inquisitive mind and a love of books, particularly those that fell outside the approval of the authorities. His postsecondary schooling took place in the Institute of Zoology, which moved to Irkutsk, Siberia, in 1955. Similar to his friend and classmate, Aleksandr Men, his experiences in Irkutsk shaped his life and perspectives. There, he became acquainted with a multicultural world and diverse religious beliefs. There, too, he made the decision to study for the Orthodox priesthood. He was ordained in 1960, during the worst period of Khrushchev’s attack against religious belief and his massive closure of churches.

As a young priest, Fr. Gleb strongly believed that the survival of the church depended on its willingness to reform and its ability to reach out to the world. The letters he and his fellow priest Nikolai Eshliman sent to the Russian patriarch and the head of the state expressing this view resulted in the suspension of both young priests. Undaunted, Yakunin continued to fight against the system, writing letters to the World Council of Churches in 1975 and to various other world leaders, exposing the persecution of religious believers in the Soviet Union. Additionally, he participated in what he believed was a coming religious Renaissance among young members of the intelligentsia in the 1970s, served as a founding member of the Christian Committee for the Defense of Religious Believers’ Rights in the USSR and, in an act of utter defiance of the political authorities, transported the committee’s materials to the US entrepreneur and publisher Henry S. Dakin, an act that ultimately resulted in his arrest, imprisonment, and exile to Siberia.

Supported by his wife, Iraida, and his family, Yakunin refused to confess to his alleged anti-Soviet activities. Like other political prisoners, he was released from exile by President Gorbachev’s general amnesty in 1987. On his return to Moscow, he was appointed head priest of a small parish in the Moscow region. There, he engaged in a whole flurry of activities. While serving as a priest, he ran for political office, served in the Congress of People’s Deputies, and, after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, worked on the small parliamentary commission to investigate the heretofore closed archives of the KGB, which resulted in a series of explosive revelations. Pressured by church authorities to give up his political activities and focus solely on his responsibilities to his parish, he refused, an act of defiance that again led to his suspension from the priesthood and, eventually, in 1997, to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church. The principles to which he held firmly—freedom of conscience, church reform, sobornost′ (conciliarity), reconciliation, and repentance—were activated in the Apostolic Orthodox Church, which he helped found in 2000 and in which he served until the end of his life. He remained a sharp critic of the Moscow Patriarchate, authoritarian government, political violence, and a closed society until his death on December 25, 2014. His legacy is a testimony to defiance against the established power, a strong yet understudied theme in Russian history.

The Russian Orthodox Church does not list the name of Gleb Yakunin in its official encyclopedia; nor is there any mention of his myriad activities in defense of religious believers against persecution by the Soviet state. These omissions negate neither his historical significance nor his role in calling both the church and the state into account. The story of the Russian Orthodox Church in the twentieth century cannot be fully understood without coming to terms with Yakunin and the many voices he represented—in all their aspirations, circumstances, and struggles.

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, no serious study of Yakunin’s life and activities appeared in print, and he seemed nearly forgotten in public memory. In 2021, however, in rapid succession, three significant books on Yakunin were published, all of them written by knowledgeable Russian scholars. The first, authored by Volkova, titled The Colossal Gleb: The Most Forbidden Priest (in Russian, my translation), is an intimate portrayal of Yakunin’s heroic efforts to defend religious believers of all confessions against state persecution and the church’s seeming indifference to their plight.²⁶ The volume is particularly strong in its inclusion of lengthy excerpts from materials held in KGB archives, which Yakunin originally unearthed, the testimonies of family and friends, memoirs, and Yakunin’s poetry, all of which in combination offer an informative and moving portrayal of his aspirations and activities.

The second book, Gleb Yakunin (1934–2014): Orthodox Human Rights Defender, Priest, Deputy, and Poet (in Russian, my translation), adds a unique perspective. Written by Georgii Vasil′evich Rovenskii, a local historian and the author of more than three hundred books on the city of Shchyolkovo, nineteen miles northeast of Moscow, and its surrounding region, this short work focuses on Yakunin’s significance within that region.²⁷ The author aspires to revive and preserve Yakunin’s memory in the face of efforts to forget the past and the men and women who kept humanistic values alive in the Soviet era.

The last of the three, Fr. Gleb Yakunin: The Difficult Way of the Truth-Seeker (in Russian, my translation), by the historian Sergei Sergeevich Bychkov, is a fact-based, well-researched, nonideological account of Yakunin’s lifelong efforts to secure religious freedom in the former Soviet Union.²⁸ An acquaintance of Yakunin’s for over forty years and the author of four books on the Russian Orthodox Church, Bychkov centers his biography on the major questions of ecclesiological debate in the past century: “What is the Church?” “How should it relate to the state and to the community?”

My book owes a debt of gratitude to all three of the abovementioned works. It relies on them, particularly Volkova and Bychkov, for factual details on several aspects of Yakunin’s life and his break from the Moscow Patriarchate. In two ways, however, the account in my book takes a different approach to the subject.

First, more emphasis is placed on the significance of the international relationships that Yakunin cultivated. His activities sparked interest that went beyond the Soviet state and included the responses to the well-known letter he and his colleague Lev Regel′son wrote to the World Council of Churches in 1975, the perceptions he and others created about the grassroots realities of life in the former Soviet Union, as opposed to the picture Soviet leaders and the media attempted to draw, the support he received from abroad during his time in a Siberian labor camp and in exile, the outreach he and the members of his committee for the defense of believers’ rights cultivated with the US entrepreneur Henry S. Dakin, and his efforts on behalf of religious believers that reached across confessional boundaries. Although he remained a citizen of Soviet Russia, Yakunin thought more broadly about citizenship and humanity than about national allegiances.

The materials in the Keston Archive at Baylor University, particularly those that document the persecution of religious believers, fit the narrative of the Soviet Union as an oppressive state. Some documents in the archival collection were used by political interests during the Cold War. Keston College in Great Britain, the original creator of the archive, however, never received funding from state agencies, and its employees did not view themselves as agents of the state. They had little control over how the documents were used outside the archive’s domain, and such uses belong to another study. In this book the focus is on Fr. Gleb Yakunin, his activities and his struggles to support human rights and religious freedom. These themes spoke to global concerns that transcended the Cold War. In the 1970s, especially, they became an important part of the “quest for personal meaning and authenticity.”²⁹

Second, the theoretical framework for this book is derived from the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz’s classic book-length essay The Captive Mind, written shortly after he left Poland for the West in the early 1950s. Miłosz had recently witnessed Stalin’s tanks in the streets of Wilno (now Vilnius), the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, and the Soviet suffocation of Poland. The Captive Mind seeks to explain why so many thinking people choose to sacrifice their independent lives and pay homage to an authoritarian political order. Miłosz explores the inner fears of people who surrender their personhood and their own freedom of thought for the promise of a bright, fantastic future in which neither shadows nor darkness exist. He calls this the “New Faith,” whose magical influences have proved attractive to large numbers of intellectuals in the past century and, by inference, in the present.

In such a society, a few people resist and struggle to maintain their mental independence, but the vast majority submerge their identity in the New Faith. They acquire a different understanding of truth than that of the past. Truth is malleable, always in motion, and interdependent on a whole host of circumstances beyond their control. A magical power replaces the “objective search for truth and beauty,” and metaphysical thought, in all its forms, is denigrated as being too intellectual, as well as too close to religion. Poets, therefore, are deemed especially dangerous and their work harmful to the compliant spirit of an authoritarian state. Thus, the government targets them first as enemies of the New Faith.

A major theme of Gleb Yakunin’s story concerns his opposition to this notion of the captive mind. He challenged the political and religious structure that sought to crush freedom of thought. Russian history contained a strong tradition of dissent that existed alongside an authoritarian system that sought to compel compliance. Yakunin was part of that tradition, a rebel who never felt at home in a society that required submission and servitude. He was not without flaws and miscalculations. He put his wife and three children through periods of hardship and deprivation. Nevertheless, he had an indomitable spirit, a willingness to take great personal risks in pursuit of causes he considered just.

The roots of Yakunin’s rebellion against the church and the state lay deeply embedded in his upbringing and personality as well as the specific impediments he encountered throughout his life. Although an Orthodox priest, he did not recognize Orthodoxy as the only authentic religious body in Russia, but endeavored to reach out to other confessions in defense of their legal rights and appreciation of their aspirations and beliefs. This book seeks to tell his story, his triumphs and disappointments, and above all his perseverance in the face of formidable challenges.