CHAPTER 7 The Outcast
The sentencing of Fr. Gelb Yakunin did not go unnoticed either in the Soviet Union or in Western Europe. In response, two different narratives quickly developed. The first offered severe criticism of the court proceedings and underscored the values that Yakunin represented. The second aimed at defending the court’s decision and portraying him as an archvillain. The two narratives provided vastly dissimilar interpretations of Fr. Gleb’s activities and how their motivations should be perceived.
After the conclusion of Yakunin’s trial in late August 1980, as in the case of Tat′iana Velikanova, human rights organizations in the Soviet Union immediately protested what they viewed as a “judicial farce.” In Velikanova’s case, Elena Bonner, wife of the exiled dissident Andrei Sakharov, returned from visiting her husband in Gorky to take part in a public vigil outside the courtroom.1 On the day following Yakunin’s trial, on August 29, a petition signed by Sakharov and forty-six other supporters, titled “Who Is Guilty?” protested the court proceedings in the trials of Yakunin and Velikanova. The charge of “Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” causing the “weakening of Soviet power … through the dissemination of slanderous fabrications for the same purpose, are lies,” the petition read.2 The petitioners called out the injustice of the sentences in both trials. They spoke for the defendants, proclaiming the purity of their motives in emotional but decisive language, describing “two flawlessly honest people doomed to serve long terms in prison and exile, separated from their families, because they wrote the truth; the truth is objectionable to those who fear it, and truth is what those persecuted here stand for.”3
A similar defense of Fr. Gleb came from a Moscow monk who signed his name simply as the Orthodox monk Innokentii. Innokentii wrote as a severe critic of the legal processes that had taken place in Yakunin’s case. His paper, which he composed and distributed in samizdat soon after Yakunin’s trial ended, was titled “The Reprisal” (Rasprava). In it, he excoriated the state for holding Fr. Gleb for ten months in the Lefortovo Prison while the police undertook a so-called investigation of his activities. This turned out not to be an “investigation” at all, but an effort to subject him “to psychological pressure designed to break his will, spirit, and resistance, to destroy his personality, and, in this way, persuade him to make a public confession of self-condemnation and recantation.”4
Innokentii asserted his view that several claims made against Yakunin were false narratives concocted by the state. Like Sakharov, he disputed the charge that Yakunin had violated the laws and undermined the state’s legal order. Yakunin had spoken the truth, and for telling the truth, the Soviet government had prosecuted him. Further, in his support for the laws, Yakunin had conducted a struggle “not against the government, but against lawlessness, deceit, arbitrary power, and wanton violations of religious rights and freedom.”5 For these, the authorities considered him a dangerous criminal. To protect their own power, which the author identified with lawlessness, the governing authorities punished the person who called out their transgressions.6 Innokentii’s paper posited what he saw as the fundamental conflict between fantasy, wrapped up in an ideological distortion of social order, and harsh realities, evidenced by concrete facts.
Like the petition composed by Sakharov and his supporters, the monk Innokentii addressed a higher order of morality than the court proceedings had shown. Both documents emphasized the importance of truth to a flourishing civil society. Both defended the accused against the malicious falsehoods of those in power. Sakharov appealed to a “just order” embedded in laws and adherence to the truth. Innokentii, on the other hand, framed his argument in what he called the “rebirth and stabilization of humanity,” the standard, he maintained, found in Orthodox Christian morality.7 In the place of egoism, pride, deception, killing, and the love of power, this moral ideal had its foundation in “Christian freedom, charity, and love.”8 It was the moral ideal, he argued, that Yakunin had fought to preserve.
Both Sakharov’s petition and Innokentii’s “Reprisal” created a strong narrative in defense of Fr. Gleb Yakunin. Condemning the legal processes that had condemned Fr. Gleb, they found the harsh sentences levied against Yakunin and Velikanova unjust. “Their relatives, their friends, and all those who value the honor of our Motherland are proud of them and will always be proud of them,” wrote Andrei Sakharov.9 In the eyes of government officials, however, this narrative could not be allowed to stand. They created a much different account of the proceedings that led to the verdicts, particularly in the trial of Fr. Gleb.
On the day Yakunin’s trial concluded, TASS, the official Soviet news agency, issued its version of his sentencing. TASS justified the outcome as consistent with Part 1 of Article 70 of the Criminal Code, which defined criminal acts as propaganda and agitation aimed at weakening the Soviet state.10 The prosecutor had proved that Yakunin had fabricated, reproduced, and widely distributed materials aimed at undermining the Soviet Union. But the TASS correspondent’s news summary also went further, portraying Yakunin as dangerous to the social order, guilty of establishing criminal connections with ideological centers abroad whose major purpose aimed at the internal subversion of the Soviet Union.
Perhaps the most damning indictment in the TASS correspondent’s narrative consisted of his assertion that Yakunin’s activities had nothing to do with religion.11 The writer of the report dealt mainly with psychological and personal factors in which commercial and political gains underlay Yakunin’s motives. The court established, he claimed, that Yakunin skillfully bought and sold icons, books, and precious metals and stones for his own profit, that he did little in service of the church, and that he had cleverly cultivated an image of selflessness that concealed his real interests. TASS referenced one of the main witnesses, Aleksandr Shushpanov, who had served alongside Fr. Gleb early in the priest’s career. Yakunin had betrayed the church, Shushpanov said: “At first, I considered him a very religious person, but the longer I served with him I came to the conclusion that his primary interest lay in accumulating political capital for himself, through the use of religion.”12
In its efforts to defend the court’s decision publicly, the TASS account contained several misleading and false statements. The TASS story cited testimony from two of Yakunin’s closest associates, Lev Regel′son and Viktor Kapitanchuk. Both men testified to working with Yakunin; both, according to this official account, confessed to knowing their actions were harmful to the Soviet state, with Kapitanchuk going further and naming foreign organizations to which all of them had deliberately allied themselves. Finally, the TASS correspondent maintained, Yakunin himself had confessed to taking part in acts “hostile to the Soviet Union,” tearfully asking for forgiveness and saying that he “would never again engage in such actions.”13
The significance of the government’s account was that it provided the context for other, later accounts of Gleb Yakunin. Less than a week later, a lengthy article titled “Which ‘Father’ Did Gleb Serve? written by Soviet journalist Leonid Kolosov, appeared in the mass-circulation newspaper Trud (Labor). The article contained many inaccuracies, including the assertion that Yakunin’s trial was an “open process.”14 Kolosov rarely mentioned Fr. Gleb’s service as a priest, focusing instead on what he considered—and several witnesses in the trial referred to as—Yakunin’s commercial activities, buying and selling icons, silver and other precious metals, rare books, and jewels. This was the person Western propagandists called a “leading fighter for religious liberty in the Soviet Union.” Kolosov mentioned two British visitors to Moscow, David Atkinson, a member of the British Parliament, and David Beak, his assistant, both supporters of Yakunin, who advised him about how best to attack Soviet ideology. In the same vein, the Trud journalist cited the trial testimony of Viktor Kapitanchuk, who invoked the name of Henry Dakin: “I fully admit that, after establishing criminal relations with Dakin, the editor of the ‘Washington Street Research Center’ through Yakunin and Regel′son, during 1977–79, we regularly sent him, through illegal channels, materials that I and the above-named individuals had prepared, materials of a tendentious nature, containing slanderous inventions for mass distribution.… I know that these documents were used by various Anti-Soviet centers and organizations, including the so-called People’s Labor Alliance, the editors of the journal Posev, ‘Radio Liberty’ and others in their hostile activity against the Soviet state.”15 These articles in the Soviet press cast Yakunin not as a committed servitor of the Orthodox Church, but as a rogue figure whose primary interest lay in self-aggrandizement. But the articles had another significant purpose: to warn Orthodox clergy about making connections with foreigners and what the possible consequences were.
While Soviet journalists criticized Yakunin’s connections to Henry Dakin and others as associations designed to subvert the Soviet state, these efforts warrant a different interpretation. As mentioned earlier, Henry Dakin had a strong interest in cultivating people-to-people relationships that transcended national political bureaucracies, which, he believed had produced frozen, outworn confrontations.16 Yakunin, too, although operating from a different set of values, had a major desire to forge bonds with people of different nationalities in a common struggle against nearly universal problems. In these attempts, Yakunin and especially Lev Regel′son held views they had encountered earlier in the student seminar in Moscow.17 Facing harsh, often unyielding government power, seminar members wrote to their brothers and sisters in the United States, during the darkest days of the Cold War and the nuclear threat, seeking to establish common ground and to emphasize their shared humanity. In a letter addressed to “Young Americans,” composed in late November or early December 1979, seminar participants expressed their desire to reach across physical boundaries. They wrote, “We would like to tell you that, in response to this call, there is another that is growing and rising to meet it, coming from the depth of our existence. It began with a desperate protest of our human nature against the total power of the lie.”18 The principle of “all-unity,” which seminar members derived from the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov′ev, conceived of everything in the natural world, the social world, and the spiritual realm as interrelated; this unity, Solov′ev had written, comprised one of the foundational principles of Christianity.19 Earlier, in their “Appeal” to the World Council of Churches, Yakunin and Regel′son had emphasized this fundamental principle in calling for the delegates’ support for persecuted religious believers in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. They pleaded for churches to move beyond their narrow “egotistical indifference towards other people’s suffering” to defend freedom of conscience wherever such action might be required.20
In Western Europe and elsewhere, strong but diverse reactions almost immediately followed the verdict in Gleb Yakunin’s trial. In London, 3,500 members of clergy of numerous faiths signed a petition demanding the release of Yakunin and others who had led the struggle for freedom of conscience. The petition, presented to the Soviet Embassy, expressed the conviction that “their arrest and present imprisonment have come about solely as a result of their faithfulness to the Gospel.”21 In Oxford, Michael Bourdeaux and his colleagues at Keston College, who had supported Yakunin for several years, pledged to stay in touch with him.22 In Frankfurt, Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov, having emigrated six years earlier, wrote a lengthy piece for the émigré journal Posev in which he portrayed Yakunin and others as leaders of a burgeoning democratic movement. He called them “heroes of the spirit” in the Soviet Union.23 In Sydney, the Orthodox Church of Australia issued an appeal for letters of moral support and letters of protest from church leaders and members of Parliament to be sent, respectively, to Iraida Yakunina and Patriarch Pimen.24 These petitions, letters, and other writings offered evidence that Yakunin’s plight would not be soon forgotten.
Incarceration
As expected, in the days following his trial, Yakunin appealed for a commutation of his sentence, asserting that he had not violated any laws. Meanwhile, he remained incarcerated in the Lefortovo Prison while awaiting the results of his appeal. Months passed, an unusually long time for a review, which normally required only a few weeks. Finally, after six months, he learned that the courts had denied his appeal.25 In March 1981, Yakunin left Lefortovo Prison for transport to a forced labor camp, the notorious Perm-37, where the state sent “political prisoners” deemed dangerous to the Soviet political and social order.
Perm-37 represented one of three labor camps—Perm-35, -36, and -37—that were part of a vast chain of the gulag, which Stalin created in 1930. As the numbers of people accused of crimes against the state mushroomed in the late 1920s, Stalin put them to work. He built a massive network of labor camps that eventually stretched from the Ural Mountains across Siberia.26 The Perm settlements made up a minor segment of this chain. Founded in 1946, the three Perm sites originally served as logging camps in the dense forests to the east of Perm, where workers felled trees and floated them down the Kama and Chusovaia Rivers to the Volga to collection sites from which they were distributed to construction locations throughout the Soviet Union.27 All three of the Perm camps lay near the village of Kuchino, about sixty miles east of Perm; travel to the camps from the city required a four-hour bus ride across rutted roads marked by frequent potholes.
After Stalin’s death in March 1953 and the general amnesty that soon followed, the Perm camps fell into disuse. But their abandonment proved short-lived. During Khrushchev’s rule, they served as places of incarceration for former state security officers. In 1972, under the administration of Leonid Brezhnev and the KGB chief Yuri Andropov, the purposes of Perm-35, -36, and -37 again underwent change. They became the primary sites to which the state sent “politicals”—human rights activists, people of influence from the republics who supported independence, religious visionaries, and rebellious writers and publishers.28
Yakunin arrived at Perm-37 labor camp in the early spring of 1981, when the worst of the winter had passed, but the air remained frigid and deep snow covered the entire settlement. The site presented a dilapidated, godforsaken appearance. Several rings of barbed-wire fences encircled the camp. A heavy metal gate allowed admittance, and inside were several rows of ramshackle, poorly constructed wooden barracks that were unpainted and poorly heated. A high wooden fence surrounded the compound, with several watchtowers rising above the fencing. Upon arrival, a prisoner would be issued a bug-infested woolen blanket, a pair of leather boots, and a thin gray uniform.29 Here Gleb Yakunin would spend the next four and a half years of his sentence, enduring winters in which the temperature often reached 40 to 50 degrees below zero and the summers were infested with mosquitoes and had daytime temperatures in the 90s. His fellow inmates included writers, poets, religious believers, and former demonstrators for civil liberties whom the state considered in opposition to the regime.30 Incarcerated in Perm-37, too, was the human rights activist Yuri Orlov, whom Yakunin had known in Moscow.
The police designated Perm-37 as a high-security camp, which meant it was not as stringent as the neighboring maximum-security outpost, Perm-36, several hundred yards away. The restrictions and treatments in Perm-37 did not match the extreme cruelties of Stalin-era labor camps; nevertheless, the guards could be harsh and their demands onerous. Yet Perm-37 camp authorities did allow the limited receipt of mail, an occasional visit by a relative, and printed materials, but only those published in the Soviet Union. On April 29, soon after Fr. Gleb’s arrival, camp authorities allowed him a visit from his wife, Iraida. The visit gave her the first glimpse of her husband since his trial the previous August. “He is very thin, and is having health problems because of high blood pressure,” she reported to the Keston News Service. “He has not been assigned to one specific kind of work in the camp, but is constantly moved from task to task. His hair and beard have been shaved off.”31 The same news service noted that on May 4, Fr. Gleb participated in a one-day fast that Yuri Orlov had planned to coincide with a world conference in Madrid, convened to review the compliance of various governments with the Helsinki Accords on human rights.32
Here, as in labor camps elsewhere in the Soviet Union, prisoners’ relationships with the guards required constant negotiation. As the journalist Anne Applebaum has written, guards exerted pressure on prisoners to become informers, to renounce their former lives, or to break their will.33 Prisoners, in turn, sought to manipulate guards into rewarding them with extra privileges, food, or release from onerous duties. A sympathetic guard might be willing to post a letter to a spouse or a friend, while a hostile guard could easily add to the burdens the inmate faced daily. The rules governing life in the camp were not fully known by prisoners, and they were applied arbitrarily, leaving inmates uncertain of their standing and fearful of what lay immediately ahead. This lesson Yakunin would quickly learn.
A contemporary of Yakunin’s who served in Perm-37 at the same time penned a detailed description of life and work in the labor camp. The authorities, he wrote, allowed prisoners to spend up to five rubles in the camp commissary—more like a stall—which opened only once each month.34 The camp paid prisoners a meager amount for each day’s labor, of which 10 percent was deposited and the monthly sum accumulated in a camp logbook. The rules for Perm-37 required each person to do physical labor every day, excluding a day of rest on Sunday, regardless of the prisoner’s physical condition or age. Often, camp authorities enlisted a prisoner to perform unofficial work that went unpaid.
In the event, however, that someone violated the rules, the authorities deducted a certain unspecified sum from the person’s total amount in the fund. If the violation was severe, authorities had the right to deduct the whole sum. Perm-37 had a work plan for the month, a production quota, and if prisoners failed to fulfill their allotted share of the plan, they were fined.35 This, too, happened often. Only on occasion, therefore, did a prisoner accrue the five rubles to spend at the commissary. “What would five rubles buy, if a person had that amount? It was enough to purchase two cans of jam, a month’s supply of unfiltered cigarettes, and sometimes a few small items,” a fellow prisoner wrote. “If a person had several violations on his record, the individual could be denied any purchases.”36
The authorities in Perm-37 designed these restrictive camp practices of penalties and rewards as a means of controlling the inmates. They allowed little recourse for those who opposed camp practices to fight back without incurring severe consequences, but this did not mean that a person had to be submissive.37 Yakunin offered an example of the refusal to compromise on an action he viewed as an assault on his personhood. Upon his arrival at Perm-37, camp authorities removed all his possessions, including the religious literature he had brought with him. Despite his repeated pleas for the return of these items, the authorities refused, asserting that they could not allow such publications in the labor camp. Undaunted by their refusal, Yakunin wrote to the Perm Regional Procuracy, whose reply on May 28, 1981, adamantly refused his request, stating, “There is no provision in the law for the possession and use of religious literature by condemned persons.”38
Refusing again to accept the procuracy’s verdict, Yakunin went further. He wrote two appeals, both of which were smuggled out of the camp and posted elsewhere. The first he addressed to President Leonid Brezhnev and signed it from “Gleb Pavlovich Yakunin, incarcerated under Article 70 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR.” He reported that camp authorities had taken from him his Bible, Psalter, prayer book, and a church calendar; all of these materials the Moscow Patriarchate had published legitimately, and he asked for their return. Yakunin’s appeal also mentioned fellow prisoners Aleksandr Ogorodnikov in Perm-36 and Vladimir Poresh in Perm-35, who had endured similar confiscations. The actions of the camp authorities, he argued in inflammatory language, were “unprecedented in history; even in Nazi chancelleries, the fascists did not seize Bibles and the New Testament from the clergy and religious believers.”39 Yakunin’s appeal was signed by sixteen inmates of Perm-37, including Yuri Orlov.
The second letter, addressed as “An Appeal to Western Christians,” Yakunin sent to Keston College in England. Significantly, he did not sign his “Appeal” as a prisoner in a labor camp, but as a priest and member of the Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights.40 In it, he requested the prayerful support of Christians everywhere on behalf of those whom the state had sentenced to lengthy terms for their religious beliefs. He specifically mentioned Ogorodnikov and Poresh; both they and he, Yakunin wrote, offered concrete examples of state persecution, which representatives of the Moscow Patriarchate had vehemently denied at the Nairobi Assembly. Each of them had not only faced persecution for their beliefs, but the authorities’ confiscation of their religious literature denied them even the right to read the Bible. Yakunin noted that he had written in protest to the appropriate state bodies, but his protests “resulted in refusal or [had] been ignored completely.”41 His remaining recourse was to reach out beyond the governing institutions in his country and “appeal to you, dear friends, and to all those believers who do not remain indifferent to the lot of persecuted Christians to support imprisoned believers who are demanding that the Soviet authorities cease to violate their right to freedom of conscience.”42
In his “Appeal” to Western Christians, Fr. Gleb cited fasts begun by Ogorodnikov and Poresh. “Now, it is my turn,” he said, and announced his intention to begin a hunger fast on September 16, if camp authorities continued to deny him access to his Bible.43 Furthermore, he proclaimed his desire to “draw attention to the crude denial of the right to freedom of conscience to inmates in Soviet prisons and camps.” Having exhausted every internal venue to protest what he believed violated rights of conscience, Yakunin turned to the only avenue available to him: communicating personally with citizen supporters outside the Soviet Union. Somehow, he had confidence they would hear his pleas for help.
Historically, hunger strikes initiated by well-known leaders of social movements have drawn world attention to the causes for which they struggled. The most famous examples were the fasts of Mahatma Gandhi, which he offered as a sacrifice on behalf of the “suppressed brethren and sisters” in India.44 Cast in similar language, Yakunin viewed his coming fast as an effort to draw the Western world’s attention to people deprived of liberty, confined in labor camps, where they were “condemned to spiritual starvation.”45 When he began his hunger strike on September 16, Keston College followed his movements as closely as possible through information leaked to its contacts in Moscow. Keston reported that ten days after Yakunin’s hunger strike began, other camp inmates, including Yuri Orlov, had joined him in staging fasts to “demonstrate their solidarity with him.”46 In light of his already weakened physical condition, Fr. Gleb’s body could not withstand a prolonged fast, but, determined to continue his protest until the authorities relented and returned his Bible, he stayed the course. On September 26, camp officials, concerned about Yakunin’s rapidly deteriorating health, ordered him to be fed intravenously. They arranged for his temporary transfer to Perm-35, which had a small hospital where he might receive better medical care.47
It is unknown precisely when Yakunin ended his hunger strike. He returned to Perm-37 in early 1982, and Keston College later reported that he then had access to his Bible.48 Despite this concession, however, neither his harsh treatment nor Western interest in his fate dissipated over the next two years. In the second half of the year, camp authorities sentenced him to four months of solitary confinement in the camp’s internal prison, where his food ration consisted of only fourteen ounces of bread daily and, on every second day, a small bowl of soup. They forbade him to receive any correspondence, allowed him no extra warm clothing, and, without a bed, left him to sleep on the cold floor of his cell.49 The stated reason for his punishment was his engagement in “religious agitation” among the young who were serving time in the camp, but the more plausible unofficial explanation was that Fr. Gleb had revealed the identity of a person who earned special favors by regularly reporting on fellow prisoners to camp authorities.50
Yakunin survived the next two years in Perm-37 enduring the mocking taunts of the prison guards, the perpetual threat of further punishment, and the physical demands of an intensive work schedule. Any extra time at his disposal he spent writing, beginning a long poem whose contents will be discussed in due course. He was perhaps buoyed by news of several awards for bravery and civic service in New York and in London, but even these were tempered by worries about the condition of his wife and children in Moscow.51 In late 1984, Fr. Gleb Yakunin’s five-year prison term that had begun at the end of his trial in 1979, came to an end, and he prepared to begin the next stage of his sentence, his five-year term of forced internal exile.
Exile
While Yakunin might have found relief in his release from Perm-37, any solace he experienced was short-lived. The state security police assigned Fr. Gleb to a village in the harshest, coldest region of the inhabited world, the Republic of Yakutia (Republic of Sakha). Located in northeastern Siberia, Yakutia is Russia’s largest republic, with a land area of 1.2 million square miles; it is the basin of Siberia’s mightiest rivers—the Lena, Kolyma, Indigirka, and Yana—which flow northward into the Arctic Ocean. The average temperature in January is –46 degrees F, but the nights and early mornings often reach –50 to –60 degrees F; Yakutia has recorded the lowest temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere. The republic produces the most prized diamonds in the world and provides one-quarter of the world’s supply of these precious stones. The Sakha people, an indigenous Turkish tribe, originally inhabited Yakutia; in the 1980s, they composed about one-third of the population, making a living from mining, fishing, herding reindeer, and hunting fox, ermine, and squirrel. In the twentieth century, the republic became a favorite location for the police to send political dissidents. In exiling Fr. Gleb Yakunin to this remote region, the police ensured that, for the immediate future, his voice could not be heard.52
Yakunin was posted to the distant Siberian village of Solnechnyi, in the southeastern corner of the republic. Travel to Solnechnyi presented a major challenge, since the railroad did not pass nearby. To reach the village, a person had to fly to Yakutsk, the capital city, then negotiate with the pilot of a small plane to fly to a town closest to the village, and, upon arrival, take a bus, and from there hitch a ride with a lorry or, failing that, walk the remaining distance.53 Yakunin’s arrival in late January presented another impediment: it coincided with the most severe time of year. Although details are lacking about this difficult situation, upon his arrival in the village, he somehow managed to obtain temporary lodging with a local inhabitant and to wait for warmer weather before securing a more permanent accommodation.
Yakunin was skilled at improvising, and late that spring, he began to construct a small hut for himself, although he lacked the necessary materials to secure it against the cold winds that swept through the village (figure 7.1). To earn money, he obtained work in a carpentry shop in the village, making minor repairs for local people and eking out meager pay that barely enabled him to live.54 That summer of 1981, his wife Iraida and two of his children, Mariia, the eldest, and Anna, the youngest, anxious to see him after these many months, traveled the vast distance to be with him. Iraida reported that he worked mostly as a common laborer, doing odd physical jobs, including grave digging.55 The presence of his wife and two children undoubtedly lifted his spirits.
The visit of his wife and children, however, also sharply reminded Fr. Gleb of the suffering that they, too, had endured. Whether financially or psychologically, the daily struggles and well-being of his family bore constantly upon them. Earlier, he had learned that his wife had fallen seriously ill and had to take a leave from her job, a misfortune that left the family without her salary.56 Already lacking the financial cushion to survive during a crisis, they did not have adequate food and clothing for the long Moscow winters. How the members of Yakunin’s family managed to live during these extremely difficult circumstances required considerable ingenuity. It also took a great deal of help from friends, especially from a remarkable person named Lidiia Iosifovna Zdanovskaia.
FIGURE 7.1. House in Siberian village in which Yakunin lived in exile, 1985–1987. Courtesy of the Keston Center for Religion, Politics, and Society, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.
Lidiia Iosifovna was Fr. Gleb’s aunt and the wife of Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov. A resourceful, strong, and humble person, she was also a parishioner of the Moscow church where Fr. Viacheslav Vinikov, a close, lifelong friend of Fr. Gleb’s, served.57 When a friend was in need, she stepped in. In the 1960s, because of his critical writings, Levitin-Krasnov ran into trouble with state authorities, which prohibited him, a single man living in a communal apartment, from entering Moscow. Because he lacked a private residence, which otherwise would have enabled him to live in the city, Lidiia Iosifovna offered to marry him, and she took him into her own apartment in Moscow. Whether they actually lived as husband and wife is uncertain, but in 1974, after his emigration to Switzerland, she spoke of him as her “husband,” and he, in his memoirs, referred to her as his “beloved wife.”58 In the 1980s, during these trying times for the Yakunin family, Lidiia Iosifovna cared for the children and helped to raise them. She provided constant support to all of them, without which their very survival would have been doubtful.59
In significant acts of heroism, Aunt Lidiia also reached out to Yakunin in Siberia. In the late summers of 1985 and 1986, she filled two large suitcases with food and flew to Yakutsk. There, she engaged a helicopter pilot to fly her to the village where Yakunin lived. The pilot helped her stow the heavy suitcases on the plane, and when they landed, he unloaded them for her, leaving her only to find Yakunin’s small hut. She had worried he would not survive the brutal winters and had confided her concerns to a friend. Her friend assured her of Fr. Gleb’s strength and capacity to endure this challenge, but Aunt Lidiia had to make certain, and her delivery of food was her endeavor to help. She stayed with him into the autumn. “When the first freeze came, she awakened in the morning to find herself covered with frost, which had drifted in through the cracks in the walls.”60 Only then, having fulfilled her mission, did Lidiia Iosifovna return to Moscow.
Facing the cold, loneliness, and isolation of the village in distant Yakutia, Yakunin had to dig deep into his own inner resources to endure the hardships he faced. As others before him had experienced, personal isolation became one of his greatest challenges. But just as he had managed earlier in Perm-37, he did not give in to these life-threatening difficulties. He needed to find a means of connecting to a world larger than his own immediate circumstances. In the labor camp, and particularly in exile, he turned to poetry as spiritual and emotional sustenance. Poetry gave him a way to replenish his storehouse of ideas and to relate to others beyond the daily exigencies of physical life. Above all, poetry became a means of stimulating his imagination and bringing to the surface memories that lay buried in his consciousness.
A “Golden Treasury”
Poetry has a “very special place in this country,” wrote Nadezhda Mandel′stam, the wife of Osip Mandel′stam, one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets. Poetry, she said, “is a golden treasury, in which our values are preserved; it brings people back to life, awakens their conscience and stirs them to thought.”61 While serving in the labor camp, and later in exile in remote Siberia, Yakunin wrote poetry in an attempt to reflect on Russia’s past and to project a vision for his country’s future. This awakening of conscience and stirring of thought characterized the verses Fr. Gleb conceived from the depths of Perm-37. In them, he returned to his aspirations as a younger man and to his hopes of being part of a reformation within the church. He wanted to contribute to this reformation and its attendant practices of redemption and healing, which formed key elements of his poetry. They were, he believed, more important than ever in Russia’s present condition. He wrote a long narrative poem, much of it while in Siberian exile, a personal, probing account of the ideals for which he fought with such passion and determination. The poem, he said repeatedly, contains his theology, his hopes, and his perspectives on humanity.62
Yakunin titled his poem “Eulogy of a Simple-minded Fool of God: In Honor of God, the Universe, and the Homeland.”63 In neither the labor camp nor exile did Yakunin have the essential scholarly resources to write a narrative poem. He would work on it for many years afterward, and he told his readers that in the process of writing it, he went through many periods of depression and anxiety, thinking that he would not be able to complete it.64 Ultimately, however, the long poem was finished, most likely in the 1990s. But the original conception and the main ideas belong to that earlier period, during his years of imprisonment and exile when his oldest daughter, Mariia Glebovna, believes he wrote the best parts of his narrative poem.65
The Russian literary scholar Elena Volkova, who has written a fine introduction to Yakunin’s work, described the poem as written in the genre of “idiotic primitivism,” a “form of writing popular in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.”66 As Volkova points out, Yakunin’s work is filled throughout with popular speech and images, the language of the street, and a play on words, “characteristic of the ‘dark’ unchained language of ‘holy fools,’ who like children, loved to play with shapes and gestures.”67 The purpose of these so-called holy fools was to “unmask delusions” and forecast the future. It was Yakunin’s attempt to “unmask delusions” that had led to his arrest earlier and his sentencing to the labor camp and exile. Although he broke no law, he did aim to expose hypocrisy and to champion human dignity, goals that proved deeply threatening to the captive mind. These themes run throughout his poetry.
“Eulogy of a Simple-minded Fool of God” treats a wide range of topics. The poem discusses the conditions of the labor camp and the cold, hunger, and isolation the author had to endure, as well as the extreme cold and dense fog of the Siberian village. But the poem is also Yakunin’s spiritual testimony and includes long, lyrical verses about nature, the skies, the seas, and the earth, with reference to the book of Genesis and the creation of the world, the wisdom of the Creator, and his compassion for human beings.
In the wide range of subjects that Yakunin’s poem addresses, one theme is threaded throughout, and it applies to every part of his life and theology. He emphasized the need for human beings to be open to the world—to the beauty of nature and to creative activity.68 Too often, Yakunin stated, the church closed itself off from the world, and it had much richer fare to offer than the materialist philosophy of the Soviet state and its claims of victory over religious belief: “And in celebrating victory / atheism summons everyone to a dinner / but its poverty is revealed by its one-course meal.”69
Fr. Gleb displayed a dynamic view of world history, in which the entire cosmos was in movement, constantly evolving toward something different from the past: “The whole world lives and evolves, / and it moves under a banner, / under a shadow bearing the inscription / “Progress.” / This phenomenon / (the creative method)—/ does not undermine my faith.”70 Like Fr. Aleksandr Men, he conceived of an evolving, unfinished universe, a major thesis of Men’s multivolume magnum opus, Istoriia religii.71 Christianity remained incomplete, and people who claimed to have a complete knowledge of the truth were mistaken, because it, too, was in process. Yakunin’s poem underscored this view: “The development of the earth is a clear fact / and didn’t give me a heart attack.”72
Since the world’s creation was an ongoing process in Yakunin’s view, the person participated in this continuous creation. The Creator had not made human beings to be slaves, but because God had endowed humans from birth with a divine spirit, they were made to be creative beings in order to contribute to the betterment of all humanity and to the eventual perfection of the universe: “We have this rare gift, / that the Supreme Authority gave us.”73 Yakunin repeatedly emphasized the connection between creativity and faith and he found it to be a major theme in the teachings of the Gospels. Yet the church in the twentieth century had failed to emphasize this connection, turning its back on the world and on the sciences. In the place of creativity, the church had promulgated an anti-Christian message, locking the door on society and wrapping itself in a pagan cult of empire, power, and collaboration with the police. Yakunin severely condemned this captive spirit and its allegiance to false claims about other human beings and about life in general. His faith required him to speak the truth, regardless of the suffering it might bring in its wake: “Lies / I will not utter / From my mouth / And from my writing. / Listen—/ You will listen to tears.”74
If the Orthodox Church lay silent under the weight of its transgressions, its ill-begotten present faults, it still had the potential to be a major living presence in Russian life. Yakunin believed strongly in Orthodoxy’s inner strength and its capacity to speak profoundly to the Russian people. He had unwavering faith in its potential to break through the stultifying mentality that pervaded it. “But still—can she not be resurrected? / We are yet awaiting the spiritual events to take place in her.”75
Yakunin told his readers that he wrote his narrative poem as a manifesto, a clarion call to action that he hoped would contribute to this spiritual awakening. Recent circumstances, particularly the spiritual awakening among young people, convinced him that his country was on the verge of an inner transformation. For the Orthodox Church to play a significant part in this transformation would require repentance, healing, and different ways of thinking—needs that his poem expressed in the form of a prayer. “O God? We are paralyzed! / We have frozen! / For a higher purpose / heal us / in your own invigorating way.”76
In “Eulogy of a Simple-minded Fool of God,” Fr. Gleb also expressed his abiding love for Russia. Despite its faults, his country possessed spiritual resources that he believed allowed it to construct a promising, holistic vision for its future. Among the main sources of inspiration were its great religious leaders and writers, to whom Yakunin paid homage. They included Boris and Gleb, the twelfth-century saints whose passive suffering in the face of violence stood out as models of behavior; St. Sergius of Radonezh, the spiritual leader of medieval Russia and Russia’s patron saint; the great nineteenth-century elder St. Seraphim of Sarov, whose acts of charity became renowned among the Russian people; and the early twentieth-century patriarch Tikhon, who, at great cost to himself, refused to compromise with the Bolshevik government. Yakunin also emphasized the profound impact of the philosophical/theological writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—Vladimir Solov′ev, Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Viacheslav Ivanov—who initiated the Russian Religious Renaissance. While their influence had been limited in time, they had “pushed back the darkness: / rehabilitated the / humanistic beginning, / and from freedom, the human being began to stir.”77
Similarly, Yakunin believed it was critically important to rediscover the “revelatory voices in Russian literature,” beginning with Maksim the Greek and continuing with Denis Fonvizin, Alexander Radishchev, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Nikolai Pomialovskii. These visionary writers showed that members of the Russian clergy always talked about God, but, in reality, their behavior demonstrated how little the teachings of the Gospels resonated in their lives.78 Such revelatory voices, Yakunin pointed out, had not subscribed to the state’s ideology; instead, they had challenged the principles on which that ideology rested. They depicted another side of social life, its poverty, the beggars, and marginalized people who struggled against nearly devastating obstacles to retain their sense of human dignity. The works of Nikolai Gogol served as an example: “Before Gogol’s eyes / Did not pass by without seeing / (How many beggars there were), / (How much pain existed everywhere!).”79 All the cultural giants Yakunin named in his poem underscored the importance of the freedom to speak, think, and write to Russia’s future well-being.
In addition, as he had in his early years as a parish priest, Yakunin remained critical of the hypocrisy that he witnessed in large parts of the clergy. The years he spent in Perm-37 and Siberian exile did not lessen his disdain for behavior that undermined the sacred mission of the Orthodox Church. His references to Gogol and other Russian writers and artists aspired to bring to public attention a long-standing caste system that perpetuated social injustices. Through their creative works, the writers he referenced had provided a signal service to their homeland. Their emphasis on freedom of thought, their capacity to look beyond static norms, and their courage to challenge unexamined beliefs, in Yakunin’s view, had made significant contributions to Russia’s moral strength. Even in the depths of his Siberian exile, these voices continued to speak to him. The church needed to purify itself, seek repentance, and embrace the creative spirit with which the Creator had endowed each person.80 Russia’s greatest cultural and religious writers emphasized this connection between creativity and faith, and the future of Christianity in Russia depended on restoring this relationship.
A twist of fate, even less anticipated than those he had experienced earlier, would soon alter the course of Yakunin’s life. A remarkable change of events moved him from a remote village on the extreme periphery of Siberia to a position near the center of Russia’s political controversies.