CHAPTER 8 Return
The years Fr. Gleb spent in the Perm-37 labor camp and, afterward, in a remote village in northeastern Siberia coincided with some of the most significant events in twentieth-century Russian history. On February 9, 1984, Secretary-General Yuri Andropov, Brezhnev’s successor as party leader, died. His replacement, the septuagenarian Konstantin Chernenko, ascended to power on February 13, 1984. In poor health and lacking energy and vision, he was essentially a caretaker who ruled for only a little more than a year before his death on March 10, 1985. His successor on March 11, 1985, fifty-three-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev, understood and almost immediately signaled the need for fundamental reform of the Soviet system. On December 10,1986, he called the exiled human rights leader Andrei Sakharov in Gorky and told him that he was free to return to Moscow. The Soviet leader soon amnestied individuals who had been incarcerated for political reasons. Granted amnesty in early 1987, Yakunin returned to Moscow and immediately took up the causes to which he had previously committed himself. He would find the political and religious landscape he reentered to be both promising and treacherous.1
In his narrative poem, “Eulogy of a Simple-minded Fool of God,” Yakunin said that his seven-year sentence and exile had not changed him.2 Whether he wrote this line during or after his two-year stint in a remote corner of Yakutia or afterward is uncertain, but he returned to Moscow with similar goals to those he had before his incarceration. In a much different political environment, the wily art of negotiation and compromise, rather than direct confrontation with political and religious authorities, generally yielded better results.
Months after coming to power, the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the program he called perestroika, his revitalization plan to reform the Soviet economy and society. As outlined by the British political scientist Richard Sakwa, between 1986 and 1991, perestroika went through several phases, beginning with an effort to strengthen the economy and make more rational decisions about investments. The next phase featured debates about democratizing the Soviet system and bringing to light issues that previously existed beyond the boundaries of public discourse, followed by the transformation of the economic and political structures and the coup of August 1991. The final phase, from late 1991 to 1992, witnessed the disintegration of the Soviet Union.3
Yakunin’s return to Moscow took place during the second phase of these revitalization efforts, which began with discussions at the Nineteenth Party Congress in January 1987 about loosening up the socialist system and promoting “openness and transparency” in all phases of Soviet life. What was needed, Gorbachev emphasized, was not only political advancement, but “a new intellectual breakthrough.”4
If Fr. Gleb confronted a much different political setting post-confinement than he had witnessed earlier, he also encountered a profound change in the government’s view of the church. From the outset of his accession to power, Gorbachev recognized and addressed concerns about the erosion of the moral values of the Soviet people. What we must have to succeed, he said, “is greater order, greater consciousness, greater respect for one another, and greater honesty.”5 Concurrently, Gorbachev reversed policies that had long characterized the Soviet government’s treatment of the Orthodox Church. In late 1987, the Soviet leader announced the return to the church of two historic monasteries: the Tolga Presentation of Mary, Mother of God nunnery, near the city of Yaroslavl, and the Optina Presentation men’s hermitage in the Kostroma Diocese. Both monasteries had faithfully served the Russian people during times of difficulty, and the latter also enjoyed a reputation as a chief source of inspiration for some of Russia’s greatest cultural figures, including Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Kireevskii, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Solov′ev, Leo Tolstoy, and many others.6
The return of these historic religious centers forecast other changes. On April 29, 1988, Gorbachev invited the now older Patriarch Pimen and five leaders of the Holy Synod to meet with him in the Kremlin. Held in the Great Catherine Hall, this historic event heralded a major change in the status of the Orthodox Church, signaling a much different view of religion than had existed during most of the Soviet era. Gorbachev rescinded a fundamental goal of Marxism-Leninism: to obliterate religious beliefs and practices. He told the patriarch that “believers are Soviet people, workers, and patriots, and they have the full right to express their convictions with dignity.”7 In preparation for the coming celebrations of the millennium of Orthodox Christianity in Russia, Gorbachev also underscored the common history shared by the Russian people and the Orthodox Church and his expectation that this historical bond would continue into the country’s future.8
Gorbachev’s earlier meeting with Patriarch Pimen and the millennium celebrations of Orthodox Christianity in the summer of 1988 precipitated major changes in the status of the church in Russian society. Although the alterations did not immediately overturn decades of ridicule and harassment of the church in public consciousness, they marked the beginning of a vast shift in public attitudes toward one of the cardinal features of Soviet ideology. The atheist goals, proclaimed from the beginning of the Soviet state, suddenly underwent a dramatic reversal. As the state reformed its views on religion, the church quickly regained the physical structures it had lost earlier. In 1988, the church opened 809 new Orthodox communities; in the following year, their numbers grew to 2,564.9
The rapid opening of new parishes created major problems of staffing them with qualified pastors. The church’s need for well-qualified priests presented Fr. Gleb Yakunin with a golden opportunity when he returned from exile. Despite his suspension by Patriarch Pimen, Yakunin had never relinquished his position as an Orthodox priest, and he immediately sought an appointment to a church parish. This position allowed him to serve the church during an increasingly volatile and rapidly changing period, while also offering support for his family. Moreover, he had long believed that the reawakening of Russian society required rebuilding connections with the treasures of Russia’s past. The poetry he wrote during his incarceration and exile had stressed the importance of recovering and building on this mostly forgotten religious heritage.10 His reintegration into parish life would enable him to contribute to a need he considered essential to strengthening the Orthodox Church and reconstructing his country’s identity.
Shortly after the millennium celebrations, Yakunin applied for a position in the church, and the patriarchate assigned him as head priest of a small church on the outskirts of the city of Shchyolkovo, a short distance to the northeast of Moscow, on the Kliazma River. Household silk-weaving craft enterprises had developed here, and over time, they had evolved into silk manufactories.11 Shchyolkovo was the home of five churches once renowned for their architectural beauty and the thriving parish communities that sustained them before their closure during the Soviet era.12
Fr. Gleb began his tenure in the small St. Nicholas Cathedral. The church’s origins dated to the mid-sixteenth century, although in 1727, a fire had destroyed its original wooden structure. The present stone church was constructed in 1836, with an elegant bell tower adorning its front edifice.13 At the time of Fr. Gleb’s arrival in 1987, St. Nicholas Cathedral was the only functioning church in a city of fifty thousand people. Although it may have seemed an eternity since he last actively served as a priest, he was well-schooled in the correct order and the complex requirements of the Orthodox service, and he immediately fell into the traditional role of the parish priest. “If one did not know his past,” wrote a young journalist assigned to write a story on Yakunin, “it would seem that he [had] always served here, forever submerged in this peaceful and disciplined church world.” Sympathetic to his plight, the journalist reminded her readers that the “journey Fr. Gleb had traveled to get here was one of painful difficulties.”14 His arrival coincided with a large infusion of new churchgoers. Many came out of curiosity, wanting to taste the fruit that the state had considered anathema for so long. But Fr. Gleb also found that large numbers came in search of something more satisfying than Soviet schools had prepared them to experience. Asked to explain the rapid growth in the numbers of newly arrived parishioners, Fr. Gleb offered the following explanation: “In the last half-year, most of those who came to my parish were adults, who asked to be baptized. This, apparently, was related to the crisis in the official communist ideology, the lack of success in what state leaders have called the development of socialism. People arrived in despair; they no longer believed in the capacity of the government system to bring them personal well-being. Human beings are essentially spiritual beings—they do not live by bread alone. In reality, by their nature, they are searching for spiritual health, for new ideals.”15
At the same time that he served his parish community, as throughout his adult life, Fr. Gleb kept a watchful eye on the political direction of the country. Local affairs had never fully satisfied his craving for something more substantial, more connected to the fate of the church as a whole and its role in Russian society. Since his student years, he had believed it was necessary for the church to overcome its inward focus and speak to social and moral problems, as the Russian Orthodox essayist Evgenii Barabanov urged. The clergy needed to help the people “overcome the fetters of lies, the lack of faith, and the [church’s] connivance with the political authorities,” as Barabanov advised.16 The church, Barabanov argued, had to recover its own moral traditions, which would enable it to break the chains of subjugation and give it the opportunity to free a compliant, mentally enslaved people.
In 1989 and 1990, Yakunin’s public reputation underwent a reversal compared to the perception of him a decade earlier. In the late 1970s the official government press had excoriated him, calling him an enemy of the Soviet state, whereas he was now viewed in a positive light. Having returned from the labor camp and exile, incarcerated for exposing the falsehoods and corruption of the patriarchate, he had reentered a society turned upside down. The journalist Natal′ia Pavlova, writing in one of Moscow’s popular newspapers, highlighted the human rights leader Andrei Sakharov’s praise of Yakunin and the Orthodox priest’s willingness to “speak truth to power.”17 Another journalist, reporting in Novosibirsk’s most prominent newspaper, placed Yakunin “on a parallel with Andrei Sakharov and Anatoly Marchenko.”18 Such accolades and his reputation as an outspoken advocate for reform placed Yakunin in a position to speak more broadly than his priestly service in a provincial city might otherwise have allowed. In spring 1990, while continuing to serve his St. Nicolas Cathedral he stood for election to the new Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Federation.
Intended to loosen the stranglehold of the heavy-handed bureaucratic system, elections, a primary feature of perestroika, aimed at imparting greater dynamism into policy making. The initial two elections—the first in 1987 to local soviets and the second in the spring of 1989 to the new Congress of People’s Deputies—represented major stages in the development of competitive elections in the Soviet Union. The third election, on March 4 and March 18, 1990, took place at a turning point in the Gorbachev era. Richard Sakwa points out that the election on March 4, 1990, and its second round on March 18 represented significant developments in democratic politics in the Soviet Union. Unlike other republics, Russia kept its two-tier legislature and elected a Congress of People’s Deputies with 1,068 members. The Congress then selected a smaller Supreme Soviet, which dealt with parliamentary issues. Russia had truly entered a time of transformation, and this election came at a precipitous time, when democratic politics and debate over the wholesale remaking of the country had become central parts of this process.19
This Congress had significant “long-term importance” in “the shaping of a distinctively Russian political identity,” Sakwa wrote. “The vessel of democratic politics was no longer the USSR but ‘Russia,’ or as the democrats tended to put it at the time, the ‘country.’ ”20 These developments, in turn, further brought the question of Russia’s identity and history to the forefront of public debate.
In the months preceding the 1990 elections, Yakunin and others voiced concerns about the Orthodox Church’s capacity to play a significant role in Russia’s transformation from a formerly closed society to an open one and whether its previous servility to the political authorities hindered it from thinking creatively. In November 1989, a small group of senior Orthodox officials and laymen expressed similar worries. They wanted a more honest discussion about the church’s ability to adapt to the moral changes on which the success of perestroika depended. In late November and early December 1989, they convened a small conference to debate these issues. The organizers defined their goals as seeking to bring to fruition the “regenerative processes in church life,” to establish “healthy standards” for how the church should relate to the state, and to discuss how the church might best rebuild its internal structures.21
The leaders of the conference invited Fr. Gleb to make the opening presentation. He and other critics had called for the church to examine its history and its complicity with the communist government, believing that confrontation with the past offered a first step in the church’s rebirth.22 Before it could contribute to the development of religious consciousness in Russia, Fr. Gleb said, the church needed to confront its own past behavior: its collaboration with the Soviet authorities, its complicity in spreading lies, and its unwillingness to protect the downtrodden from the assaults of the state. An honest assessment of these deficiencies would go a long way, Yakunin insisted, toward healing the wounds that the church had inflicted upon itself.
In 1989, Yakunin served as leader of the Church and Perestroika movement formed during the church millennium to examine the moral condition of the country.23 In line with one of the key goals of perestroika, the movement explored the question of whether the church was prepared to contribute to the transformation of Russia. Yakunin believed that an honest look at the church during the Soviet period—the problems the church confronted, the moral decisions its leadership made, and the consequences of those choices—would help prepare it for the future role it needed to play.24 He wanted to dispel the mythological version of the past and take a close look at the practical realities of the times, believing that they held moral lessons for Russia’s present. His views came close to what the American historian James Sheehan meant by history as a moral science. According to Sheehan, “history works best when it stays closest to the contours of ordinary life, where people must face the painful choice between compliance or resistance, greater or lesser evils, inflicting or suffering harm.”25
Although dialectical materialism dominated the instruction in Soviet schools, the Russian historians Pyotr Vail and Aleksandr Genis have pointed out that students had also been exposed to the writings of Plato and Aristophanes, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Boccaccio and Pushkin. As a result, as Vail and Genis noted, the moral values mentioned above had inadvertently been ingrained in the mental framework of many students.26 According to Vail and Genis, Russia’s democratic reformers in the late 1980s and early 1990s exemplified these humanistic values in their actions. Moreover, certain moral ideals were embedded in the works of Russia’s own literary giants, specifically in Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, whose writings emphasized honesty, compassion, truth-telling, and self-sacrifice.27 In the Russian Orthodox Church itself, St. Gregory of Nazianus (325–389), one of the three Fathers of the church, exhibited the same attributes in both his personal life and his poetry.28 Yakunin and his democratic colleagues had a plethora of rich resources on which to draw. The problem now concerned how to inculcate these moral principles in the public sphere and everyday lives of citizens.
In his electoral campaign, Fr. Gleb spoke repeatedly of the need to strengthen the moral climate of the country (figure 8.1). Although the process still had a long distance to travel, the electoral campaigns and the open discussion of major social issues signified that this educational venture had begun. His political campaign emphasized the need for a “religious renaissance, moral guidance, and spiritual education,” without which, he reiterated, “we will not succeed in raising the level of [the country’s] morality.” He then issued a charge that cut to the heart of his political campaign: “It is necessary for us not to be afraid to speak truth to power in our world. An authoritative voice is necessary—especially in a time of cataclysms and shocks. And the church must play this role.”29 To Yakunin, taking an honest look at Soviet history and repenting of the church’s complicity in the telling of lies represented vital steps in that direction. In publicly expressing these views, he was clearly treading on extremely sensitive grounds. These notions would raise questions about guilt and collaboration that the leaders of the church might have preferred to leave dormant.
FIGURE 8.1. Yakunin campaigning for office, early 1990s. Courtesy of the Keston Center for Religion, Politics, and Society, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.
A Democratic or an Authoritarian Order?
In late spring and summer of 1990, the Soviet Union confronted a massive transformation of its political and social life. In nearly every corner of public life, a lively debate ensued over how the state should move forward and what role the church would play in the future rebuilding of Russia. “Who is bold enough to predict with any degree of accuracy when we shall be able to stabilize the situation and begin to live in a civilized, humane, and democratic society,” a well-informed, moderate member of the Communist Party wrote in late July 1990. “And finally, who can explain why the path to a rule of law often lies through the jungles of anarchy and lawlessness, shootings and fires, blockades and strikes?”30
During those same spring and summer months, two events took place that significantly affected Yakunin’s future. First, on May 3, 1990, seventy-nine-year-old Patriarch Pimen (Izvekov), who had served as the head of the Russian Orthodox Church since 1971, died. His replacement, sixty-one-year-old Aleksii II (Ridiger), was enthroned on June 10, at a time when the resurgence of the church was well underway. More energetic and forceful than his exhausted and passive predecessor, the new patriarch promised major changes in the church’s status and policies. A former parish priest, Aleksii II viewed the revitalization of the parish and the religious education of the Russian people as among the church’s highest priorities. “The greatest wound inflicted by the Communist dictatorship,” he said, shortly after his enthronement, “was lack of spirituality.”31 “All other evils,” he noted, “were the result of the systematic and total eradication from the souls and consciousness of the people of the very notion of spirituality.” Spiritual consciousness, he maintained, formed the common basis of humanity.
But if the new patriarch’s early messages promised the resurgence of the church, as well as hopes of building closer connections to the Russian people—actions Yakunin endorsed—other aspects of Aleksii II’s portfolio offered more troublesome prospects for what might lay ahead. His education, life as a priest, and rise within the church hierarchy had taken place during the Soviet period, experiences that shaped his world outlook. He had ascended to the patriarchy as a compromise candidate. Having served as bishop of Tallinn for nearly three decades, and for the previous five years as bishop of Leningrad and Novgorod, the new patriarch had made many concessions to the political authorities.32 Yet he also expressed a willingness to change with the times, learn from the past, and meet the spiritual needs of the Russian people during times of rapid change and economic instability. In helping to rebuild the church after seven decades of oppression, he knew he faced a formidable task.
Second, only a few months after the new patriarch’s enthronement came the shocking murder of Fr. Aleksandr Men, Yakunin’s spiritual mentor and longtime friend. Several months before his murder, Men had taken part in a symposium in Germany titled the “Individual and Mass Consciousness.”33 In the opening address to the symposium, the well-known Kyrgyz novelist Chinghiz Aitmatov spoke about mass systems of belief as the bedrock on which totalitarian governments were built. Aitmatov worried about present trends in the Soviet Union. “We are going through a difficult period, a time of troubles, which is assaulting our self-image,” he said. “Many in our society want to put an end to this discourse” and revert to a less anxious time, when the state told people what to think.34
During the discussion following Aitmatov’s presentation, Fr. Aleksandr spoke about the dignity of the individual, which, he noted, could not be separated from a person’s spiritual well-being. Mass thinking, he emphasized, invariably led to the degradation of the individual and to a general impoverishment, which Fr. Aleksandr likened “to amputating the foot or hand from the body” or divorcing one from one’s own spiritual essence.35 Recognizing and strengthening this reciprocal relationship and overcoming the attractions of mass society, Fr. Aleksandr said, presented Russia with a pathway forward. Affirming the dignity of the human being offered Russia the opportunity “to build a new paradigm” that would serve the country well in the future.36 His remarks at the symposium reiterated the importance of “freedom of conscience” as a fundamental human right, which Fr. Gleb Yakunin similarly viewed as essential to the development of an open and democratic society.
Fr. Aleksandr’s unexpected death and the failure to discover the culprits made it more important than ever for the state to protect the sanctity of the individual. This required stronger laws that affirmed the right to freedom of conscience, laws that safeguarded people from state incursion into their spiritual beliefs and actions. The creation of such a system necessitated not only new ways of thinking about the laws but also an investigation into the Soviet past and why the government had so willfully violated freedom of conscience.
In the early 1990s, when religious belief had taken on new meaning in the Soviet Union, how might the political system provide future protections against government intrusion? What obstacles needed to be removed in order to guarantee freedom of conscience? These were serious, controversial issues confronting the legislative arm of the government, and they greatly concerned Fr. Gleb Yakunin. Having successfully won a seat in the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies in the spring of 1990, he soon found himself in the middle of an effort to address these questions on several fronts.
Remodeling the State
Until 1989, the 1929 Law on Religious Associations governed the laws on religion in the Soviet Union. By this statute, the state allowed religious gatherings to take place only within buildings located on the grounds of a church registered with the government. The law had prohibited churches from conducting various activities, including reaching beyond the narrow confines of those establishments, engaging in charitable activities, teaching religious subjects to children at home, publishing and distributing religious materials, and proselytizing one’s faith beyond the physical boundaries of the grounds of the church itself. Some people breached these restrictions, but by doing so, they faced arrest and prosecution that often resulted in long prison sentences.37
Given the new status of the church and perestroika’s attempts to revitalize religious beliefs, the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Soviet Union proceeded to write a new law on freedom of conscience in 1989. Deputies knew the task was urgent in these new conditions, but finalizing a draft of the law went slowly.38 After much discussion, debate, and revision, the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies completed its task, and on October 9, 1990, a new law on Freedom of Conscience went into effect, extending its coverage to the entire Soviet Union.39
Meanwhile, following the general elections in the spring of 1990, the newly formed Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Federation commenced work on its own law on freedom of conscience. A newly created and loosely organized group calling itself the Russian Christian Democratic Movement spearheaded this effort.40 Three people made up the leadership of the movement, two priests and an Orthodox layperson: Fr. Gleb Yakunin, Fr. Viacheslav Polosin, a prominent Orthodox pastor, and Viktor Aksiuchits, a layperson and coeditor of the religious-philosophical journal Vybor (Choice).41 Knowing they were in competition with the Soviet committee, Yakunin, Polosin, and Aksiuchits rushed to finish their task.42 On September 24, 1990, they produced a first draft for presentation to the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Federation, whose delegates, for the most part, received it enthusiastically. After going through several rounds of amendments, the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Federation officially adopted the new law on October 25, more than two weeks after the Soviet law went into effect. The Russian law was similar, although in some ways, it was less restrictive than the Soviet version. Crucially, both the Russian and the Soviet laws offered radically different conceptions of the church and the state than those of the preceding sixty-one years.
In the short term, the simultaneous existence of the two different laws created an ambiguous, confusing situation about which law had precedence.43 The dilemma, however, would soon be resolved by two circumstances: the Russian Republic’s growing power and authority and the eventual demise of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the conceptions of religious freedom and the independence of the person warrant brief consideration and a comparison of each of the statutes.
Pre-1990 Soviet law, as the legal scholar Harold J. Berman has written, played a parental and educational role. Its purpose was to “guide, discipline, and protect.”44 It treated the individual less like an autonomous human being with autonomous desires and ideas and more like a dependent member of a collective in which the citizen was part of an uncompleted social order. The new Soviet law had a different purpose. In 1988, the chair of the Council for Religious Affairs, likely reflecting Gorbachev’s thinking, said that the government had to rectify the wrongs of the past, particularly the treatment of religious believers.45
Having learned from the mistakes of Soviet history, both the Soviet and Russian laws defined the individual as an independent being capable of following their own desires and beliefs, allowing each citizen to decide their “own attitude towards religion” and to “confess any religion” or “not to confess any religion.”46 In asserting this legal claim, both laws repudiated the policies on religion that had served as centerpieces of Soviet ideology.
The 1990 Soviet law declared the “equality of all citizens independently of their relationship to religion” (Part 1, Article 6). It thus rescinded the previous claim that the party represented the most enlightened, leading group in society and gave much wider scope to the individual’s formulation of his or her religious beliefs. The law removed the source of this authority from the Communist Party and placed it in the citizenry, firmly stating that the “government, its agencies, and its officials are not to interfere in questions belonging to citizens in their relationship to religion” (Part 1, Article 8).47
Previously, the term “freedom of conscience” (svoboda sovesti) was understood in a contradictory fashion. At times, as the legal scholar Giovanni Codevilla notes, in Soviet jurisprudence, “freedom of conscience” had meant the freedom to believe or not to believe; at other times, the term had signified the obligation of the citizen to free oneself from religious prejudices.48 For many decades, in order to foster this freedom from religion, the state had permitted the publication and dissemination of atheistic materials only. In Soviet constitutional law, “freedom of conscience” thus had a double meaning: the 1977 Soviet Constitution reaffirmed a citizen’s right to believe or not to believe, but it expressed the citizen’s responsibility to overcome what the party conceived as superstitious, irrational religious thinking.
Both the newly written Russian and Soviet laws removed the ambiguity, giving citizens the right to hold and develop their own religious beliefs.49 In the Soviet version, however, “freedom of conscience” did not apply to everyone; it specifically applied only to citizens of the Soviet Union; the Russian law did not make this distinction.50 Moreover, the Russian law affirmed this right in a much broader context than did the Soviet law: “Citizens of the Russian Republic, foreign citizens, and stateless persons may enjoy the right to freedom of religion individually, as well as in concert with each other” (Part 1, Article 3).
By abrogating the party’s preeminent position in Soviet society, the 1990 Russian law, like its Soviet counterpart, resulted in a radical social and political reshuffling. The state, not the party, had sovereignty. No longer did the law forbid parents to raise their children in their own religious beliefs; it allowed them to provide religious instruction in the home. Further, the 1990 Russian law proclaimed “the right of every citizen to freely choose, profess, and disseminate one’s religious and atheistic beliefs or not to profess any, and to act in accordance with their beliefs, subject to the laws of the state” (Part 1, Article 3).51 The most important Christian festivals of Christmas and Easter, both of which the former Soviet calendar had not observed, became national holidays. The Russian law affirmed the right of citizens “to receive, acquire, and use religious literature and to participate in religious rites” in a variety of settings, including the military, medical facilities, children’s homes and orphanages, institutions for older people, those with disabilities, and prisoners (“as well as in pre-trial detention and penal isolation cells).”52
In their members’ discussions, in both the Soviet and Russian legislatures, education quickly became one of the most hotly debated topics, and the two bodies took different roads. The issue concerned how the nation’s schools might be transformed to fit the democratic aspirations of the Gorbachev era. The Soviet law no longer required teachers to incorporate an atheistic worldview during regular school hours; it prohibited the teaching of either religious or atheistic ideals. It also required teachers to express neutral attitudes toward these subjects and forbade them to express their personal beliefs.53
The 1990 Russian law took a different, less restrictive position. The law reaffirmed the secular nature of the educational system, but it allowed both religious and atheistic classes to be optional offerings in state schools. As part of the regular curriculum, schools could provide “informational classes on religion, but the performance of religious rites in these classes were to be strictly prohibited.”54 As one might expect, the new law had a dramatic effect on classroom instruction and school textbooks. As the state implemented the new law, teachers throughout the school system fundamentally had to adjust to these new ways of thinking, changes that they could not have easily implemented.
In allowing the Orthodox Church to recover from a history of repression and to assert its capacity to engage Russian society, the committee that prepared the 1990 Russian law had to strengthen the church’s economic stability. Since the late 1920s, the church had no right to own its buildings and landed property. In previous antireligion campaigns of the Stalin and Khrushchev eras, the police had confiscated sacred objects, precious stones, and religious art, some of which state agents had destroyed and others they had transferred to museums.55 The question of how to strengthen the church’s weak physical capacity was a major issue, and it had large future implications for the church and the state.56
The 1990 Russian law restored religious organizations’ right to own property, acquire property on their own account, and develop land for their own purposes (Part 3, Article 26). An entire section of the new Russian law, which dealt with property and financial rights, gave religious organizations ownership of their buildings, cultural objects, religious artifacts, icons, monetary donations, and “all other property necessary for their activities” (Part 3, Article 26). Some thorny issues concerning property rights would soon emerge, but for the immediate future, the new Russian law offered the church the chance to regain its economic footing.57 The law provided only a legal framework, not a detailed plan, for this physical recovery; it left related issues unresolved in a field certain to provoke heated controversy.
In his opening presentation of the new draft law to the Russian parliament, the committee’s chair, Fr. Viacheslav Polosin, reminded the deputies of the history of church and state relations since the revolution and the state’s brutal attempt to extirpate religion from the consciousness of the Russian people. In 1917, he reminded the deputies, Russia had almost 100,000 Orthodox priests; in 1939, their number had fallen to roughly 500. In 1917, the country had 120 bishops; in 1939, only 4 remained. In 1918, the Bolsheviks shut down all Orthodox ecclesiastical establishments.58 Stalin labeled his Second Five-Year Plan (1933–1937) an “atheistic plan,” which sought to remove the word “God” from the Russian vocabulary. By 1936, Russian priests no longer had legal status, but were “outside the law” and considered parasites. Polosin also asked the deputies to recall that since 1929, the state had forbidden the church to reach out to those in ill health, help people in their local communities, and collect funds for the poor. Khrushchev’s massive closure of Orthodox Churches, following their reopening during and after World War II, continued the Soviet state’s long-term goal of destroying religious beliefs.
Fr. Viacheslav Polosin told the deputies that they had the choice between two different conceptions of state policy. The first was the Stalinist conception, which, in its official declaration of the separation of the state from the church, in effect meant the government’s sovereignty over the church. Such thinking had precipitated the violent assault on the church and its priesthood. The second conception, Polosin said, could be found in the draft law that he, Yakunin, and Aksiuchits had prepared and that lay before them. It needed their support and it underscored the new law’s fundamental guarantees against state power. Most important, by clearly defining the rights of believers, the proposed law provided strong protections against the state’s infringement of those rights. Furthermore, Polosin emphasized, the draft law provided legal status to religious organizations upon which the state could not legitimately infringe. While he may have oversimplified the choices laying before the deputies, Polosin underscored the seriousness of the present moment. The passage of the proposed new law by the Parliament on September 15, 1990, by a vote of 152 to 16 in support of its adoption, with 20 deputies abstaining, signified enthusiastic support for the second conception Polosin had outlined.59
As a member of the committee that wrote the original draft, Fr. Gleb Yakunin spoke immediately after Fr. Viacheslav Polosin. The proposed new law offered the church an opportunity to make itself more outward-looking and dynamic at every level of its operations. “From the point of view of juridical ethics,” Yakunin said, “perhaps the law is incomplete, but from the point of view of its content, after many decades, this is the first law in our country that is truly democratic, truly protective of the rights of freedom of conscience, and is in full accordance with the human rights articulated in the Helsinki Accords.”60 The law, he claimed, upended the history of church-state relations in the Soviet Union and potentially prepared the way for a momentous step forward.
The passage of this law signified much more than a legislative act, Yakunin told the deputies; it constituted new ways of thinking, promising to free the citizen from the mental servility that characterized the Soviet era. He expressed faith in the capacity of the Russian people, who, once freed from bonds of servitude to the state, would unleash their democratic spirit. But for this process to gain momentum, Fr. Gleb believed a moral and spiritual revolution was essential. Given the previous history of the Soviet Union, Fr. Gleb’s faith in an inherent democratic spirit revealed a certain naiveté about the prerequisites of democracy, and this failure to understand the strength of opposing forces exposed one of his weaknesses. He consistently held out hope in people and their capacity to change, to seek the truth, and to develop a better society than the one presently holding them back.61 After reading the draft of the law, a deputy from a Moscow district expressed a similar faith in the potential outcome: “We are taking a step to return Russia to its true heritage and civilization, to place emphasis on the moral and spiritual development of the country, and to liberate Russia from the hold of a totalitarian regime over the thought of humanity.”62
Fr. Gleb knew well that mental and spiritual liberation from the tyranny of a despotic regime depended on more than the passage of a new law. Such liberation also required a fresh look at the reasons underlying the party’s control over the mind, an understanding of the historical forces that precipitated “mastery over the human spirit,” as Czesław Miłosz referred to the flight from reason to illusion. A tyrannical government appealed to reason, Miłosz noted, while at the same time, it embraced and propagated a collective magic, a collapse of the boundaries between truth and fantasy.63 What had led to this cataclysm? In Yakunin’s view, the historical factors needed elucidation in order for Russia to transition from a tyrannical society to a more democratic one.
More than a decade earlier, Yakunin had written an essay that was published and circulated in Russian samizdat, “In Service to the Cult (The Moscow Patriarchate and Stalin’s Cult of Personality)” (K sluzhenii kul′tu [Moskovskaia Patriarkhiia i kult′ lichnosti Stalina]). In 1989, the essay was republished in a volume of essays, On the Road to Freedom of Conscience (Na puti k svobode sovesti), where it attracted a large readership. In his essay, Yakunin explored some of the foundations of this mental captivity, whose chains of bondage Russians needed to break. “Never, in fact, has its subject—the Moscow Patriarchate and Stalin’s cult of personality—been so topical as it is today,” he wrote.64
Yakunin’s “In Service to the Cult” covered a wide range of subjects related to his main theme, which was the connection between the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church and the adoration of Stalin. In identifying the sources of the “cult,” Yakunin put in first place the slavish devotion of the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church to authoritarianism. The patriarch had repeatedly showered Stalin with praise, as exemplified by the patriarch’s extravagant, worshipful testimony on December 21, 1949, at Stalin’s seventieth birthday celebration. Patriarch Aleksii I assured the Soviet leader of the church’s profound devotion and allegiance that had never faltered over the many years of Stalin’s rule. He begged the “Great Leader” never to doubt the love of the church and its servitors and the sincere gratitude the people felt for the Soviet leader, who “had selflessly devoted his life” to the “freedom and well-being of the people.”65 In his official letters, the patriarch glorified the Soviet leader with various epithets: “Supreme Leader,” “Leader of Genius,” “The Great Head of Our State,” “Great Builder of the People’s Happiness,” and “Wise Leader of the People’s Well-Being.”66 These words, Fr. Gleb wrote, conveyed much more than political loyalty and praise; they expressed a religious awe and reverential feeling of devotion that the patriarch consistently bestowed on the Soviet leader.
How could this be, Yakunin asked, when the same Soviet leader had put to death many thousands of Orthodox priests, murdered nearly all Orthodox bishops, killed large numbers of believers, and plundered their churches? At the time that he wrote his essay, Yakunin found the same sacrificial devotion in the homage paid by church leaders to Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet head of state from 1965 to 1982. Even more broadly, this sacred fidelity characterized the entire leadership of the church, a phenomenon that Yakunin’s essay attempted to explore, and the reason for its persistence in Russia’s religious culture. He saw the “cult” as a sickness, which first had to be diagnosed and, subsequently, extirpated.
Part of the reason for the “cult” was historical. Yakunin believed that the church had started making compromises in the decade following the revolution, when it faced an extremely difficult situation. Although he praised Patriarch Tikhon, the newly elected and revered church leader in the early 1920s, for his truthful and courageous stand in defense of a suffering people, Yakunin traced to Tikhon’s time the origins of a long list of compromises perpetuated by church leaders. Yakunin simplistically attributed blame to Patriarch Tikhon, but too easily glossed over the complexities of that early period, as well as Tikhon’s repentance near the end of his life.67 Fr. Gleb was more convincing in his depictions of subsequent leaders and their boundless capacity for pretension and lies. Beginning with the ascension of Metropolitan Sergei in the late 1920s, many of these phenomena were useful to the state, and they fit Stalin’s pathological phobias. But they poisoned the church’s integrity and compromised its need always to tell the truth. Yakunin maintained that church leaders promoted lies not simply because of fear of destruction and the desire to save the church from extinction, but also because of their wish to recover “symphoniia,” this Byzantine concept of state power in which the church served as the government’s partner, not as its chief critic or a subservient body. Church leaders failed to “comprehend that the ‘symphonic’ era was gone forever. They faced a new type of state—one fundamentally hostile to the church—and relations with it required an entirely different direction. The leaders of the church did not see that the contemporary position of the church had become quite similar to its situation in the early years of Christianity.”68
According to Yakunin, by the late 1930s, the strategy of the state had undergone a change. No longer did the Soviet government seriously consider itself a revolutionary order; the slogan “Workers of the world unite” boldly printed at the top of Soviet newspapers was generally ignored. In practice, the government replaced earlier ideological promises with nationalistic ideas and policies, which became stronger with the onset of World War II. In resurrecting it from near extinction in 1943, Stalin saw the church as a means of bringing the Russian people together around his nationalistic vision. According to Yakunin, the “renaissance” of the church during the war evoked in the patriarchate the belief in a miraculous occurrence, “willed by God,” after terrible years of isolation in the desert. Divine Providence had intervened, and, in this historic event, Stalin took on the mantle of “Deliverer.” Church leaders referred to him by new appellations such as “Wise One,” “God’s Deliverer,” and the “God-given Supreme Leader.” The patriarch, in turn, received special privileges—awards, decorations, medals, and other social distinctions that he and his closest hierarchs quickly learned to savor.
Yakunin’s essay is most insightful in its analysis of the psychological effects on the leaders of the church, which their relationships with Stalin produced. In his many meetings with leading hierarchs of the Orthodox Church, Stalin made a strong personal impression on them. Their growing reverence for him had a profound psychological effect on their vision for the future. Seduced by Stalin and the nationalism he espoused, leaders of the church began to think of him as a “new Constantine,” and of Moscow as the “city of Constantine,” the chosen city, which, in its splendor and beauty, would lead Russia’s revival towards unparalleled “power and glory.” The spectacular celebrations during the eight-hundred-year anniversary of the founding of Moscow (1947) promoted this vision in the minds of Orthodox leaders. Yakunin cited an article written by the Orthodox priest Mikhail Zernov, published in the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, as exemplifying the Church’s messianic outlook:
But Moscow, the ancient, 800-year-old Moscow, at the same time eternally young and beautiful, mightier than ever, still glows with the gold of the Kremlin’s cupolas. Its glory grows more and more prominent in the world, surpassing the glory of the most glorious cities of all times and of all nations.…
We believe that until the end of time shalt thou be the great stronghold of faith, truth, and liberty.69
Yakunin included other examples of these messianic hopes centered on the city of Moscow in this anniversary year. For example, according to Bishop N. A. Khar′iuzov, “the ancient capitals of other states—Paris, London, Venice—did not experience everything that Moscow went through during its eight-hundred-year history. Their development was gradual, evolutionary, while the development of Moscow took place by leaps-and-bounds. This historical feature has left a corresponding imprint on the people of our homeland. Many times, it was thought that our people were on the edge of death, but always after the difficult experiences, they became stronger, more persistent, and more robust.”70
This messianic vision addressed both the past and the future, and it tied the Russian Orthodox Church ever more closely—politically and spiritually—to the Russian state. Ideologically, “Red Moscow” was again proclaimed as the “Third Rome,” whose star shone in bright contrast to the decrepit see of Constantinople and degenerate Rome. This was a delusion, but, Yakunin argued, it had long-lasting effects. It promoted among many church leaders a deepening antipathy toward Catholics and, more particularly, toward the West. The delusion also led to a disregard for Russia’s religious martyrs of the twentieth century, “whose blood had turned Russia crimson.” Their humble, sacrificial service to the Russian people stood in sharp contrast to the worship of power that the church hierarchy had embraced. Moreover, Russian martyrs offered rich sources of “spiritual and moral wealth” for the church, which still retained their memory; their lives and teachings contained the “promise and hope for the church’s true rebirth.” The church’s seeming indifference to these holy martyrs offered clear proof, Yakunin said, of its spiritual apathy about one of the richest sources of moral regeneration in the church’s treasury.71
His belief in the significance of the holy martyrs to the church’s future development did not constitute a recent phenomenon. In 1975, Yakunin, Viktor Kapitanchuk, and Lev Regel′son wrote to Patriarch Pimen, making an “Appeal for the Glorification of Russian Martyrs in the USSR.”72 They sent the letter on the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Patriarch Tikhon, whom they praised for his courageous support for freedom of the church and the church’s separation from the Bolshevik government. This “gentle and formidable” patriarch stood as a prime example of the “light of Truth” during a time marked by falsehood and deception.73
The letter writers proposed canonization for six additional church leaders who sacrificed themselves for their faith. They included Metropolitan Pyotr, the steadfast church leader who, in the late fifteenth century, had spoken truth to power and suffered the consequences; Metropolitan Veniamin of Petrograd (d. 1922), a self-sacrificing confessor who, in the great famine of the early 1920s, raised money for the suffering people, while refusing to comply with Bolshevik efforts to confiscate church treasures; Metropolitan Kirill (Smirnov, d. 1937), who worked tirelessly to restore the church’s spiritual unity, after its split in the late 1920s; Bishop Arseni (d. 1945), the visionary priest, teacher, and missionary who devoted his life to service and to succor for the poor; Bishop Afanasi (Sakharov, d. 1962), a spiritual giant, teacher, and preacher, who, after the Russian Revolution, fought for the preservation of the church and, while serving time in the Gulag, gave spiritual comfort to those in pain; and Seraphim of Sarov (d. 1833), one of Russia’s greatest saints, beloved by the people and widely known for his contemplative prayers, love for people of all ranks, spiritual advice, and the simplicity of his life. According to Yakunin and his associates, none of these ever compromised the church, unlike Metropolitan Sergei (Stragorodsky) and later members of the church hierarchy, whose alliance with the Soviet government did great harm to the Orthodox Church, its integrity, and its role as a servant to the people. Suffering greatly for their faith, each of the martyrs presented an image of the church as “courageous, self-sacrificing, free, and filled to the brim with beauty and truth, an image sorely needed in a “world becoming increasingly secularized.”74 The themes running through the lives of each of the martyrs they mentioned was their service to people in need and their opposition to violence. The memory of these sacred martyrs stood as the diametrical opposite to the “cult of power,” a memory that the present leadership of the church sought to extinguish.
In the early 1990s, the issues Yakunin raised in his essay on the cult of power remained very much alive. Remnants of the church’s participation in the cult of Stalin continued to define its leadership. To find the true church, religious believers had to break through “the mounds of lies, deceit, and slander” that plagued the recent history of the Orthodox Church.75 In his essay, Yakunin called for the church to repent publicly of its past behavior, which he believed essential to the recovery of its sacred mission. Unless the church purified itself, Yakunin maintained, it was incapable of providing the kind of moral leadership the country required for its rebirth. The Moscow Patriarchate had to take a truthful look into its history in the twentieth century and summon the courage “to peer into the abyss of [Russia’s] moral and spiritual degradation” to which it had contributed.76 It was essential that the patriarchate open the closed pages of its past in the twentieth century. It needed to admit to and ask forgiveness for placing the appetite for power and privilege at the top of its agenda, relegating its sacred teachings to a secondary position.
Whether leaders of the church had the willingness and fortitude to address their complicity with political power in 1991–1992 remained an open question. The act of looking more deeply into the Soviet past threatened to invoke historical ghosts that to some church leaders had best be left hidden. Fr. Gleb Yakunin was willing to push forward in an attempt to free the church from its servility and from its reluctance to open itself to self-examination. In the process, his actions were certain to provoke controversy. As in the past, he neither feared the consequences nor worried about the antagonisms that such an inquiry invited.