CHAPTER 4 Western Perceptions and Soviet Realities

Nairobi

Convened in Nairobi in August 1975, the WCC’s Fifth Assembly faced all these contentious issues. Before the meeting, however, the leadership could not have anticipated that the organization would soon have to deal with a serious question it had largely avoided in earlier sessions. On October 16, 1975, WCC delegates read an “Appeal” transmitted from Moscow by Yakunin and Regel′son, which dealt directly with violence in the Soviet Union. Although earlier letters from individual religious believers had largely been set aside, the delegates did not ignore this appeal, and it would find its way onto the main agenda of the international meeting. The letter’s prominence derived from two fundamental reasons: its timing and the actions of the African organizers of the sessions.⁶

In 1975, human rights had emerged as a major issue of international concern, which generated passionate interest, especially in the United States and Western Europe. Not surprisingly, in some groups within the WCC, it likewise ascended to the top of their agenda, and the communication from Yakunin and Regel′son immediately attracted their attention. Except for a chance decision, however, it is unlikely that the appeal would have acquired the notoriety it did. When preparing the news briefing for the WCC agenda, the African organizing committee elected to print the letter written by Yakunin and Regel′son in its entirety. This action ensured that instead of being buried in a subcommittee, all the participants in the meetings of the WCC would read the letter. Printing it likewise determined that the problems Yakunin and Regel′son raised would become part of the WCC’s proceedings.⁷

In their appeal, Yakunin and Regel′son began by making their case within the framework of the WCC’s principal mission by appealing to its ecumenical ideals.⁸ They spoke to the feeling of brotherhood and the commitment to the love of Jesus Christ, which prepared Christians for genuine unity. It was within this context that the two writers placed the tragic story of the Russian Orthodox Church, which had suffered an enormous human tragedy under the abusive antireligious policies of the Soviet government. In the name of Christian love, Yakunin and Regel′son appealed for selfless help. They referred to a similar plea made by Patriarch Tikhon in 1921, in the midst of a great famine that ravished the Russian countryside. “Not to your ears, but to the depths of your hearts,” Patriarch Tikhon had cried out, “let my prayer convey the suffering cry of millions of human beings doomed to death from starvation; let me bring it home to your conscience, to the conscience of all humankind.”⁹ Yakunin and Regel′son’s clarion call went out not to address physical starvation, but the spiritual suffering of a people denied the right to worship, a people whose lifeline had been cut off by the antireligious policies of the Soviet government. The appeal echoed the cry of the Russian people, Michael Bourdeaux has written, “with all its spiritual power welling up from generations of suffering—to be heard in a totally new way by hundreds of delegates, many of whom had previously thought of the Russian Orthodox Church in terms of somewhat ominous figures—with whom communication was difficult—circulating at ecumenical gatherings.”¹⁰

In a statement that would eventually prove important to Yakunin’s and Regel′son’s future, their appeal recalled an international protest led by Christians everywhere against the Soviet government’s actions that had exacerbated the famine of 1921–1922. The international outcry, they claimed, led by Anglican, Catholic, and other faiths, had a decisive impact on Soviet behavior. Outside pressure had resulted in the release of Patriarch Tikhon from prison, an event that had large significance for the Orthodox Church.¹¹ Patriarch Tikhon they regarded as a martyr in the defense of the Orthodox Church against efforts to destroy it, and they maintained that Russian believers had never forgotten his legacy.¹² Similarly, they would always remember the support of the WCC.

Moving to the present, Yakunin and Regel′son noted that, heretofore, world attention had focused on issues other than religious repression in the Soviet Union. Their appeal made it difficult for members of the WCC to ignore any longer the fate of religious believers in that country. First, Yakunin and Regel′son exposed the intolerance Orthodox Church leaders had exhibited toward other faiths, their devotion to the government’s nationalistic agenda, and, above all, their unquestioning submission to the political authorities of the Soviet Union. For example, when the Soviet government’s foreign policy shifted from the Cold War to détente, the church, too, fell in line with the government’s approach.

Second, despite the Soviet state’s frequent claims to the contrary, Yakunin and Regel′son provided a catalogue of specific actions it had taken to suppress religious belief. The specificity of their charges, offered not as parochial instances, but as widespread, disparate cases, painted a picture of violence that made denial of these hard. Paradoxically, in 1961, the same year the Russian Orthodox Church joined the WCC, the Soviet government initiated a wave of antireligious terror and forced the closure of a large number of churches, monasteries, and theological institutions. A year later, at the Twenty-Second Party Congress, the Soviet leadership promised that the current generation of Soviet people would live in a country devoid of religious belief. It was extremely important, Yakunin and Regel′son asserted, that “Christians all over the world learn about their confessing brethren, wherever the victims of persecution reside and whatever their denomination may be.”¹³

Yakunin and Regel′son’s observations about psychiatric hospitals in the Soviet Union were among their most important revelations. They requested international inspection of these “torture chambers,” where psychiatrists regularly prescribed shock therapy for religious believers and dissidents, thinking it would “cure” them of their so-called irrational behavior. Psychiatrists used electrical shock as a weapon against “freedom of thought and conscience.” “There we encounter a threat to humankind as dangerous as nuclear bombs and bacteriological warfare,” the two writers claimed.¹⁴ They also cited the American psychiatrist Dr. Robert Coles’s warnings about the effects on people placed in these “psychiatric torture chambers”: “Such people know what it means to be abandoned and deserted. In their perplexity, they often ask themselves whether they are not already in hell, at this very moment. For them heaven remains a vision just as for a thirsty man in a desert. Somebody must save them.”¹⁵

The two writers offered specific recommendations to the Nairobi Assembly. Foremost among them was the need to awaken to the suffering of their Russian brethren. They again appealed to the universal sense of brother- and sisterhood that, they maintained, lay at the core of Christianity.¹⁶ They emphasized the importance of circulating information about the suffering victims of religious persecution in newspapers and magazines and on radio and television, as well as in a special mass-circulation bulletin focused on the plight of confessors of Christ all over the world. Most important, they called on the WCC to take up the issues they had brought to the delegates’ attention. Speaking to the delegates’ sense of shame, Yakunin and Regel′son asserted that an egotistical indifference to the suffering of Christian confessors had too long characterized the meetings of the WCC. The two writers called upon the delegates to overcome their disinterest and to hear again Christ’s call to care for the poor and the suffering of the earth.¹⁷

Several features added to the power of the appeal. It was written in eloquent language that spoke to the mission of the WCC, which made it nearly impossible for the assembly to ignore the document’s call for action. Moreover, it spoke in the language of Christianity, articulated how best to witness to the call of Christ in the modern world, and proposed how to advance the spiritual unification of Christians all over the world through human rights and religious liberty.¹⁸

Scorned, ridiculed, and ostracized from their community, both psychologically and religiously, believers in the Soviet Union needed to feel part of a world Christian community. They could not themselves reach out to other people, but would have great joy if members of the world community reached out to them.¹⁹ Yakunin and Regel′son offered simple, practical suggestions for how individual churches might respond.²⁰ They asked for prayer, personal contacts, sharing of information, international protests, support for the persecuted, and fraternal concern for people who wished to emigrate.

The appeal Yakunin cowrote to the delegates in Nairobi also marked the widening scope of his public statements. The 1965 letters had addressed Soviet leaders in the government and the church. A decade later, still suspended from serving as an active priest, he sought a wider audience, casting the grievances in a much larger framework and connecting them to universal claims. The lone exception to this broader perspective appeared in a previous letter, in which he and Regel′son addressed fellow Christians in Portugal. Surveying Portuguese politics, they warned that the country presently faced a situation not unlike what Russia confronted in the era of the 1917 Revolution, when it had broken from its traditional culture. This process had let to “spiritual, national, and political decay.”²¹ They cautioned Portuguese Christians about falling into a similar trap and implored them to become actively involved in politics.²² Yakunin began to cast his thinking in larger, more universal terms than before. He took an ecumenical approach, and in his Nairobi appeal, he reached across denominational lines, alluding to the suffering not only of Orthodox Christians but also of Muslims, Jews, Baptists, Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Catholics. “We believe,” he and Regel′son wrote, “that it would be the right thing if churches made an effort to support Confessors of all religions, as well as all fighters for freedom, human dignity, and the preservation of God’s image in man.”²³ Their plea went further: “Are not Christians more than anyone obligated to lead the implacable struggle against such a diabolical assault on human personality?”²⁴ Denied political support in his own country, Yakunin turned to the outside world for help. Yet pragmatism did not constitute the only reason for his decisions. Ecumenism also played an important part in his thinking, his growing view that the isolation of the Orthodox Church had hindered its creativity and its need for dialogue. Readings and discussions in the Christian Seminar had encouraged such an approach, and they constituted one of the sources on which he had drawn. Reaching across religious boundaries soon became a key element in his political actions and represents one of the first attempts by an Orthodox priest to take this ecumenical approach.

When it appeared in the assembly’s daily newspaper on November 25, 1975, the appeal caused a great deal of backroom conversation among delegates, particularly those from Western Europe. It also put the Soviet delegates in an extremely awkward position. To them, it came as a surprise and created a political dilemma. As representatives of a country whose government officially declared itself atheistic, Soviet delegates had always confronted the difficult task of simultaneously professing themselves emissaries of Jesus Christ. Facing the charges made in the Yakunin–Regel′son “Appeal,” they now had to defend their government, while responding to specific claims of injustices and persecutions of religious believers for practicing their professed faith.

The Soviet delegation’s response came on November 28. Metropolitan Yuvenalii (Vladimir Kirillovich Poiarkov), the chair of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department of Foreign Relations, wrote the reply to the claims Yakunin and Regel′son had made. Yuvenalii had impressive credentials. Born in 1935 in the city of Yaroslavl into a family of priests, the forty-one-year-old Yuvenalii was a well-educated, highly respected metropolitan who had rapidly risen within the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church.²⁵ He was ordained to the priesthood in 1960, the same year the church selected him to be a member of the Russian delegation to attend the first European Ecumenical Youth Assembly, held in Lausanne, Switzerland. Afterward, he remained to study in the WCC’s Ecumenical Institute in Bossey, Switzerland, thus giving him contacts that would be useful to him in his later career.²⁶ After completing his course of study, he had traveled extensively in Western Europe, often participating in conferences devoted to building ecumenical relationships between different denominations. In 1965, Patriarch Aleksii I appointed him deputy chair of the patriarchate’s Department of Foreign Relations. In 1972, he became chair, replacing Metropolitan Nikodim, who had become ill. Yuvenalii was a widely experienced, knowledgeable, and well-known member of the church hierarchy who played a large part in the shifting of foreign policy within the church from the Cold War to peace and ecumenical politics.

Metropolitan Yuvenalii’s written response to the assembly represented a masterstroke of “walking a thin line” between two disparate points of view. Obviously, he had to clear his response with the KGB, which exercised a tight hold on all Soviet delegations sent abroad. He could not totally whitewash the internal conflicts within his country without earning the disapprobation of WCC delegates. His response, therefore, required judicial judgment, and it was certain to provoke a heated reaction.

At the beginning of his reply to the Yakunin–Regel′son “Appeal,” Yuvenalii disparaged the character, as well as the motives, of the two writers. Yakunin, he claimed, was an inveterate troublemaker, a renegade within the church who had earned the opprobrium of both the leadership and the rank-and-file loyal servitors. “He has been in conflict with his own church for some time,” Yuvenalii wrote, referring to Fr. Gleb’s previous troubles with the authorities following the letter he and Nikolai Eshliman had sent to the patriarch in 1965. Fr. Gleb’s cohort, Lev Regel′son, a layperson, had long been known for his opposition to ecumenism, Yuvenalii claimed, as evidenced by a statement he wrote “to the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1971, in which he criticized the ecumenical activities in the theological field of the Moscow Patriarchate’s representatives.” In his statement, Regel′son asserted that “ecumenism and all connected with it is a danger for Orthodoxy and must be seen as a heresy of our day.”²⁷

Despite the harshness of his opening rhetoric, Yuvenalii’s tone softened. He made several surprising admissions about the shortcomings of Soviet officials: “We do not disguise the fact that there do arise problems in the life of the church, resulting from the infringement of the laws concerning religious communities, both by local representatives of the State authorities, and by members of church communities.”²⁸ In addition, he expressed regret for the transgressions of the laws: “We do not condone the violations of these laws, whether on the political plane, or any other.”²⁹ He neither sought to excuse the violations nor attempt to justify them.

Nevertheless, Yuvenalii asserted that the Council for Religious Affairs, which operated under the Council of Ministers, had made great strides in working on these infringements, and he asserted that its work had proved highly beneficial to the well-being of the country. Foreign visitors to the Soviet Union could clearly see the opportunities for religious believers to worship freely, to enjoy all the amenities of the state, and to appreciate the respect for their religious activities so long as their actions did not violate the legal separation of church and state. Foreign visitors repeatedly had found little evidence of religious persecution.³⁰ Yuvenalii called the rumors that frequently circulated in the Western press about religious persecution to be wildly exaggerated accusations, and he declared them extremely harmful to resolving his country’s internal problems.³¹ By implication, he placed the charges that Yakunin and Regel′son advanced in the category of these distortions, which misrepresented the long-term course his country was taking: “At the same time, we cannot but note the fact that our society is evolving in the direction of ever-increasing development of democratic principles. The church has found its level in this process, and contributes to it to the extent that it is possible for her to do so.”³² Yuvenalii thus tried to make Yakunin and Regel′son’s appeal appear to be a minor issue. The Soviet state was not perfect, which he well recognized, but it was moving along the path toward the pursuit of democratic ideals. He hoped the WCC delegates would disregard the problems Yakunin and Regel′son had brought to light.

On the same day that the WCC’s organizing committee received Metropolitan Yuvenalii’s response, it also received a letter from Russian Baptist delegates. They wrote on behalf of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians and Baptists in the Soviet Union. Evangelical Baptists, they pointed out, had deep roots in Russia, having existed there for more than a hundred years, and presently represented more than half a million believers. Ostensibly, their letter expressed support for the government’s policies. The letter, however, confirmed what Yakunin and Regel′son had claimed about the persecution of believers. It referenced a group of schismatic Baptists who wanted nothing to do with the All-Union Council, preferring to remain separate and true to their faith and outside government control. The motto of these schismatic Baptists was the “Persecuted Church Is the Saving Church.”³³ Electing to remain separate from the state and refusing to comply with state laws on registration, they often suffered arrest and conviction.³⁴

Although the issue of religious liberty in the USSR raised heated discussion in the back rooms and hallways of the WCC, two weeks passed before, on December 8, the problem finally arose in the assembly sessions. That it eventually did so was almost by accident. The opening for its discussion followed a report of the working Committee on Disarmament and the Helsinki Accords when Dr. Jacques Rossel, a Swiss Protestant delegate, moved to incorporate the following statement in the concluding paragraph of the committee’s report: “The WCC is concerned about restrictions to religious liberty particularly in the USSR. The Assembly respectfully requests the government of the USSR to implement effectively principle number 7 of the Helsinki Accords.”³⁵ This statement moved the claims made in the Yakunin–Regel′son appeal to the center of the WCC’s agenda. It also targeted the Soviet Union’s violations of the Helsinki Accords. The proposal forced the WCC to consider taking a strong stand on religious liberty, which it had hitherto been reluctant to do.

Rev. Richard Holloway of the Episcopal Church of Scotland immediately seconded the motion. As might have been expected, Russian delegates strenuously opposed it.³⁶ A period of confusion followed, likely caused by uncertainty among the delegates over whether they were voting to close the discussion or to end the session.³⁷ After this proposal for closure failed to receive the required two-thirds majority, the discussion continued, with Dr. Ernest Payne, an English Baptist, urging that the amendment be sent back to the committee for more deliberative consideration. He hoped that the result would lead to a wider level of consensus. Payne’s suggestion was approved, and that evening, the Committee on Disarmament and the Helsinki Accords held an open hearing. The records reveal that a large number of delegates attended. Late in the evening, a small group of committee members were assigned to draft a final statement.³⁸ The next day, December 9, the committee members filed their draft proposal, saying that they had deliberated into “the small hours” before arriving at a recommendation that they had unanimously approved. Although it called attention to “alleged infringements of religious liberty,” the revised statement contained no mention of the Soviet Union. It read: “The Assembly requests the General Secretary to see to it that the question of religious liberty be the subject of intense consultations with the member churches of the signatory States of the Helsinki Accords and the first report be presented at the next Central Committee meeting in August 1976.”³⁹ After the reading of the revised statement, Dr. Rossel and Rev. Holloway withdrew their original amendment. An extensive, often heated discussion ensued, in which the Soviet delegation announced that its members would abstain from any subsequent vote. Professor Vitalii Borovoi spoke on behalf of the Russian Orthodox Church and reiterated the wish to engage in conversation that “deepened our understanding of, and to apply, human rights, including religious liberty.” On this issue, he explained the Soviet delegation’s intention to abstain: “We were always ready, and at this present moment, declare our readiness to participate in open, brotherly, and equitable discussion of these problems which are of prime importance for us all. We are prepared for frankness, for dialogue, and for co-operation. But we were unpleasantly disappointed by the prevailing atmosphere which surrounded the discussion of these questions at the Assembly, an atmosphere compounded of haste, nerves, emotion, and divisiveness.”⁴⁰ The proposed statement from the committee was then put to a vote, and it carried by “an overwhelming majority,” with four negative votes and many abstentions.⁴¹

The Aftermath

The discussion of religious liberty and human rights did not end in Nairobi; the questions Yakunin and Regel′son raised continued to resonate long after the WCC’s meetings concluded in December. On March 3, 1976, the Holy Synod of the Moscow Patriarchate sent a letter addressed to the general-secretary of the WCC, Dr. Philip Potter, and to the chair of the WCC’s Central Committee, Archbishop Edward Scott, that sharply criticized the WCC’s resolution. The synod’s letter argued that, in preparation for the assembly, no representative of a socialist country had participated. Further, in the assembly’s discussions, socialist representatives had rarely had the chance to speak, while their Western counterparts had dominated the sessions. The synod wanted an explanation for why the leadership had pushed forward its own agenda.⁴²

The conflict between these opposing forces over religious liberty would become even more strident in the ensuing months. During that time, the WCC received many letters from clergy and religious believers in the Soviet Union claiming that they enjoyed religious freedom and praising the opportunity to practice their own faith traditions. Throughout 1976, they also excoriated Yakunin and Regel′son for creating a false picture of the Soviet Union and castigated them for “this type of slander” against the Soviet system (figure 4.1).⁴³ Conversely, persecuted people also sent letters, testifying to the closure of churches and the prohibition of many of their religious activities.

The leadership of the WCC continued to wrestle with these conflicting issues despite an abundance of evidence it received supporting the case Yakunin and Regel′son had originally made. Even so, the leadership welcomed the participation of the Soviet and East European representatives in its meetings, and it did not want to precipitate their withdrawal. Concurrently, the WCC wanted to hear the cries of the persecuted, voices it could not easily ignore and to which it needed to respond with compassion. The struggle to resolve these dilemmas sparked several meetings: the first, in late July 1976, in the resort town of Montreux, Switzerland; the second, from August 10 to 18 in Geneva. The former, called the Helsinki Colloquium, included representatives from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It fostered a great deal of conversation among the attendees, but in the end, it resolved little.⁴⁴

Attended by 130 people, including a large delegation from the Soviet Union, the second meeting convened with a great deal of anticipation of a resolution. In his final report to the participants, however, Dr. Potter avoided reaching an ultimate conclusion. The existing conflicts over human rights and religious liberty, he said, could be solved only “in the context of mutual trust, mutual respect, and mutual caring and support.”⁴⁵

As one might have expected, Dr. Potter’s report did not fulfill the hopes or desires of Western European or American delegates, who had long sought to clarify the WCC’s position on religious liberty and connect this issue to human rights. In the end, the leadership of the WCC tried to bridge the excessive disparate interests and beliefs. It feared offending different parties, and thus it satisfied none of them. The leap of judgment it had to make was too great, the danger of creating permanent fissures in its membership too risky, and its desire to forge unity among its members too deeply rooted for it to take a resolute stand.

The controversy over religious liberty did not dissipate in the months after the delegates returned home from Geneva, because the issues it had raised were too important. They involved the self-image of the countries competing for international prominence during the Cold War, when the strength of a nation’s internal coherence served as an important measure of national power. Moreover, the charges brought by Yakunin and Regel′son concerned the difference between truth and delusion. In the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States, the claims made by Yakunin and Regel′son rapidly became contentious matters of public concern. They altered the perception of the Soviet Union, particularly in matters of religion. The issues they raised and the debate that followed in the WCC also had wider ramifications in political circles both within and outside the Soviet Union.

Rocking the Boat

In Moscow, the reaction was swift and condemnatory of how certain political factions in the Nairobi Assembly had treated representatives of the Soviet Union. Metropolitan Nikodim, the second-highest-ranking member of the church hierarchy, spearheaded the defense of the state’s policies. Yakunin must have known that church officials would stand behind the Soviet state. As the British historian Jane Ellis notes, the church had sided with the state, rather than with the clergy’s desire to speak out for church autonomy a decade earlier in response to the letters Yakunin and Nikolai Eshliman sent to the patriarch.⁴⁶ Patriarch Aleksii I, in 1965, like Metropolitan Yuvenalii in Nairobi, had chosen not to rock the boat in the interest of preserving what few privileges the church possessed.

At the Nairobi Assembly, the delegates elected Metropolitan Nikodim president of the WCC; he was well-known among them for his major role in supporting the ecumenical movement and advancing Soviet goals within it. Raised in the aggressive atmosphere of Stalin’s Russia, he did not see the church as an autonomous institution and favored the total subordination of the church to the state. In February 1976, Metropolitan Nikodim gave an interview with the English-language newspaper Moscow News in which he presented his views—and by extension, those of the church hierarchy—of the events that had taken place in Nairobi.⁴⁷ Some groups in the leadership of the previous WCC, he asserted, had sought to make the “persecution of religion” in the USSR and in other socialist states a primary issue in the Nairobi meetings, as a means of denigrating them: “Certain circles indirectly connected with the Nairobi staff, tried to create an Anti-Soviet atmosphere at and around the Assembly, speculating on certain factors pertaining to the understanding and interpretation of the problems of human rights and religious freedom.”⁴⁸ Although some delegates approved of the claims that Yakunin and Regel′son had made, the large majority, Metropolitan Nikodim said, appeared unconcerned; rather than rely on conjectures made by the two discontented Russians, most of the delegates, he maintained, took a more “objective approach,” relying on the testimonies of religious believers throughout the Soviet Union and socialist countries elsewhere.

In his interview, Metropolitan Nikodim portrayed the issues advanced by Yakunin and Regel′son as politically motivated. “Reactionary forces in the West,” he said, aspired to “cast a shadow on the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.” Nikodim described their ultimate aim as an effort to undermine the peace process to which the Soviet Union had committed itself. He argued that the Soviet Union had signed the Helsinki Accords in order to promote world peace, which certain political interests in Western Europe and the United States did not support. They planned, before the Nairobi sessions began, to disrupt the proceedings by deliberately plotting to raise an issue that was not on the program’s agenda.

Metropolitan Nikodim characterized Yakunin and Regel′son as two biased, opinionated individuals who had a superficial, misconceived view of the relationship between church and state. In his defense of the state, Metropolitan Nikodim’s own understanding of this relationship became evident. Although he was a church leader, he perceived the church as little more than a body of believers without any legal standing. It had no claim to equal partnership with the state. Its authority was always limited: it operated within its own sphere of interest, and nowhere did those interests take precedence over those of the state. As loyal citizens of the country, believers should not, for any reason, either challenge or transgress the laws established by the state. This understanding, he said, corresponded to the common view of the truth—that is, “the Russian Orthodox Church is carrying on its activities in parishes, divinity schools, and monasteries absolutely unhindered, within the limits, naturally, of the existing laws of our country.”⁴⁹

In his public statement, Metropolitan Nikodim disregarded both the relevance of canon law and the sanctity of individual conscience. Growing up during the early Stalin years and being educated in the Moscow Ecclesiastical Academy, like many other church officials of his generation, he identified the prosperity of the state with the well-being of the Orthodox Church. As he emphasized in his interview, those who claimed to be victims of religious persecution were people who, in reality, had violated state laws. Nikodim cited the many examples of visitors to the Soviet Union who testified to the flourishing state of the Orthodox Church; they told a different story, he said, from the one that Yakunin and Regel′son had fabricated.⁵⁰

The publication of the interview with Metropolitan Nikodim is curious. Its appearance in an English-language newspaper and its timing, shortly after the Nairobi meetings, raise questions about the political motivations underlying the metropolitan’s accusations—and perhaps also the pressure he felt. He wrote primarily to an international, rather than a Russian, audience. Since the appeal had been written by an Orthodox priest and a layperson, rather than by two people outside the church, the charges they made had to be taken seriously. The accusations of Yakunin and Regel′son, made in an international setting, required a severe response. As Jane Ellis notes, the publication of the interview with a high-ranking church official offered clear evidence of the church hierarchy’s need “to disown publicly the ‘two dissidents.’ ”⁵¹

What Is to Be Done?

In England, the issues raised by Yakunin and Regel′son touched off a lively, contentious, many-sided debate. In some quarters of the British establishment, bringing forth the question of religious freedom at the time appeared unwise. Détente was still in its infancy, and the Soviet Union’s engagement with England and others in Western Europe needed to progress further, without the threat of Soviet withdrawal over religious liberty. Foreign relations officials generally agreed with Pope Paul VI’s ostpolitik, the importance of keeping open political doors to the East, rather than closing them over problems like the persecution of religious believers. Such difficulties represented internal matters, in which Western countries should not become entangled.⁵² What, then, was the most appropriate course of action to take?

The question invited much discussion that was sometimes heated. The East-West Relations Committee of the British Council of Churches, under the skilled guidance of Rev. John Arnold, a Russian speaker, debated the issue. Arnold invited speakers from all sides to participate and hosted an open exchange of views about the meaning and scope of religious liberty. The committee’s main goal was to strengthen the channels of communication between governments and religious believers in East and West. It viewed the cultivation of these relationships as the best way to deal with contentious matters.⁵³ Elsewhere, however, not every group looked with favor upon organizations that reached out to persecuted individuals in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and interpreted these efforts as politically motivated intentional distortions of realities in the Soviet Union. Erich Weingartner, of the WCC’s affiliated Commission of the Churches on International Affairs, published a report on Human Rights on the Ecumenical Agenda, in which he argued that the Western focus on religious liberty and human rights in Eastern Europe represented a weapon that intensified the Cold War.⁵⁴ Christians who engaged in such actions, according to Weingartner, participated in “pious denunciations from a safe distance” which “are not only ineffective … but mask a certain hypocrisy.”⁵⁵ Why, Weingartner asked, did the United States and Great Britain devote such extensive attention to religious persecution in the USSR, while they showed much less concern with equal violations of human dignity in apartheid South Africa and American massacres in Vietnam?⁵⁶ Other prominent church leaders refused to accept the accusations of religious persecution that Yakunin and Regel′son cited. They asserted that these accounts deliberately distorted the realities of communism. For example, the Rev. B. O. Fielding Clarke disparaged Yakunin and Regel’son with the following words: “I do regard the letter of the dissidents to the World Council of Churches in 1975 at Nairobi not only as Anti-Soviet propaganda, but as an attack on the whole position of Patriarch Pimen and of the Russian Church as regards the State.”⁵⁷

In England, however, one organization dedicated itself to being what it called the “voice of the voiceless.”⁵⁸ Founded by Canon Michael Bourdeaux, Leonard Schapiro, and Peter Reddaway, Keston College served as a significant research institution that monitored religious persecution in the communist world. Supported primarily by private donations, Keston engaged in a wide range of research related to religious liberty and church-state relations. It published a journal, Religion in Communist Lands, edited by the Russian specialist, Xenia Howard-Johnston (Dennen), which featured articles by leading international scholars, as well as samizdat publications from the Soviet Union.⁵⁹ Although occasionally accused of being an instrument of Cold War politics, Keston’s contributions to opening up a wider public discussion on religious liberty, human rights, and the problems identified by Yakunin and Regel′son were undeniable.

Not only in England but also in the United States the persecution of religious believers in the USSR attracted a great deal of interest. The House of Representatives in the US Congress convened meetings on the subject, delegating further study to the Committee on International Relations. The committee, in turn, appointed two subcommittees to hold special hearings. On June 24 and 30, 1976, the Subcommittees on International Political and Military Affairs and on International Organizations of the Committee on International Relations met jointly to hear from experts and make recommendations on how the US government should proceed. The issues raised by Yakunin and Regel′son in Nairobi, the persecution of individual believers, and the alleged violations of the Helsinki Accords combined to make them major issues in how the US government viewed its relationship with the Soviet Union.⁶⁰

Donald M. Fraser, a Democratic congressman from Minnesota, presided over the hearings, which heard from leading experts on the Soviet Union. They included Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, a professor in the Department of Political Science at Carleton College; Yanis Smits, chair of the Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians and Baptists and a former prisoner in the Soviet Union; John Dunlop, a professor in the Russian, East European, Eurasian Studies Department at Oberlin College; and Alexei A. Kiselev, a professor in the Slavic Department at the University of Pittsburgh, who represented the Committee for the Defense of Persecuted Orthodox Christians.⁶¹ The subcommittees and Committee on International Organizations, therefore, heard both from top scholars and from people who had intimate experience with the subject under investigation. The case of a Soviet citizen, Georgi Vins, stood at the top of the agenda. His example fit well into the framework that Yakunin and Regel′son had outlined in their appeal.

In the mid-1970s, Georgi Vins became a well-known name in the United States. He was the son of an American Baptist missionary of Russian origin, Peter Vins, who had once pastored a church in Pittsburgh that had a large number of Russian immigrants. While there, he heard a call to do missionary work in Russia, and, in 1926, he left the United States for Siberia. There, a year later, he married Lydia Zharikova, and in 1928, she gave birth to their son, Georgi.

During Stalin’s assault on religion in the early 1930s, the Soviet authorities revoked Peter Vins’s American citizenship, arrested him, subsequently freed him, and then arrested him again. In 1936, he was executed. Following her husband’s death, Lydia Vins took Georgi and his siblings to Kyiv, where she raised them alone. There, Georgi completed his schooling, specializing in electrical engineering, and while working in Kyiv, he fell in with a group of Baptists. In 1962, although he had no formal theological training, Georgi Vins was ordained as a Baptist evangelist. His ordination took place during Nikita Khrushchev’s antireligion campaign, which compelled religious organizations that remained open to follow stringent state requirements and prohibited parents from teaching religion to their children. Vins refused to comply, maintaining that Christ’s commandments superseded the laws of the state.

Vins became the pastor of a breakaway Baptist congregation that met secretly in the forest outside Kyiv. Passionate, a dynamic speaker, and a pastor who demonstrated warmth and care for his people, Vins rapidly gained a reputation as a tireless spokesperson of the “initsiativniki,” or “Reformed Baptists,” which had separated from registered Baptists and refused to comply with the requirements for registration and other state commands.

Vins also drew the scrutiny of the KGB. In May 1965, the Reformed Baptists held a large demonstration outside the offices of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow in protest of the laws restricting the church. Arrests followed, and when Vins and two other leaders went to police headquarters to inquire about the fate of the protesters, the police arrested them, too, and a trial followed, with Vins receiving a three-year prison sentence. After serving his prison term, Vins resumed his pastor’s role, again holding underground services, meeting in the fields and forests near Kyiv. He became a major voice speaking for “freedom of conscience,” as guaranteed in the Constitution, and instituted a long series of appeals in defense of prisoners in the Soviet Union. In March 1974, he was again arrested, which prompted a vigorous protest on Vins’s behalf by the human rights activist Andrei Sakharov, who called for support from the World Council of Churches. The WCC was slow to respond. Vins was tried in Kyiv in January 1975 and sentenced to five years in prison, to be followed by five years of internal exile. After the trial, Baptist women in Russia created the Council of Prisoner’s Relatives which publicized Vins’s case around the world. He became, in the historian Felix Corley’s words, “the Soviet Union’s most famous religious prisoner.”⁶²

In their appeal to the Nairobi Assembly, Yakunin and Regel′son referred to Vins’s case. They cited the international support for Vins and how the Reformed Baptists’ advocacy for the cause had inspired them and given them hope that sympathizers would pursue a similar course with others who freely practiced their religious beliefs.⁶³ The case of Georgi Vins presented the congressional subcommittees with an immediate, compelling example of an assault on religious liberty, illustrating the precise charges that Yakunin and Regel′son had made in Nairobi. For the subcommittees’ members who had little knowledge of the Soviet Union, the key issue concerned the context in which the Soviet government acted. They sought to better understand the motivations and rationale governing its religious policies.

At the beginning of the hearings, the chair recognized Representative John H. Buchanan from the state of Arkansas, who had introduced a bill in Congress demanding Georgi Vins’s release from prison. Representative Buchanan announced that the bill had gained support from more than one hundred members of Congress, who called for the Soviet Union to respect its vow of commitment to religious liberty.⁶⁴ The United States, he emphasized, needed to use “all the moral persuasion at our command” to enhance the rights of citizens as guaranteed in their Constitution.⁶⁵ To that end, the subcommittees should seek to understand not the words of leaders but the realities of the Soviet Union.

Following Buchanan’s introductory remarks, the chair called Professor Bociurkiw as the first witness. A native of Western Ukraine, Bociurkiw earned his doctoral degree in political science at the University of Chicago. A distinguished scholar and teacher, he was foremost an expert on church-state relations, domestic politics in the Soviet Union, political dissent, and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church (1921), whose legitimacy the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate refused to recognize. He placed his statement to the subcommittees in the framework of how he understood the actions of the Soviet state. He argued that the Communist Party ought to be interpreted not so much as being a secular and rational authority, but as “occupying a position once reserved for an established religion and church.”⁶⁶ The governing apparatus represented, in Bociurkiw’s view, a “state church” with its own set of beliefs, doctrines, rituals, and codes of proper conduct. The party politicized its faith and saw the world exclusively through the lens of that faith.⁶⁷ Turning Marxism into a dogmatic faith, he argued, constituted the only way in the Soviet Union that the leaders could consolidate and maintain their hold on power. This “state church” evolved into a political-religious order that sought control over the values and beliefs of its citizens. It waged war on other belief systems that fell outside the Soviet political-religious order, because other faiths challenged or repudiated the legitimacy of this order.

Although Bociurkiw did not specifically call critics of the established church “heretics,” his words suggested that Soviet political leaders considered dissenting views as heretical. The leaders viewed Russian Orthodoxy and other faiths as hostile ideologies that obstructed the political-religious order they wanted to create, and thus as threats. They could not totally destroy the Orthodox Church and other religious bodies, but they could force them to register with the state, and through registration, they could control the behavior of these diverse religious bodies. Leaders did not tolerate groups that refused to comply by taking an independent road. Thus, in the Soviet Union, as the perceptive Orthodox writer Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov pointed out, a “strange paradox” existed: “a state church within a system of an atheist state,” a situation in which the government acted as the protector of the state church against its own freethinkers and dissenters.⁶⁸

According to Bociurkiw, church dissenters fell into three generations, each of which had its own distinguishing characteristics. The oldest emerged in the 1920s among groups that formed around Patriarch Tikhon, and then later among priests who refused to accept Metropolitan Sergei’s declaration of loyalty in 1927. The middle generation of dissenters came into existence following World War II; the government labeled them “bourgeois nationalist” or “anti-Soviet.” The youngest generation arose in opposition to Khrushchev’s extensive antireligion campaign from 1959 to 1964. The last group benefited from Stalin’s earlier revival of the church as well as the loosening of some restrictions on thought after Stalin’s death.⁶⁹ Preeminent among the dissenter priests was Fr. Gleb Yakunin. The letters he and Nikolai Eshliman sent to Patriarch Aleksii I and Chairman Podgorny, and, a decade later, the letter he and Lev Regel′son wrote to the Nairobi Assembly represented direct challenges to the ideology and practices of the Soviet regime. In the eyes of the authorities, the freedom of religion Yakunin and his associates advocated threatened to undermine the existing political-religious order. In response, as Bociurkiw noted, the state and church authorities swiftly retaliated.⁷⁰

In his analysis of trends in politics and religion, Bociurkiw missed the opportunity to discuss the groups of young people who gathered in Moscow, Leningrad, and other cities in the 1970s. Dissatisfied with the ideology of the state and the practices of the Orthodox Church, they sought a new moral center for themselves. As described in chapter 3, the existence of these groups and the rapid spread of their writings deeply worried the state authorities, who fervently worked to suppress them.

Next, the subcommittees called Professor Dunlop to testify. A specialist in the politics of religion, Dunlop had only recently begun his academic career. Unlike Bociurkiw whose approach concerned the ideological framework of the Soviet state, Dunlop focused on the laws. He offered a wide-ranging, factual account of the Soviet state’s efforts to “extirpate all religious ‘survivals’ from the Russian earth.”⁷¹

Although the Soviet Constitution of 1918 had decreed the separation of church and state, the understanding of this division, Dunlop maintained, differed from its usage in the United States. In the Soviet Union, the laws had a hidden agenda in which they might only have seemed to protect the church from state encroachment, but in reality, they enabled the assault on all religious institutions. The 1918 legislation put an end to all parochial schools, church-sponsored homes for the elderly, church-funded hospitals, and parish libraries, all of which the government determined were hostile to the population.⁷² This legislation served as a prelude to what soon turned into massive assaults on monasteries and convents, closures of Orthodox Churches, and executions of bishops and priests. As Dunlop noted, they were what Yakunin and Regel′son had emphasized in their “Appeal” to the Nairobi Assembly and their March 6, 1976, letter to the WCC general-secretary Philip Potter, in which they emphasized the discrepancy between a literal reading of the laws and “lawlessness under the guise of law.”⁷³

Dunlop’s testimony about the obstacles to belief highlighted a central argument Yakunin and Regel′son had made earlier. According to the two writers of the Nairobi “Appeal,” state policies severely restricted the opportunities for the intellectual growth of the Soviet citizen. These policies confined the mind to a narrowly defined framework. In his presentation, Professor Dunlop expanded on the practical consequences of these policies. In the educational system, in which the entire curriculum was based on “scientific atheism,” students who questioned the premises of this paradigm or advanced an alternative way of thinking suffered a severe reproach, including ridicule from teachers.⁷⁴ People who desired to enter the priesthood also had little opportunity to receive the education they needed. In a country that once had thriving theological institutions, most of them had closed; only two ecclesiastical academies and three closely monitored seminaries remained, thus severely limiting the future theological capacity of the Russian priesthood. All these were consequences of the state’s commitment to extirpating religion.

The congressional subcommittees spent the remainder of the sessions hearing from other witnesses. They included Janis Smit, a Latvian Catholic priest who had recently emigrated because, he said, “the Soviet government prohibited his pastoral activities,” and David D. Klassen, whom the Soviet police had arrested four times and confined for ten years in prison and psychiatric clinics. Both former Soviet citizens gave personal accounts of their struggles with the authorities. In Smit’s case, his troubles developed with the state’s control of the Union of Evangelical Christians and Baptists, which prevented the “restoration of Christian and Biblical normalcy in the life of the church.”⁷⁵ Like Smit, Klassen asked the US Congress to give moral support to the plight of religious believers in the Soviet Union. Although they did not refer directly to Yakunin and Regel′son’s appeal, their testimony confirmed the charges of state persecution that Yakunin and Regel′son had made. Smit and Klassen made passionate appeals for the help of the United States government, claiming that such assistance offered the only hope for them and other Soviet citizens who suffered for their religious beliefs.

The statements of all the spokespeople the subcommittees summoned invited questions about how the United States should best respond as well as about the long-term health of the Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union. First, did the United States or any other country have the right to interfere in the internal jurisdiction of the USSR? Professor Bociurkiw argued that they had earned this right when the USSR abrogated the international agreements it had signed. Certain moral issues such as human rights constituted universal and inalienable rights, to which the USSR had committed itself. Did these agreements, Bociurkiw asked, have one meaning for international public relations and another meaning for internal practices?⁷⁶ Second, did the development of détente require overlooking the violations of human rights and religious liberty? Members of the subcommittees agreed that these policies should be connected rather than perceived separately. Progress in détente with the Soviet Union needed to correspond to support for human rights and religious liberty, and the United States ought to demand their convergence.

Third, and perhaps most important, since the late 1920s Orthodox leaders had made many compromises, rationalizing their collaboration with government officials as necessary to preserve what they could of their faith. It had been said sarcastically that Orthodox clergy “hold no secrets from God and no secrets from Soviet authorities.”⁷⁷ Therefore, they resorted to distortions of the truth, to “lying” to their flock, they maintained, “for Christ’s sake.”⁷⁸ What consequences did these compromises have for the well-being of the church as an institution? As Professor Bociurkiw said in his report, the distortions undermined trust in the official church, and when people saw what they did or the profligate lifestyles of members of the church hierarchy, they lost faith in one of the church’s most important attributes—its integrity.⁷⁹ He reiterated the argument Yakunin and Regel′son had made in their letter to Dr. Potter on March 6, 1976: “It is not surprising that, seeing the apparent helplessness of Christianity in the face of the militant and advancing spirit of violence and falsehood, many Christians are saying even now: ‘Who is like unto the beast? and who is able to make war with him? (Rev. 13:4).’ ”⁸⁰ Falsehood had weakened the church’s capacity to defend itself against state persecution. By distorting truth, church officials had undermined their moral authority.

Members of the congressional subcommittees knew that they had little power to affect change. Yet they vowed to maximize their concerns about the difficulties of religious believers in the Soviet Union.⁸¹ They pledged support for Voice of America and Radio Liberty, radio outlets that the two former Soviet prisoners said were extremely important as news sources of inspiration to many Soviet citizens. The subcommittees’ members also learned that congressional interest in religious believers provided encouragement to people who suffered from state persecution.⁸² The members voiced agreement with the resolution that called for the release of Georgi Vins from prison.⁸³ The hearings brought greater recognition of the predicament of religious believers in the USSR, and they exposed the moral challenges that violations of international laws entailed.

Although neither Fr. Gleb Yakunin nor Lev Regel′son were physically present at the congressional hearings or at the WCC Assembly in Nairobi, they closely followed the proceedings of both. They saw even more clearly than ever the importance of information about specific cases of state abuses and violations of the laws. Yakunin knew well that, in pursuit of his goals, he confronted a powerful political machine whose own use of the media presented a major structural obstacle. How to bring to light concrete evidence of violations of freedom of conscience and to give them wider publicity became daunting tasks. Most important, the WCC meetings and US congressional hearings brought home to him an issue that needed much more attention: the conflict between the laws and the religious-political ideology of the state, laws that served not as a cover for government oppression, but as instruments for moral authority and social justice. In Fr. Gleb’s case, the confrontation between these indomitable forces would become the central focus of his life.