CHAPTER 9 Lifting the Cover
In the 1990s, Fr. Gleb Yakunin was not unique in believing that moral and religious issues lay at the center of Russia’s future identity. The initial step to recovering the church’s true purpose required exposing the lies and betrayals that had corrupted it in the past. In this effort, Fr. Gleb offered strong support, and was joined by another powerful voice, an outspoken critic of the church’s behavior with an equally courageous personality, Zoia Krakhmal′nikova. Although the two were never close friends, they expressed similar views about the course the church ought to take.
Someone looking at her portrait when she was a young woman would not have imagined Zoia Aleksandrovna Krakhmal′nikova (1929–2008), with her shoulder-length black hair, brilliant smile, and friendly face, to be a rebel. Born and raised in Ukraine, she fell in love with Russian and Ukrainian literature at a young age and hoped to become a writer. She matriculated at the prestigious Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow, where she earned high marks, before going on to postgraduate study. Afterward, Krakhmal′nikova entered the profession to which she had long aspired, the career of a writer. She became a member of the Union of Soviet Writers, acquiring the necessary credentials for publication in the leading literary journals, to which she successfully sent her articles. In 1971, three years after her graduation, she married another writer, Feliks Svetov, who had followed a similar career path. The two of them settled into a secure and promising family life in Moscow, where she, in particular, acquired a reputation as a talented author of articles, books, and translations and earned an appointment in the Academy of Sciences Department of Philosophy.1
Krakhmal′nikova was restless, however, and not completely satisfied with her life and the ambitious direction she had taken. Although somewhat older than members of the young Soviet generation that had begun to question Soviet ideology and to search for meaningful alternative worldviews, she and Svetov had similar yearnings. In 1974, they accepted Christianity, a decision that led to her dismissal from the writers’ union, expulsion from the Academy of Sciences, and a ban on her publications in government journals.
These setbacks nevertheless did not mean the end of her writing life. In 1976, Krakhmal′nikova resurrected the prerevolutionary journal Nadezhda (Hope), whose subtitle she inscribed as “Christian Reading.” The journal, which she published in samizdat, carried articles on church history, the writings of the Church Fathers, and pastoral thoughts, stories, and poems. Rather than publish the journal anonymously, she signed her name to every issue. On August 4, 1982, Krakhmal′nikova was arrested and charged with anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. After spending a year in the Lefortovo Prison, she was tried and sentenced to five years of exile in a village near the border of Mongolia. In 1987, during the Gorbachev era, the authorities offered her clemency.2
Upon her return to Moscow, Krakhmal′nikova resumed her publishing life. Like Yakunin, she strongly believed that the moral underpinnings of a new society required a truthful look into the history of the church in the twentieth century. Like him, she decried the church’s silence during the decades when the party persecuted large numbers of religious believers, and she believed that healing could not take place until the reasons behind the church’s silence were uncovered. Not everyone in the leadership of the church welcomed this call for a truthful look into the past, in fear, she wrote, “that such an act will uncover both the abyss and the depths of horror, the moral degradation, criminality, predatory behavior, and corruption, which are hidden under the mask of piety.”3
Deeply religious, unafraid of state reprisals, and democratic at heart, Krakhmal′nikova joined Yakunin in his distaste for hypocrisy (figure 9.1). She did not accept the excuse of church leaders that they could not speak out because they remained “captives of the state,” an excuse that Yakunin had decried for many years. Krakhmal′nikova exposed the hypocrisy of the patriarch’s excuse even more graphically:
As I was taking my first steps towards the church, I often heard in response to my questions about the silence of the more experienced and more “deep rooted” of the church people and the Patriarch and bishops: “They are held in captivity.” Not once, however, did I see handcuffs on Patriarch Pimen, not once did I see a convoy accompanying the patriarch or the bishops, not once did I see him emerging from a “paddy wagon,” but with amazement I observed how they blessed the crowds, who bowed before the wheels of a black “Chaika” or “ZIL-111” in which our church hierarchs rode around in comfort.4
FIGURE 9.1. Fr. Georgii Edel′stein and Zoia Krakhmal′nikova, 1990s. Courtesy of the Keston Center for Religion, Politics, and Society, Baylor University.
The chance to delve more deeply into the darkest corners of Soviet history would soon become a reality. During the heady August days of 1991, when the old guard of the Communist Party and the KGB attempted to overthrow the Gorbachev government and regain authority, Fr. Gleb played an active part in helping to diffuse the power of the opposition movement. After narrowly escaping arrest by the KGB, he was one of a handful of Orthodox parish priests who came to the defense of the newly elected Yeltsin government. Dressed in his priestly regalia, he stood in the road before an oncoming column of tanks that threatened to disperse the crowd defending the White House, home of the Russian Parliament.5 Standing on the balcony of the White House, he addressed the crowd, urging them to defend Russian democracy. “Take courage and fulfill your duty as citizens,” he told them, “God will help you and will help Russia.”6 He had confidence that the young soldiers commanding the tanks and members of the militia gathered around the crowd would hear the ancient call of the church; walking among the barricades defending the massive building, Fr. Gleb offered blessings to scores of people. He fearlessly championed the promise of a new beginning for the Russian government and the Orthodox Church.
After the failed August coup attempt, Yeltsin’s government abolished Directorate “Z” of the KGB, the unit charged with watching over domestic political developments. Soon to be known as the Fifth Department of the KGB, it had closely monitored Russian dissidents and others suspected of disagreeing with state policies and failing to comply with the party’s goals. On August 24, 1991, only a few days after the failed coup, Yeltsin issued a series of presidential decrees that required the transfer of KGB archives and those of the Communist Party to the Russian government.7 The Supreme Soviet of the Russian Republic thus took control of both archives. Although not all of these valuable documents were turned over, on grounds that they contained classified operational intelligence, they became more accessible to researchers than at any time in the Soviet period.8 They opened up a whole panoply of formerly closed resources that the KGB and the Communist Party had considered off limits to outsiders.
Following the abolition of Directorate “Z,” President Yeltsin formed a commission to investigate the leaders of the coup and the KGB’s involvement in planning and executing the attempted coup, naming Lev Aleksandrovich Ponomarov as head of the commission. A brilliant physicist and mathematician, the slender, black-haired, dignified Ponomarev had taken the place of Andrei Sakharov in the Congress of People’s Deputies after Sakharov’s death in 1989, and the following year, Ponomarev easily won the seat on his own account. He was a founding member of Democratic Russia, a loosely bound group of people who assisted in the transformation from Soviet rule to a more open and democratic society.9 In turn, Ponomarev selected three people to investigate a special section of the archives, Directorate “Z’s” Fourth Department, which dealt with the Orthodox Church and other religious organizations. The investigators included two Orthodox priests, Fr. Gleb Yakunin and Fr. Viacheslav Polosin, the latter to serve as chair.
Fr. Polosin (1956–) graduated from the philosophy department at Moscow State University before going to work for the Orthodox Church and, shortly afterward, he graduated from the Moscow Theological Seminary. After his ordination as a priest in 1983, Fr. Polosin served first in Orthodox parishes in Central Asia, before the Soviet authorities deported him for his alleged lack of proper respect for government officials and his refusal to comply with state orders. He returned to active service in June 1988, during the church millennium, and was appointed to a newly opened, crumbling church in the Kaluga region. In 1990, Polosin participated in the founding of the Russian Christian Democratic Movement, became interested in politics, and ran successfully for election to the Congress of People’s Deputies. A strong supporter of Boris Yeltsin, he served on the president’s inauguration committee.10
The third person appointed to the parliamentary commission was Aleksandr Iosifovich Nezhnyi, a young journalist and author whose articles in the late Soviet period were among the first to present the church in a positive light, and quickly attracted a large readership. A strong proponent of freedom of conscience, Nezhnyi severely criticized the Bolshevik’s persecution of religious believers, which he described in detail in his writings. Nezhnyi was the only member of the commission who did not serve in the Congress of People’s Deputies, but in selecting him, Ponomarev appointed a talented writer who was certain to present the investigation into the archives in a sympathetic way.11
When the long-closed files of the KGB were opened, it gave members of the parliamentary commission the chance to peer into a world of personal networks connecting the KGB and the church. The files contained materials on church agents of the KGB, how these agents were used to gather foreign intelligence, KGB efforts to manipulate public opinion, and how the state sought to control thought. The archives, therefore, offered a look into not only history but also the shaping of the political framework in which the church and other religious organizations functioned.12
As he began his work, Yakunin knew that admittance into the KGB archives represented a rare opportunity. Not knowing how long this privilege would last before political interests forced their closure, he worked tirelessly. Here was the chance to reveal, with concrete evidence, one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Soviet period, the collaboration between the church and an agency determined to destroy it. Nevertheless, he faced several immediate difficulties. He quickly learned that the files were in near total disarray. Documents were misfiled, some were incorrectly labeled, others were missing. Uncovering the stories concealed in the archives would require time and prodigious effort, but Yakunin was determined. He refused to let the obstacles he confronted deflect from his main purpose, which was to find and document the networks that had inflicted such pain on religious believers.13
Before his dismissal in 1989 from his post as chair of the Soviet Council for Religious Affairs, Konstantin Kharchev admitted the KGB’s complicity in the affairs of the Orthodox Church.14 Yet the scope and depth of the organization’s influence—which Yakunin and his commission members discovered in the archives—touched on some of the most sensitive issues before the investigative body. These issues concerned how much the public should be told about the church leaders who had betrayed their sacred oaths. Would full disclosure irrevocably tarnish a key institution, a pillar of social stability, at a time when the new political order was only in its infancy? After more than seventy years of severe persecution by the Soviet state, could the church endure another crippling blow to its legitimacy, particularly at a time when it had only begun to recover its status?
Such questions set off a lively debate, both in certain parts of the church and among other members of Russian society. Shortly after the investigative commission began its work, some of its findings were leaked to the Russian press. In February 1992, the journal Stolitsa held a roundtable discussion in its editorial office to debate the conundrums associated with publishing this information. The participants included two prominent representatives of the Moscow patriarchy, several church dissidents, a few laypeople, and the journalist Aleksandr Nezhnyi. In the discussions, the representatives of the Moscow patriarchy urged the parliamentary commission to move forward but to exercise extreme caution: “We have a matter that is unique and also tragic before us,” they said. “In the history of the Christian Church, it is not easy to find an example when a similar fall from grace is so fully revealed, and the ulcers are exposed. Therefore, it is necessary to exercise restraint and very soberly approach the phenomena that are now becoming public. They are tragic for the people and for the church itself; it is necessary that we understand the extremely complex situation this is for the servitors of the church. Not all of them, we think, became collaborators with the KGB.”15
From the outset of the commission’s work, Ruslan Khasbulatov, the chair of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, faced intense pressure from conservative and nationalist groups, both within the Parliament and in society, to curtail or at least limit the commission’s investigations. He especially worried about the public release of the findings, particularly how they might place an irremediable stain on the Orthodox Church’s reputation. Never comfortable with the probe into the KGB archives, Khasbulatov, in February 1992, terminated the parliamentary commission’s access. His decision to end the investigation took place shortly after Patriarch Aleksii II came to see him, and in a closed-door meeting attended by the patriarch and Evgenii Primakov, head of the state intelligence service, Khasbulatov acted.16 Despite the curtailment of their work after only four months, however, the commission members had succeeded in uncovering many KGB transgressions into the life of the church that they had long suspected and could now prove.
Public Disclosure (and Its Dilemmas)
Shortly before the closure of the archives, Viacheslav Polosin published an article in the newspaper Izvestiia that provided an introductory account of the revelations that would soon follow. Speaking about his experiences on the investigating commission, he said he had discovered that the KGB’s involvement in church affairs extended far beyond what he had imagined. Earlier, in 1991, he noted, he had found a letter written by Vladimir Lenin, soon after the Bolsheviks’ accession to power, about the party’s plans for infiltrating the church. Fr. Viacheslav had uncovered Lenin’s document in the files of the KGB, and it revealed the Bolsheviks’ long-term strategy: “An honest priest is a thousand times more harmful than an immoral one, because his [wrongdoing] is a thousand times more difficult to expose,” Lenin wrote, near the beginning of the campaign to suppress religion in Russia.17 He followed up this statement with another, written in 1921, near the end of the Russian Civil War, instructing the security police (Cheka) to recruit church leaders for jobs in the new administration. He recommended that the police employ bribes, threats, and other inducements in order to identify people of weak character and exploit them for political purposes. The goal, Lenin wrote, was to convert the church leaders into “eternal slaves of the Cheka.”18 Seventy years had passed, Fr. Viacheslav noted, yet the police still employed the same methods in their efforts to compromise the leadership of the Russian church and ensure their compliance with the policies of the Soviet state:
It would seem that the document is seventy years in the past. But it remains, to this day, the key to understanding the essence of the secret services’ contributions to ideological security. Over all these years, the security police’s methods have not changed, except that they have become more sophisticated. Over time, the selection of believers has become more sophisticated and resulted in the practice of sending agents to infiltrate religious organizations in order to recruit members.… In the end, the state must admit before millions of our believers that it had become an instrument of a misanthropic force which, introducing the fourth dream of Vera Pavlova, plotted to transform a free person into an “eternal slave.”19
In recent decades, this ideological dream, Polosin wrote, had weakened among the Soviet people. The state had attempted to replenish it by employing “agents in cassocks,” the term he used to describe members of the church hierarchy who worked for the police. Had the time not come, he asked, for the secular state to provide a legal foundation for the establishment of religious tolerance that prevented the state from interfering in the affairs of “any religious confession, without exception?”20
The motivations underlying Yakunin’s fervent labors in the archives remain a matter of conjecture. Revenge served as a possible explanation. By temperament and character, however, Yakunin, rarely, if ever, sought retaliation against those who caused him suffering; he was more likely to forgive than to look for retribution. “My father never viewed individuals as enemies, even people who offended or harmed him” recalled Mariia Glebovna, his daughter, “their actions, in his view, were dictated by the circumstances in which they found themselves.”21 A much stronger causal factor had its origins in his religious convictions. He believed that the church had to cleanse itself before it could begin to heal. The church’s collusion with the KGB had to be clearly defined and factually proved as the most appropriate means of identifying the people who, in the present, continued to work with the security services.
Yet in the process of discovery, several major problems emerged. Before its dissolution in 1991, the Council for Religious Affairs had destroyed some of the documents in the archive. Yakunin was not able to find the red books of the KGB, which specifically identified the real names of the church officials who collaborated with the security police.
Despite the absence of missing documents, Yakunin learned that the KGB issued code names for its church collaborators, and, in addition, had given code names to individuals the agency deemed especially dangerous to the party’s goals. In his first interview after his participation in the fact-finding commission, in early January 1992, Yakunin revealed the code names of church leaders who regularly reported to the KGB.22 In reports to their superiors, KGB officers identified their sources only by these names, never by their church appellations, in this way concealing the identities of their collaborators. In an interview, Yakunin disclosed the code names most prominently featured in the reports: “Adamat,” “Abbot,” and “Antonov” commonly appeared. Other names from farther down in the church hierarchy also came to light, but, crucially, these three names featured in reports describing international trips.
The indication that these collaborators had traveled abroad offered the principal clue to the identity of these church leaders. Comparing their code names with mention of their international trips and other activities published in the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, Aleksandr Nezhnyi discovered the identities of the people behind the masks. In the popular magazine Ogonek, he published their real names. “Adamat” referred to Metropolitan Yuvenalii of Krutisk and Kolomna, the prominent former chair of the Department for External Church Relations; “Abbot” signified Metropolitan Pitirim of Volokolamsk and Iurev, chair of the publishing department of the Moscow Patriarchate; and “Antonov” was Metropolitan Filaret of Kyiv and Exarch of Ukraine.23 “This was one and the same person,” Nezhnyi wrote, “but with two faces, a double and a shapeshifter.”24 They were among the most influential figures in the church leadership: each served as members of the Holy Synod, the powerful governing body of the Russian Orthodox Church.
In their research into the KGB archives, Yakunin and his colleagues discovered additional code names, among them an agent the KGB referred to as “Drozdov,” whose identity, at first, remained a mystery.25 Shockingly, they learned that it represented the newly elected patriarch Aleksii II (Aleksii Mikhailovich Ridiger, 1929–2008). The selection of his code name was not accidental: at the Theological Academy in Leningrad, Aleksii had elected to write his thesis on the famous metropolitan of Moscow Filaret Drozdov. Ordained as priest in his native Estonia, Aleksii had risen rapidly in the church hierarchy, from his graduation from the Leningrad Theological Academy in 1953 to his appointment as metropolitan of Tallinn and Estonia in 1968, at the comparatively young age of thirty-nine.
Such a rapid rise required KGB approval, thereby creating the potential for compromise through association. Some church officials, however, expressed doubt about the future patriarch’s complicity, even after his exposure, rationalizing that perhaps an overly zealous agent padded his monthly reports by writing in the metropolitan’s name.26 Although much of the proof appeared circumstantial, the weight of the evidence suggests efforts to collaborate with the security police. For example, in an extremely sensitive case in March 1983, Agent “Drozdov” was sent to quell a disturbance in the Leningrad region. A KGB official reported the following to his superior:
In December of last year, a group of monks from the Pskov Caves Monastery expressed their disagreement with regulations in the monastery and complained to Patriarch Pimen about the superior of the Pskov Caves Monastery.
By actions of agents “Drozdov” and “Skala,” educational work was conducted among the monks of the Pskov Caves Monastery.
As a result of the agents’ recommendations, the monks who initiated the disturbances were transferred to other parishes in the Pskov diocese (4 persons), 2 individuals were left in the monastery, and 4 persons were dismissed from the Pskov diocese.
At the present time, the situation has returned to normal.
[signed by] Comrade Zotov27
To cite another example: in 1988, upon the initiative of its chair, Viktor Chebrikov, the KGB presented an honorary citation to Agent “Drozdov” for his meritorious service.28 The Russian investigative reporter Yevgenia Albats, author of the most authoritative study of the KGB’s collusion with the church, noted that the KGB’s award to Agent “Drozdov” (Metropolitan Aleksii) signified services that went much beyond the act of “pacifying monks.”29 As the Russian public learned, many more revelations would soon come to the surface.
Major Targets
Fr. Gleb Yakunin and his colleagues’ archival research uncovered a mass of information concerning the KGB’s efforts to control and manipulate all levers of thought within the body of the church. As the country approached the 1988 millennium celebrations, KGB anxieties about what it perceived as “anti-Soviet” centers of opposition intensified. In early 1984, an agent’s report read: “An analytical report has been prepared on the situation in the monasteries of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) with suggestions for activating agent-operational work among the monks.”30 In the same month, “Material has been prepared for publication in the bulletin of the 5th Directorate on inadequacies in the matter of counter-intelligence security of the religious schools of the ROC.”31 The growing interest in religion among the population and the rapid weakening of Soviet ideology heightened the KGB’s concerns.
In the KGB files, Yakunin discovered his own name and those of two others cited as potential threats to the social and religious order of the Soviet Union. The two whose actions the KGB closely monitored, in addition to Yakunin, included the layman Aleksandr Ogorodnikov and Yakunin’s friend Fr. Aleksandr Men. They were also given code names and labeled as subjects to be watched closely.
The KGB referred to Ogorodnikov by the code name of “Aptekar.” In April 1987, he had returned to Moscow from prison, and later that year, married a theater and art critic, Paulina Bogdanova. They had an infant child, born in May 1988, at a time when Ogorodnikov had already resumed his energetic past activities, reaching out to critics of the Soviet government, holding frequent meetings in his apartment with Western correspondents, and, at every opportunity, testifying to widespread religious persecution in the USSR. His behavior did not comport well with government officials, particularly in the beginning weeks of the millennium celebrations, when large numbers of foreign journalists and religious leaders visited Moscow. The KGB moved against Ogorodnikov in the summer of 1988 when he left Moscow to visit Lithuania. Rather than strike him directly, the KGB sought to disrupt his family by putting enormous pressure on his wife and threatening to take away their newborn son unless she left her husband. When Ogorodnikov returned from his trip, he learned that Bogdanova had filed for divorce and locked him out of the apartment, leaving him without a residence permit in the city.32
The KGB called Fr. Aleksandr Men by the apt name of “Missionary.” Troubled by the large crowds that gathered for the services and Men’s growing reputation as a powerful public speaker during perestroika, the security police tightened their surveillance of his activities. They were especially concerned about the discussion circles for young families that Men had begun organizing in Moscow in 1979. As a KGB agent reported in January 1986, the agent had initiated “the process of checking on the illegal gatherings of youth in a private flat in Moscow. The persons taking part in these gatherings have been identified. They included M. V. N., K. A. V., M. L. D., as well as T. I. Sh., who is the link with the object ‘Missionary.’ The persons listed above have come under study.”33
No evidence indicates that Fr. Aleksandr ever collaborated with the KGB. Yet some of the people who came to his church were controversial and did not always behave with proper decorum, which further attracted the attention of the security police. Fr. Aleksandr repeatedly had to answer for them, as well as for his own activities. In 1986, according to a KGB report, “The agent ‘Nikitin’ traveled to see ‘Missionary’ in the Zagorsk district, where he concluded a series of conversations with him.”34 The report was signed by Colonel Vladimir Sychev of the KGB’s 4th Department. Colonel Sychev supervised the surveillance of Fr. Aleksandr and played a leading role in developing a case against him, purporting to depict him as a person disloyal to the Soviet state.35
Yakunin had never doubted the security police’s hatred of him as well. And now, in researching the KGB files, he saw it well documented. In January 1977, an agent of the 4th Department spoke with pride about the success in “continuing to break up a group of reactionary-minded churchmen (Yakunin, Fr. Dmitrii Dudko, and a layperson [Lev] Regel′son) and their hostile activity against the church and the state.”36
More recently, in June 1987, the security services had attempted to dissipate the international support Yakunin had garnered during his years in prison and Siberian exile. The KGB began an “operation” to portray him as a radical and religious fanatic whose religious and social views had little popular support. A report submitted by Agent V. N. Timoshevskii to his superiors described a KGB counterattack on Yakunin and his desire for a more open Russian society:
We aim to establish a campaign with the foreign media to transmit information about the religious extremist Yakunin and like-minded people in Moscow, whose “appeals” to the authorities demand the liberalization of religious life in the Soviet Union. We held a press conference for Soviet and foreign correspondents, with the cooperation of Metropolitans Yuvenalii and Filaret. These priests of the Russian Orthodox Church objectively enlightened the correspondents about the real situation of the church and freedom of conscience in the USSR.37
Speaking of Yakunin and his “liberal” friends, the secret police sought to break up the circle of “extremists” who recklessly aspired to undermine the country. Rather than seek their imprisonment, this time the KGB endeavored to isolate them by ordering the Council for Religious Affairs to reassign one of the most outspoken members of Yakunin’s group to a rural parish in the distant Kostroma region of Russia.38 The KGB files also revealed that the one of the tasks of the journal Slovo, which began publication in the summer of 1988, was to publish articles aimed at “unmasking the anti-social character of the activity of the priest Yakunin.”39
As Yakunin and the other members of the parliamentary commission learned about the targets of the KGB’s domestic agenda, they also uncovered the agency’s international objectives. They discovered that the domestic and international spheres of operations were interconnected. A special focus of KGB attention concerned the World Council of Churches (WCC), in whose international gatherings the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church had actively participated. The archives revealed that all the official members of the Russian delegation to these meetings had KGB connections.
The Soviet delegates to the WCC had several major objectives, uppermost of which was to present a positive image of the Soviet Union and to shape the topics at the top of the WCC’s agenda. Metropolitans Nikodim, Filaret, and Yuvenalii, three of the most prominent and active Soviet representatives at the WCC’s international meetings, repeatedly attempted to keep the focus of the organization on nuclear disarmament, racism in the United States, and world peace, and away from questions of religion and freedom of conscience. Yakunin had personally witnessed such efforts in 1975 in the Soviet delegation’s response to his and Lev Regel′son’s letter to the WCC on religious persecution in the USSR.
In addition, members of the Orthodox delegation had the task of assessing the personal nature of WCC leaders. A KGB report from January 1973 proudly asserted the success of one of its operations: “Agents of the KGB ‘Magistr’ and ‘Mikhailov’ were sent to Thailand and India to participate in the work of the WCC. The agents had a positive influence on the work of the Council, offered information of operational interest to the WCC, and also collected information on the personal character of individual figures.”40
Moreover, the agency played a key role in planning conferences hosted by the patriarchate in Moscow, whose main purpose was to present a positive image of religious tolerance in the Soviet Union.41 A prime example concerned the carefully orchestrated visit to Moscow of the general secretary of the WCC, Dr. Philip Potter. The West Indies-born Potter served as head of the WCC during some of its most turbulent years, from 1972 to 1984, and cultivating his friendship became a goal of the security police. In February 1973, upon receiving an invitation from Patriarch Pimen, General Secretary Potter traveled to Moscow as a guest. The entry in the KGB’s ledger recorded the results: “Agents ‘Sviatoslav,’ ‘Adamat,’ ‘Mikhailov,’ and ‘Ostrovskii’ exerted a favorable influence on him.” They also “obtained information about the activity of the World Council of Churches, which has operational interest.”42
Moral Regeneration?
In his poetry and public statements, Fr. Gleb Yakunin had repeatedly emphasized the importance of Russia’s moral regeneration to his country’s ultimate spiritual and cultural revival. Like Zoia Krakhmal′nikova, Aleksandr Men, and others, he strongly believed in the importance of recovering the revelatory voices and human values that served as spiritual guides to that effort.43 The revelations from the KGB archives, however, suggested both the importance and the difficulty of this task, especially when leading members of the church hierarchy had been deeply engulfed in corrupting the church’s sacred mission. Most of the individuals mentioned earlier, with the possible exception of Patriarch Aleksii II, served as examples of this inner corruption. Yet the question remained of how far down within the structures of the church such corruption had penetrated and what the political consequences of this duplicity were.
The archival revelations especially brought to light the egregious behavior of the powerful Filaret, metropolitan of Kyiv and Ukraine. One of the most intelligent and ambitious members of the church hierarchy, Metropolitan Filaret (Mikhail Antonovich Denisenko), in 1990, was considered a leading candidate to replace the deceased Patriarch Pimen. Born in 1929 to parents who lived in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, he committed his life to the church at an early age and he had an impressive church career. He graduated from the seminary in Odesa and then the Moscow Theological Academy and had risen extraordinarily fast within the church, becoming a bishop at the age of thirty-three and head of the entire diocese of Kiev and Ukraine at the age of thirty-seven.44 The KGB files that Yakunin and his colleagues accessed revealed that Metropolitan Filaret had served as a trusted representative of the church at international conferences as early as 1967. He had already become a KGB informant by then, whose code name, “Antonov,” repeatedly appeared in reports of these conferences.45
In late 1991, in a scathing two-part article published in Ogonek, Aleksandr Nezhnyi wrote an exposé on Metropolitan Filaret.46 In Ukraine, he wrote, the powerful Filaret oversaw the jurisdiction of his diocese with a stern, uncompromising hand that brooked little dissension.47 Yet in his personal life, Metropolitan Filaret displayed a much different standard of behavior, which Nezhnyi uncovered in numerous letters that provided a detailed picture of corruption and hypocrisy. “The family life of the metropolitan long ago had ceased being a secret,” read one letter to the Moscow Patriarchate.48 In violation of the church’s canon law, he lived with his housekeeper, an uneducated common woman named Evgeniia Petrovna Ronionova, who bore him three children, all out of wedlock. Evgeniia Petrovna dominated the household, and, in violation of canon law, extended her authority beyond the family to the diocese. “She often participated in the selection of church personnel, intervened in the ordination of priests,” and decided which letters that arrived at the metropolitan’s office reached his hands.49 On the streets of Kiev, people often greeted her as “Your Holiness [blazhenstvo], Evgeniia Petrovna.”50 She lived in luxury, which she also bestowed on her three children.
In his account of the metropolitan and his household, Nezhnyi, sympathetic to the church, had no reason to belittle its leaders. In this case, however, the realities, drawn from archival materials, were at variance with the ideals Nezhnyi harbored in his mind. In 1992, he returned to his theme, expressing surprise that his earlier exposé of Metropolitan Filaret had elicited little response. Nezhnyi had expected to see Filaret either quietly retire from his position or face canonical action from his superiors; yet he remained in his position while Evgeniia Petrovna carried on as before. Nezhnyi learned that the metropolitan had excommunicated three monks who had testified about corruption in his administration and prohibited discordant priests from taking communion.51 After the earlier articles had come out, Metropolitan Filaret and his mistress hosted a large banquet, the journalist learned, at which she had railed against and threatened the “slanderers” of His Holiness.52
Nezhnyi found the duplicity of Metropolitan Filaret to be the most disturbing aspect of his behavior. The metropolitan’s relationship with the KGB compromised the integrity of the church, a theme to which the journalist returned at the end of his 1992 article, writing sarcastically: “When his Holiness was born his parents named him Mikhail; when he became a monk, he was given the name Filaret; the KGB gave him a third name. I propose that believers from now on call His Holiness, ‘Comrade Antonov.’ ”53
Focused on the difficult tasks of rebuilding the church and proud of their newfound status after the end of Soviet power, the church hierarchy had little desire to see further revelations of complicity with the KGB. Several months after the closure of the KGB archives to further embarrassing investigations, church leaders thought their situation had stabilized and that the crisis had blown over. But on April 24, 1992, came what Russian historian Sergei Bychkov called “a clap of thunder in a clear sky.”54 The cause was an interview given by Archbishop of Vilnius and Lithuania, Khrizostom (Martishkin) to the journalist Mikhail Pozdniaev, which was published in the newspaper Russkaia mysl′. Titled “I Was an Agent of the KGB, but I Was Not an Informer” (Ia byl agentom KGB, no ne byl stukachem), the archbishop’s interview offered a stunning account, coming from one of the most respected leaders in the Russian Orthodox Church.55
The interview took place shortly after a meeting of the Archbishops’ Council on the situation unfolding in Ukraine. Ukrainian leaders wanted political separation from Russia, and they pressed for the independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church as well. Because of this major development, the council relegated the topic of complicity with the KGB to a committee for study. The lack of concern troubled Archbishop Khrizostom, who voiced his displeasure before the council in the following words: “Among us, and especially among our priests, there are a great many unworthy, amoral people. Their amorality benefits by the absence of a church court, a situation that the KGB has used. The KGB has protected them from us, in order that we could not punish them, as the canons of the church required.”56
In his interview, Archbishop Khrizostom said that the KGB had given him a pseudonym, the code name of “Restorer.” Using his code name, he conscientiously carried out his assignments, trying simultaneously to pursue his commitments to the church while fulfilling what the KGB called his patriotic responsibilities. He observed, however, firsthand, how some church servitors abused their positions, which he tried to point out in making his required reports, but to little avail. He had little hesitation about voicing evidence of these abuses:
If I spoke badly about anyone in my reports, it was about the enemies of the church, about KGB agents embedded in the Body of the church. I knew all of them, because they did not care who knew. They did not need to be calculated, but, by their deeds and actions, it was immediately clear which ones of them were real agents. That is why I always spoke badly about them in interviews with the KGB. I made these contacts when I was already a bishop—but we have real KGB people in the church who have made dazzling careers; Metropolitan Methodius of Voronezh is an example. He is a KGB officer, an atheist, a vicious person, imposed on the church by the gabeshniki [a slang term for KGB operatives]. The Synod is unanimously against such a bishop, but we were forced to take such sin on ourselves; and then, how he took off! He became a metropolitan, and, as chairperson of the Economics Department, for nearly ten years, he controlled millions in church funds. He never liked independent, honest priests, never protected them, and tried to drive them away.57
In a subsequent biographical statement, Archbishop Khrizostom recounted that he had served as a bishop for a decade, from 1974 to 1984. All this time, as the KGB pressured him, he worked as an agent. He provided details of what the agency ordered him to do, including writing accounts of international trips, encounters with foreign emissaries, activities of church organizations, and assessments of people who might serve as KGB contacts. Concurrently, on his own, and often to the displeasure of his superiors on the Council for Religious Affairs, he ordained many priests who had a higher education, including those of Jewish heritage, the latter in violation of state laws. They included the controversial priest Georgii Edel′stein. “He came to see me [and said] twenty-two bishops previously refused to ordain me, and you will likely do the same. He is Jewish by nationality, an intellectual, a man with a higher secular education, who, in the past, worked as a teacher.” His pathway to the priesthood was blocked. “I ordained him, and for the next five years I protected him; no one touched him. There were many such examples.”58
The archbishop’s lax policies and behavior often incurred the displeasure of the authorities, especially the members of the Council for Religious Affairs. Eventually, they sent him into exile to Irkutsk for the maximum term of five years. In 1989, he was released and sent to Lithuania. As archpriest, he declined to support Soviet efforts to suppress Lithuania’s move for independence. A year later, he said, “Precisely because of the Lithuanian question, I broke with the organs of the KGB.”59
Archbishop Khrizostom wanted to see the investigation into the KGB’s activities continued. Unconcerned about his own name in the files, he believed it essential that the council open the books and seek the truth; after receiving the information, the church should then study its collaboration with the KGB intently and fully. The church had to take on this responsibility because to remain silent, in his view, offered the worst possible outcome. Already, he said, “a frenzied campaign has developed around this issue, of course, with the goal of destroying the church. Who appears most outraged by the contacts between the Orthodox Church and the KGB? Yesterday’s atheists, yesterday’s KGB, who, using their authority, forced us to cooperate.”60 These longtime enemies of the church stood to benefit most should the church refuse to accept responsibility for cleansing itself. Archbishop Khrizostom implored his fellow members on the Archbishops’ Council to take seriously the forthcoming recommendations of the parliamentary commission. “We have no right to ignore this issue,” he said.61 Whether they would choose to accept his admonition remained an open question.
Separating the Wheat from the Chaff
Archbishop Khrizostom’s distinction between an agent of the KGB and an informer suggests that the church’s collaboration was more complex than many writers on this issue admitted. As an agent, the archbishop never fully cooperated with the police authorities, and he tried to manipulate his position to support people for whom the Council for Religious Affairs demonstrated little respect. His efforts at taking independent actions eventually led to the state’s disfavor. Given the intense pressure on bishops and priests, one has to assume that cooperation with the KGB took various forms that greatly depended on the character and values of individual bishops and priests as well as the situations they faced. Asked the share of priests who cooperated with the KGB, Fr. Georgii Edel′stein estimated it to be 100 percent.62 Asked the same question, Fr. Gleb Yakunin put the figure at 20 percent.63 These estimates, however, fail to reveal the depth and scope of complicity. Some of the clergy had little interest in politics and, under extremely difficult circumstances, quietly went about their responsibilities, serving their parishioners as efficiently as possible. They responded in diverse ways to state demands for reporting on individuals they baptized. No evidence exists, for example, that Frs. Aleksandr Men, Dmitrii Dudko, or Boris Talantov complied with the state’s requirements. At the grassroots level, the Orthodox Church was extremely diverse, as John Burgess has demonstrated for a later period, whether in church activities, political beliefs, or commitment to the state.64 Khrizostom (Martishkin), Archbishop of Vilnius and Lithuania, testified that the Voronezh parish had “independent, honest” priests, but Metropolitan Methodius “drove them out.”65
Others, however, bent with the wind, or, if personally ambitious and seeking advancement and privileges, succumbed to the pressures and personal advantages that came with working for the KGB.66 Such was the case of a major tormentor of Fr. Gleb Yakunin.
The revelations in this particular case suggest how the KGB held out the “spice cake” in recruiting agents and giving them certain targeted assignments. The mechanisms of control exerted by the security services were also divulged. These matters were addressed in an interview with a former KGB agent, Archpriest Aleksandr Shushpanov, published in February 1992 in the newspaper Argumenty i fakty. Readers may recall that Archpriest Shushpanov served as a main witness for the prosecution during the trial of Gleb Yakunin more than a decade prior, when he had accused Yakunin of being anti-Soviet. The interview is significant for two reasons: it provided concrete personal corroboration of the conclusions reached in the forthcoming parliamentary commission’s report, and it revealed the government’s strategy in the prosecution of Fr. Gleb.
Asked to recount his recruitment by the KGB, Archpriest Shushpanov described an unfortunate incident that befell him soon after his graduation from the theological seminary. For many years, he said, he had dreamed of working in the prestigious Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate. When, at last, he managed to land a job as a translator in the department, he described his overwhelming joy. Shortly after he began working in the department, an acquaintance approached him and requested help for a former dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky. Following his recent release from prison, when Bukovskii returned to Moscow penniless and seeking work, Shushpanov sympathized with Bukovskii’s plight and agreed to help. He gave Bukovskii several translations that the department had assigned Shushpanov to complete. He paid for this work out of his own pocket, after which he turned in the completed translations as his work. At first, he said, this arrangement went smoothly, but then, in his words, “everything fell apart: Somehow they [the KGB] tracked this down. Everything went according to script. They kicked me out of the Department for External Church Relations, and, for a half-year, I bounced around unemployed. Then, one fine day, they called me into KGB headquarters and offered to restore my position. In exchange, they told me, ‘You have to go to work for us.… Alas,” he lamented, “I did not allow the cup to pass me by.”67
The assignments the agency gave Shushpanov were also carefully planned. After enrolling him in a special course of study, KGB officers taught him how to do searches, make arrests, and conduct surveillance. Next, as a translator in the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, he had responsibility for accompanying foreign delegations on their visits to the USSR. His KGB supervisor required all the translators to “submit detailed reports about the visits and where we took foreigners, whether to a store or to the toilet.”68
Archpriest Shushpanov described an intricate, surreptitious network designed to conceal the work of the department in its relations with foreign delegations. He delivered his reports to a KGB officer who rented a room in the downtown Tsentral′naia hotel. For the “extra” services that went beyond his normal work in his department, he was well rewarded. “I regularly received a second paycheck and not for an insignificant amount,” he said. “The department manager personally delivered this additional payment to me, and I always signed by my code name ‘Aramis.’ ” Shushpanov followed the same process every time he accompanied a foreign delegation.69
As he progressed in his work, Shushpanov received an assignment that, he confessed, tormented him for years afterward. He did not speak of his performance in the trial of Fr. Gleb, but of certain activities preceding the trial in which he took part. Most likely, he considered everything part of the prosecution of Fr. Gleb. He described the attempted “unmasking” of Yakunin as follows:
I worked mainly spying on a well-known religious activist, the former religious dissident and priest Gleb Yakunin. I not only followed him, but also developed the conspiracy the security police planned to use against him. The KGB wanted to develop a case against Yakunin as a spy. It prepared an operation, the essence of which would be catching him delivering confidential information to the protestant chaplain at the American embassy in Moscow, Michael Spengler. During the contrived meeting between Yakunin and Spengler, the KGB planned to arrest him as a spy, and denounce Spengler and label him a persona non grata. Thank God, this operation—not without my help—collapsed.70
In his interview, Shushpanov did not divulge the circumstances that precipitated the failure of the plot. Perhaps, in advance, either Fr. Gleb or Rev. Spengler suspected the conspiracy and did not meet; Yakunin was well attuned to such efforts. In making his public confession, Shushpanov might have intended to exonerate himself by claiming that KGB officers forced his participation in the plot. Yet his testimony suggests sincere remorse for his complicity in acts aimed at severely hurting certain targeted people. Years later, his guilt in helping build the case against Yakunin continued to trouble him. Finally, he went to see Yakunin and “told him everything.” Shushpanov said that he asked Yakunin for forgiveness, and Fr. Gleb “forgave me.” Shushpanov hoped that “the Lord God will also forgive me.”71
Having gathered similar revelations and other materials, in March 1992, the parliamentary commission issued its final report. The account was written and signed by the commission’s chair, Lev Ponomarev, who also recommended ways to prevent such abuses of power in the future. The report claimed to be based on factual evidence without ideological biases. Given the disputatious political atmosphere of the 1990s, the commission’s conclusions were certain to be controversial.
Ponomarev highlighted several of the major findings that Yakunin, Polosin, and Nezhnyi’s investigation had uncovered about the KGB’s power over religious organizations:
- The agency exercised control over the church’s emissaries who travelled abroad, where they were expected to promote the peace-loving aspirations of the Soviet Union.
- Members of the clergy had the responsibility to collect information about the chief actors at international meetings.
- By the recruitment of agents in leadership positions in the church and in other confessions and the appointments and transfers of priests throughout the country, the KGB directed the social views of the clergy.
- The KGB had the responsibility to prepare criminal prosecution of recalcitrant priests and believers. In 1982, for example, criminal courts had sentenced 229 clergy and sectarians for punishment and sent eighteen others into exile. These same documents named more than 2,500 individuals considered as “hostile elements” among the Soviet population.72
The commission’s report, however, went further in analyzing the political and social conditions that had given rise to these practices, exploring the making of government policies toward the church, which had, from the outset a “duplicitous character”:
On the one hand, the government proclaimed freedom of conscience and, since 1918, issued legal acts designed to provide this freedom. They acknowledged the rights of believers to form religious associations and perform religious rites, within the limits of the laws. They granted freedom of religious activity to various confessions.… On the other hand, under the cover of democratic slogans and the declaration in the laws about the freedom of conscience, the government concealed another, much different, secret policy, aimed at the total subjugation of the life and activity of religious associations. In secret, the goal of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) aspired to eradicate religion by the use of administrative and forcible means.73
The report traced the processes through which these double-edged policies developed in the late 1920s and 1930s “within the bowels of the Central Committee of the CPSU, which issued laws and regulations aimed at harming the church, reducing its authority, and circumscribing its activities.”74 Throughout the next two decades, the 1940s and 1950s, the Central Committee served as the main “ ‘kitchen,’ which ‘cooked up’ all the state’s policies on religion.” But in the 1950s and continuing afterward, the primary agency that carried out these policies, working out in detail “everything concerning religion, was, indisputably, the KGB.”75 Because its agents worked close to the everyday life of citizens, it had the most complete information about the men and women who practiced religion. “The possession of information is power,” Ponomarev wrote, “and it is no wonder that the KGB functions as a ‘government within the government.’ ”76
Most important, the commission’s report attempted to expose the deleterious effects of the KGB not only on the church, but also on communal mentalities throughout the country. The system of control, organized and conducted by the KGB, created what Ponomarev called a “completely unique situation in the history of religion and the church. First, it deprived some of the most respected and revered ministers of worship from taking an active part in the life of the community, since they were always in danger of being transferred to peripheral regions of the country or forced to enter monasteries.” Second, those members of the clergy “most inclined to compromise, servility, or indifference to the fate of the church were assigned to positions of leadership,” where “they became obedient performers of the will and desires of this ‘secret police’ of the Central Committee of the CPSU.”77
At the time of the report’s writing, the commission had responsibility for looking toward the country’s future, seeking to construct a framework for a more dynamic and trustworthy system of governance. The report wanted the Supreme Soviet to put safeguards in place to prevent the abuses of power from recurring. To that end, the commission advocated the passage of legislation preventing members of religious organizations from participating in the operational activities of the security forces. It proposed that religious bodies include in their canonical laws a prohibition against secret collaboration with government organs. The Russian government, the commission emphasized, must ensure that all of its agencies comply with the principle of separation of church and state.
In addition to the violation of the Constitution and the laws of the Russian Federation. near the end of the report, Ponomarev emphasized an imminent danger that resulted from the “transformation of religious organizations into KGB agent centers.” During times of political instability, this transformation had the potential to institute anti-constitutional actions. This is precisely what happened, he said, on August 21, 1991, at the height of the attempted coup to overthrow the Russian government. The powerful Metropolitan Pitirim (Nechaev), one of the three senior bishops of the church and publisher of the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, paid a visit to one of the ringleaders of the coup, Boris Pugo, the Russian minister of internal affairs. The visit by such a high-ranking church official, “acting outside the law, in effect, proclaimed the state criminal Pugo, as the [incoming] President of Russia.” The commission considered it essential for the Supreme Soviet to pass legislation and ensure the separation of church and state to prevent such circumstances form ever recurring in the future of Russia.78
The revelations from the KGB archives and the commission’s report raised a whole series of controversial issues, none more important than the question of what the church was and what it should be. How should the church respond to the parliamentary commission’s investigations and discoveries? Additionally, what impact did they make on Russian society?
Some, like Deacon Andrei Kuraev of the Moscow Patriarchate, rejected the claim that the church had willfully betrayed its ideals.79 It had not become a state church, whose primary interest lay in pursuing power in a rapidly changing society.80 The church’s singular objective lay in advancing the spiritual well-being of the Russian people. Others, such as Fr. Viacheslav Polosin, argued that church leaders who were complicit in fostering evil acts should be held accountable under the guidance of Patriarch Aleksii II. The patriarch should seek to recover the church’s “symphonic” relationship to the government, giving its leaders moral counsel, serving as a partner in advancing the people’s welfare, and helping the government unify the Russian people.81
Fr. Gleb Yakunin, like Zoia Krakhmal′nikova, had reached the conclusion that the Russian Orthodox Church had to seek a new beginning. It needed to take an honest look at its history of compliance with an atheist state and separate the wheat from the chaff. He shared Krakhmal′nikova’s contention that the church, since 1927, had practiced a brand of “political Christianity,” by prioritizing servitude to the government over servitude to Christ.82 Like Krakhmal′nikova, Yakunin believed that the church required a clean break from the secular power, because only then could it free itself from the duplicity and falsehoods that stained the history of the Russian church in the twentieth century.
In the end, however, the Russian Orthodox Church refrained from probing too deeply into its collaboration with the KGB. Not only would such further study invite serious questions about the decisions the church had made but also it would implicate current leading members of the Holy Synod, the governing body of the Orthodox Church. These powerful interests had cause to stifle additional inquiry into their complicity in perpetuating an unjust and immoral system. Moreover, as Archbishop Khrizostom stated in his interview, the newly elected Patriarch Aleksii II faced intense pressure from factions within the church who limited his capacity to act according to his own desires.83 In addition, the revelations from the archives did not meet with the broad public outcry that Yakunin and others might have expected. By late 1992 and early 1993, the attention of the great majority of Russian citizens focused on immediate daily needs and the economic difficulties that the dissolution of the Soviet Union had precipitated.84 Many citizens had little inclination to blame church leaders since they regarded personal compromises as a common feature of Soviet life.85
Yakunin well knew that issues concerning Russia’s future hung in the balance at this point. To suppress the church’s collusion with the KGB would hinder its ability to make a clean break with the darker features of the Soviet past and obstruct one of the foundational pieces of a democratic society. In Yakunin’s view, the church’s independence from the state heightened its creative capacity, its ability to build social trust, and its potential to contribute to an open society that recognized the equality of all religious confessions, rather than fostering intolerance and violence. To the Russian sociologist of religion Sergei Filatov, these attributes were extremely important for his country’s future. What the church needed most was “democracy” and “new ways of thinking,” he said. The leadership of the church, however, “is made up of extremely conservative people, who are lacking in new ideas. The most interesting priests are beneath them, hidden from view, and reticent to speak out, but they are there, patiently doing their pastoral work.”86 In any other institution, the revelations from the KGB archive would have led to a shake-up at the top of the hierarchy, Filatov maintained, but the Russian Orthodox Church experienced no such upheaval and soon continued as though oblivious to the disclosures. Rather than responding to democratic forces developing from below, the inactions of church leaders, in general, contributed to authoritarianism in the church’s governing structures.87
Despite the church’s reluctance to confront the explosive revelations from KGB files, those revelations set in motion a chain of events that had long-term significance. In Ukraine, the disclosure of Metropolitan Filaret’s complicity strengthened the hand of the recently formed Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, a competitor of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.88 In addition, the Russian Church Abroad, headquartered in the United States, became extremely active in Russia, rapidly expanding its appeal. These circumstances would have a significant impact on the future course of Fr. Gleb Yakunin’s life.