CHAPTER 10 Priest and Politician
In the years 1992 through 1997, Russia continued its transition from the Soviet Union to an independent state. In terms of political stability, the period had significant peaks and valleys. These years included the consolidation of power under President Yeltsin’s leadership, separatist conflicts over the province of Chechnya, terrorism, economic dislocation, a nationalistic political culture, and the resurgence of an increasingly powerful KGB (FSB). These and other changes in Russia’s political framework scrambled the country’s identity. Whether the changes would lead to a new political order remained an open question. “It seems that the Russian people need the protection of the state, but they do not want to serve it,” observed the Russian sociologist Yuri Levada, director of the nongovernmental Levada Center in Moscow.1
In these years, the fundamental theme in Fr. Gleb Yakunin’s life concerned his conflict with the Moscow Patriarchate. It was not a new clash, as this book has attested. But in the 1990s, his disagreements with the patriarchate reached a crescendo and led to a complete break between the priest and the church itself. Yakunin had never compromised his belief in speaking the truth, and his dislike of the hierarchy’s willingness to support the political power of the state led him to take extreme positions, perhaps too extreme for his own well-being. In the 1990s, he exhibited both of these strengths and weaknesses, for which he would pay a large personal price.
The 1990s began with two developments that set the stage for Fr. Gleb’s actions and his thoughts about how the Orthodox Church should move forward. The first concerned the explosion of interest in religion among the Russian population. The dissolution of the Soviet government and, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the revelations about the Soviet system left a large ideological space that many political and religious groups rapidly endeavored to fill.2 The end of the Soviet era raised a series of additional questions whose answers remained uncertain. As the Russian state sought to remake itself, what remnants of the massive Soviet secularization program would shape the future? What religious denominations would enjoy the greatest success and speak most effectively to the Russian people? As the Russian Orthodox Church regained its status as Russia’s traditional religion, what political and social role would it play?3
It is incorrect to assert that the Russian people lived in a religious and political vacuum, as Western analysts have often claimed. A large number of indigenous groups had functioned for many years, despite the government’s persecutions. They made for a wide assortment of religious perspectives and faiths operating across the religious landscape, making Russia one of Europe’s most religiously diverse societies.
The second development that had a large bearing on Yakunin’s life concerned the regeneration of Russia. A national rebirth had already begun in the 1980s. Even before the escalation of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, this national rebirth reached a crescendo. Nationalist groups proliferated; they offered a sense of psychological and social stability during a time when Russians, unmoored from their previous ideological bearings, sought new means of support. Further, during a time of uncertainty about the future, state officials viewed the church as a prime vehicle for enhancing national unity. Increasingly, in the mid-1990s, government officials connected the reconstruction of the Russian state with the revival of the Orthodox Church. “Which Russia will be inherited by our grandchildren depends on us,” Patriarch Aleksii II said, “and it is only on the basis of the Orthodox religion that the Motherland can regain its magnificence.”4
Not only Patriarch Aleksii II but also government leaders perceived the Orthodox Church as a primary source of moral authority. The church replaced the previous code of morality taught during Soviet times that required ultimate loyalty to the Communist Party. The regeneration of the Russian state, as the Russian writers Aleksandr Kyrlezhev and Konstantin Troitskii observed, went hand in hand with the “ascendancy of the church in social consciousness, which, in turn, connected to the country’s historical experiences and offered a way of overcoming the feeling of national decline. To move beyond the Soviet past meant—in part—to resurrect the destroyed church, assist in its revival, return its possessions, and, by these means, atone for the sins of sacrilege and apostasy.”5 The revival of the Orthodox Church and its promotion in Russia’s social consciousness also opened the door to diverse forms of Russian nationalism. They ranged widely across the political spectrum from those who equated the reconstruction of the Russian nation with opening the country to Western political and economic ideas, on one extreme, to radical fundamentalists who advocated closing the country to outsiders, restoring the monarchy, and putting to death the proponents of ecumenical ideas, on the other.6
In the months before the end of the Soviet Union, numerous groups and individuals had begun looking to the future. Fr. Gleb Yakunin and several of his associates in the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies envisioned the beginning of a new era fundamentally different from the Soviet past. In 1990, three members, Fr. Gleb Yakunin, the writer Viktor Aksiuchits, and Fr. Viacheslav Polosin, founded the Russian Christian Democratic Movement, modeled in part after similar political bodies in Western Europe. Others, including Fr. Georgii Edel′stein, soon joined the group (see figure 10.1). Although their Western counterparts had derived their main ideas from the social philosophy of nineteenth-century Roman Catholicism, the Russian movement drew from a different base. It looked to Russia’s own philosophers and theologians of the early twentieth century.7 The Russian Christian Democratic Movement (RCDM), therefore, operated within a different framework than did its kindred political groups in the West. Although Yakunin left the movement in 1992, the core principles on which he helped establish it remained central to his aspirational goals throughout the next decade.
Fundamental to his thinking and his worldview, these principles also helped shape the course he pursued. Although he had embraced several of them in the past, the five principles contained in the founding document of the Russian Christian Democratic Movement constituted his vision of how Russia should construct its future.
The movement’s most basic principle underscored the priority of developing a “religious-political renaissance of the individual, society, and nation.”8 Accomplishing this goal required an unqualified rejection of the communist ideology, which had based the entire social order on an atheistic and materialistic view of the world. According to the founding document of the Russian Christian Democratic Movement, placing everything in the service of a radical and godless doctrine of power had served as an ideology of destruction. Aspiring to construct a new world and a new way of being, this former ideology, in practice, had injected into Russian society the “spirit of malice” as a means of destroying the spiritual roots of life. Communism, as the document read, “did not seek to destroy [Russian] civilization so much as to destroy the spiritual beliefs of the human being.” To achieve this goal, Soviet communism replaced the God of Christianity with the god of material prosperity. The party lived with an illusion, because human fulfillment could not be achieved in this way; “step by step Communism aspired to destroy and re-forge everything on which was imprinted the godlike nature of the creativity of humankind.”9 In such a society, a person died young, although not from a physical death, but rather from the “destruction of the soul in life itself.”10
FIGURE 10.1. From left to right, Fr. Georgii Edel′stein, Fr. Gleb Yakunin, and Viktor Aksiuchits, early 1990s. Courtesy of the Keston Center for Religion, Politics, and Society, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.
The second principle of the RCDM concerned Christian politics. Having expressed determined opposition to the communist past, Yakunin, Aksiuchits, and Polosin contrasted the Christian view of national policy to its Soviet predecessor: “The freedom of the human personality, the value of each person separately, the priority of the interests of the person over any theory of social development—here are the chief characteristics of the Christian world understanding.… In the eternal and not the temporary capacity of the human personality lies the source of the principal difference between the Christian and the neo-pagan communist.”11
In making this claim, Yakunin and his colleagues did not draw a sharp line between the eternal and the earthly. Following the great nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Vladimir Sergeevich Solov′ev, they emphasized that Jesus Christ had united the two spheres.12 He had not turned his back on the world, as had leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church in the twentieth century, but embraced it. A fundamental duty of a Christian was to improve personally and then reach out to one’s neighbors and strive for their well-being. Such a process would begin with the internal moral improvement of the individual and then, after fully inculcating love and compassion into one’s inner being, reaching out to the world. The reformulation of laws and institutions in the direction of Christian truth, rather than through the protection of selfish motives, would be one means of completing the task that Yakunin and other leaders of the RCDM had in mind.13
The Christian thus had the moral duty to serve other people, selflessly and in the spirit of love, through politics and reform as well as social activities. This service had to begin, the founders of the RCDM repeatedly underscored, with the “internal, moral, and spiritual transformation of the human being.”14 They warned against radical political change, as their communist predecessors and other political activists had promoted. Their long-range program advocated the reverse—a slow, gradual, systematic process of development that took into account the social and economic conditions and the education of the Russian people. Political change ought to be “guided by the cold wisdom of experience over any kind of passionate enthusiasm based on blind and false faith.”15 In making this assertion, the founders rejected the many times in the history of Russia when passion had ruled and reason had been left by the wayside.
Third, as a central long-term goal, the RCDM aimed to build what it called a free society and a democratic government. The movement’s leaders considered this as “our moral duty,” but they also realized the difficulty of the task. They understood that the construction of such a society, given Russia’s history of the past seventy years, could not be completed over a short period. Thus, they labeled this principle “creative democracy,” signifying the whole process of laying the groundwork for the free society and democratic government they had in mind. As a beginning step, it was essential to have an educational system free of ideology that provided knowledge and valued independent thinking. Next, the people had to understand and appreciate the meaning of freedom. Freedom did not consist of the “unleashing” of one’s desires. It could not be imposed by external forces, but had to come from within—from developing internal connections, teaching self-discipline, holding oneself accountable to the laws, and knowing the limits of the laws. Freedom required a “high level of legal awareness,” and if such an understanding of freedom did not exist, then “ ‘democracy’ led either to anarchy or despotism.”16 The leaders of the RCDM maintained that the communist regime had crushed the skills essential to a democracy. These skills had to be painstakingly cultivated by the educational process in order to prepare the people for the kind of independent judgment a creative democracy required.17
Fourth, a fundamental principle of the RCDM concerned its emphasis on “personalism.” The concept owed a great deal to the writings of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev and the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain.18 Both philosophers viewed the human being as a free personality whose primary responsibility lay in service to others, in care for one’s neighbors, and in putting such an obligation above the fulfillment of one’s own needs. This focus on a person’s responsibility to make the world a better place and fulfill God’s plan for humankind distinguished “personalism” from “individualism.”19 The church’s rejection of the world, Yakunin maintained, had led to Russia’s tragedy in the twentieth century; if the Orthodox Church followed the same path in the future, it would lead to “an even more terrible tragedy.”20
The Christian Democratic ideal stood in stark contrast to the communist ideal of building a “heaven on earth” in some remote future. It was no accident that the latter had become “a place of prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and a system of the total suppression of personhood, and the endless oppression of people.”21 In contrast, the Christian Democratic ideal proclaimed the unique value of each person and the recognition of “two spheres of life” (the heavenly and the earthly) while calling for the absence of violence and a demonstration of love for the entire human community. The leaders of the RCDM did not aspire to make Christianity into a state religion; rather, they hoped to infuse the above-mentioned Christian ideals into laws, state policies, social organizations, and economic relationships. In practical terms, the RCDM’s approach advocated freedom of speech, respect for the sanctity of the person; the development of civil society; freedom of assembly; the renunciation of violence between classes, nationalities, and religious denominations; the abolition of the Council for Religious Affairs; and “the ideals of love, kindness, and sobornost′ [conciliarity] in all spheres of human activity”22
Yakunin and the other founders of the RCDM called the fifth philosophical principle “enlightened patriotism.” It was a term opposite to the nationalism that Soviet leaders had promulgated since the Stalin era and that Yakunin had seen reemerging in various forms at the end of the Soviet period. As a political principle, nationalism proclaims that a common culture serves to unify all members of a society; in its extreme form, it forces all people in a given country to identify with a common culture viewed as superior to foreigner cultures.23 Yakunin and his associates viewed “enlightened patriotism” much differently. They defined it as “love for one’s native land,” which required a sober look at one’s own people, both their achievements and their deficiencies. When problems were identified, enlightened patriotism sought to heal them through reason and repentance. At its core, enlightened patriotism was the “consciousness and recognition of as well as personal responsibility for one’s history, culture, customs, and spiritual heritage.”24 Enlightened patriotism had an additional dimension, which the founders of the RCDM defined as the “rebirth of universal sensitivity, sympathy, and the openness of the Russian people.” It signified a “selfless, sacrificial patriotic consciousness that avoided the temptation of self-delusion.”25
Instead of enmity, it expressed respect for other cultures. Moreover, enlightened patriotism conveyed belief in the creative strength of the Russian people who, once fully liberated from the stifling yoke of Bolshevik tyranny, were capable of building a new and better Russia. At the conclusion of their founding document, the leaders of the RCDM cited the poet Alexander Pushkin and his enduring faith in the Russian people and quoted the following lines from his epic poem “Poltava”:
But in her lust for retribution,
Having endured the blows
of late,
Rus took up arms. And as
a hammer
Shatters glass, she forged steel blades.26
The principles expressed in the founding document of the RCDM served as a basis for a debate within the church between Fr. Gleb Yakunin and Patriarch Aleksii II over opposing views of Russia’s future. The Russian Orthodox Church was composed of different factions and perspectives, and the patriarch’s views did not necessarily convey the dominant ideas about the country’s future course. As the proclaimed leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, his public pronouncements, however, carried a great deal of weight, both internally and internationally. Since Fr. Gleb Yakunin and Patriarch Aleksii II did not share the same political platform, and they held vastly different positions of authority, an antagonistic relationship soon developed between the head of the Russian Orthodox Church and his chief critic. To a significant degree, their dissension evolved over differing conceptions of the role of the church in Russian society.
The Debate
Fr. Gleb Yakunin
By 1992, Yakunin had served for four years as head priest in the town of Shchyolkovo. It had been five years since his release from exile in Siberia and more than a decade since he had faced the intense daily pressure from the KGB’s scrutiny of his activities. Like many of his contemporaries, he continued to find challenging the adjustment to a political environment much different from the one he had known for most of his life. In 1992, he also faced a personal dilemma. As a participant in the new Russian Parliament, he had found political activity appealing. It offered the rare opportunity to integrate his religious ideals directly into the political arena in order to advance the principles he had articulated earlier as a leader of the Russian Christian Democratic Movement. In a dispute with other RCDM leaders over support for a new All-Union treaty to solidify the Soviet regime as well as their desire to turn the movement into a political party, he had left the movement in late August 1991. Yet he wanted to be involved in politics, although he did not know how he might best serve. In this uncertainty lay his personal dilemma.
As a priest in Shchyolkovo, according to his daughter Mariia, Fr. Gleb had found a great deal of personal fulfillment. He had been extremely successful, she said, and she had repeatedly witnessed the personal relationships he had built with the members of his parish. She cited the testimonies of the parishioners, especially the priest Dmitrii, who served with him: “When he [Fr. Gleb] heard confessions, a long line formed before him, although other priests were also available. The people eagerly came to his worship services and confessions. His celebration of the liturgy was heartfelt. Whenever he returned from his duties elsewhere, parishioners were invariably happy to see their pastor and treated him with much affection.”27
Earlier, Fr. Gleb had criticized the Orthodox Church many times for its failures to reach out to people in the community, thereby leaving a large abyss between the church and Russian society, of which the Bolsheviks had taken advantage. As a priest, Fr. Gleb attempted to break down the walls between his church and the local community: “He was attentive to each person, gave them helpful advice, and built their trust, and his parishioners, seeing his steadfastness, did trust him.” Mariia Glebovna witnessed firsthand her father’s work as a pastor:
Fr. Gleb led many people to the faith, even those in the community who had once professed to be militant atheists. People saw in him a person who did not spare himself in selfless service to God. He never feared hardships, nor taking risks, nor enduring persecution. In the difficult years of the early 1990s, when all kinds of possibilities began to open up, his sermons instructed people on how to live. He gave practical advice to many families, in which he tried to cultivate Christian qualities of brother and sisterhood that helped the community live together in peace and care for one another.28
Because of his political activities, which led to repeated confrontations with the government and the Moscow Patriarchate, people rarely remembered that Fr. Gleb had been an ordained Orthodox priest. The political dimension of his life inadvertently created a one-sided view of his personality and major commitments. Nevertheless, in the early 1990s and throughout his career, Fr. Gleb firmly believed that he served Orthodox Christianity. “Few people talk about him as a priest,” said Mariia Glebovna; in addition to his political activism, “people should know that there was another dimension to him.”29
In 1992, facing the prospect of standing for elections to the Russian Parliament, Fr. Gleb had to make a crucial decision about his future: whether to continue serving as the priest in Shchyolkovo or to stand for office. At the time, he was recognized as arguably the most prominent religious dissident of the former Soviet Union, a principled and fearless opponent of the former Soviet regime, and a supporter of the Russian president Boris Yeltsin. As mentioned earlier, the previous August, he had stood with Yeltsin on the platform and called for the Russian people to reject the communist past, believing that Boris Yeltsin intended to carry the country in a democratic political direction. At the end of 1991, as the Soviet Union disintegrated, a delegation of scientists from the nearby town of Chernogolovka paid a visit to Fr. Gleb. The members of the group told him that they trusted and respected him, and they encouraged him to run for office from the district. Chernogolovka is a town located some twenty-seven miles northeast of Moscow. In the 1970s, it had served as the main scientific research center for the Soviet Academy of Sciences.30 Whether the visit of the delegation determined the path Fr. Gleb ultimately took is unclear, but it had a significant influence.31
Politically, Yakunin had to convert his personal principles into a specific strategy. The development of a flourishing society, he believed, called for a reformulation of the entire paradigm of Russian life. The change that he envisioned required the moral reconstruction of Russian society into one that built trust in individual citizens as well as between the citizenry and the government. Trust, he believed, could not be gained without bringing the Orthodox Church, which had been relegated to an oppressed position in the Soviet state, into a central place in Russian life. Its dramatically increased prominence, however, should not resemble the Orthodox Church of the past, but rather a radically different church built on repentance and humility. The church that he envisioned should draw on the best of Russia’s heritage—on compassion for the outcast, openness to the world, tolerance for dissenting views, separation from the government, and close adherence to the teachings of Jesus Christ. The perspectives came from Fr. Gleb’s interpretation of the Gospels and the writings of the early Church Fathers, notably St. John Chrysostom, on whom the Russian Christian Democratic Movement had also drawn.32 St. John had denounced abuses of power by the ecclesiastical and political authorities of his time. He had also maintained that Christ had come into the world not to reject it but to save it. The church, as Fr. Gleb emphasized, needed to follow his example and reach out to those who were suffering, downtrodden, and poor.
In addition, as the RCDM had stated, Yakunin emphasized the central importance of the independent mind, free of the self-confining ideological framework of the Soviet state. Education, therefore, would play a fundamental role in the development of Russian society.33 The Russian educational system had to promote freedom of thought and develop autonomous individuals who thought for themselves and questioned both state and ecclesiastical power, while promoting civic consciousness and a sense of responsibility for the whole society. An urgent need, therefore, was the abolition of all ideological organs that had thrived in the past, the party organizations that had dominated the upbringing of young people and narrowed their mental capacity.34 The mind had to be free from its captivity to official organs of the state and allowed to follow its own proclivities in service to the world.
Yakunin understood freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, and the development of civil society as interrelated goals. Both a flourishing Orthodox Church and a flourishing society should value the equality of religious faiths. As the 1990 law on freedom of conscience became a hotly debated topic in the Russian Parliament from 1993 to 1995, Yakunin was unwilling to compromise on the provisions of the original law, and he had President Yeltsin on his side.35 Neither sympathized with political blocs that advocated the necessity of restricting the religious rights of several non-Orthodox confessions.
To his disappointment, however, by the mid-1990s, Yakunin had become increasingly convinced of the Moscow Patriarchate’s inability and unwillingness to reform itself and to provide the moral leadership he believed essential to Russia’s regeneration.36 He believed that the Orthodox hierarchy, rather than leading the country to a new and healthier condition, constituted an impediment to the process of national renewal. The leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church, he maintained, had not freed itself from its previous loyalty to Soviet agencies. It retained the negative psychological attributes of the former Soviet Union in its extreme nationalism, its enmity toward the West, its defensiveness, and its suppression of dissent. His comments were harshly critical; they signified impatience and indignation in response to the hierarchy’s behavior toward him, which will be discussed in due course.
In 1995, Fr. Gleb wrote two letters to President Yeltsin in which he disparaged the leadership of the Orthodox Church for its ultraconservative and irresponsible actions. He wrote the letters in despair, but also in anger, and they contained acrimonious accusations of the patriarchate’s unwillingness to meet the spiritual and social needs of the Russian people. Writing to the Russian president, he rejected the patriarch’s claim that the church should have a privileged position, arguing that it had forfeited that status earlier in the twentieth century when it had allied itself with the Soviet atheist government. Since then, the patriarchate had “fashioned a myth” that the church was the only institution in Russia whose legacy and special position went back a thousand years. In its present form, Yakunin charged, the “Moscow Patriarchy was the creation of Joseph Stalin in 1943; it was the child of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the MVD [Ministry of Internal Affairs, the forerunner of the KGB].”37 Rather than promote democracy, he said, the Moscow Patriarchate had helped foster a new sickness in Russia: it had become “a natural reservoir for the growth of Stalinist fundamentalism and authoritarianism.” This “post-Stalinist church hierarchy and its government supporters,” Yakunin charged, served as the “main incubators for the growth of fascism in our country.”38
Fr. Gleb’s unsparing words about the Moscow Patriarchate overly generalized a dangerous trend then on the ascendancy. In the 1993 elections to Parliament, Vladimir Zhirinovsky and his Liberal Democratic Party showed surprising strength, winning 23 percent of the vote and coming in first in sixty-four of eighty-seven regions of the country.39 A flamboyant Russian nationalist, Zhirinovsky combined militarism and populism in a new political style that many Russians found appealing during a time when their country’s place in the world had suffered a large setback. In the next two years, Zhirinovsky’s national appeal continued to rise, leading many Western journalists to view his popularity as evidence of an emerging fascism that threatened Yeltsin’s presidency.40 Fr. Gleb’s letters to the Russian president, linking the church hierarchy to this threat, oversimplified the complex situation in which the church leadership found itself.
Patriarch Aleksii II
In the 1990s, the Russian Orthodox Church faced unparalleled opportunities and extremely difficult challenges. In the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s demise, Russia became a fertile field for foreign missionaries, as Presbyterians, Methodists, Pentecostals, Seventh-Day Adventists, Roman Catholics, and Southern Baptists arrived in large numbers. Many of them did not speak Russian and had little knowledge of Russian history and culture.41 Well financed, often with superb technological skills, they gained access to Russian media and spread their messages widely. Some of these groups brought medical supplies and printed materials, which provincial regions of Russia sorely needed. The presence of these newly arrived religious organizations posed a threat to their impoverished Russian counterparts, who struggled to expand their own activities in a rapidly changing society.
In addition, in the early 1990s, foreign sects entered the country, aspiring to attract young people to their cause. They included organizations such as the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church of the United States, Scientology, and Aum Shinrikgo (Aum Supreme Truth) from Japan. Fringe groups that had operated underground during the Soviet period emerged into the open, where they operated freely. These included the Great White Brotherhood (Velikoe beloe bratstvo), the Church of the Last Testament (Tserkov′ poslednego Zaveta), and the Center of the Mother of God (Bogorodichnyi Tsentr).42 The patriarch expressed dismay at the proliferation of these groups for the threat they posed to Russia’s regeneration. “They undermine the foundations of our life,” he said. He singled out the Great White Brotherhood and the Center of the Mother of God which “have special influence on the young. I have had occasion to meet such young people; they left the impression on me that they were under the influence of some kind of hypnosis.”43
Challenged from all sides in the competition for Russian souls, the Orthodox Church confronted daunting tasks. The most serious of these difficulties, however, were internal. The Russian people, even the best educated, had little knowledge of biblical literature and religious teachings. The church had a paucity of Bibles and biblical literature; it also had an enormous shortage of well-qualified priests. Between 1988 and 1997, the number of functioning Orthodox Churches grew from 6,800 to more than 17,000. In the same period, the number of monasteries increased from 18 to more than 300, and the number of theological schools expanded from 5 to more than 65.44 After decades of government repression of the Orthodox Church, this increase in the number of newly opened and functioning church institutions constituted one of the signal achievements of Patriarch Aleksii II’s tenure. Once more, open churches dotted the Russian landscape, their gleaming cupulas standing out above the trees, and their bells a ringing presence in the daily lives of the Russian people. Yet, after decades of ruin, few of these churches had adequate resources to restore their sanctuaries, rebuild their edifices, and attract competent priests and teachers. They had to depend on government grants or donations from local congregations for these funds. During a time of rapid inflation, however, when most people struggled to survive, such funding would be especially difficult to raise.
Installed at the end of the Soviet Union, Patriarch Aleksii II knew that he faced severe problems. If Fr. Gleb believed the church’s top priority ought to be its leaders’ repentance for collaboration with an atheist government, Patriarch Aleksii II envisioned it as the Christian education of the Russian people. To him, the seven decades of assault on all religions had nearly obliterated their knowledge of Christianity, leaving them ignorant of its teachings. Many conceived of these teachings as the opposite of their actual substance. Not only did the church lack sufficient numbers of priests, but because of the closure of theological academies, many of the priests who were available lacked the necessary training to carry out their tasks of ministering to the people. In the provincial town of Akulovo, where Fr. Aleksandr Men first served, the head priest had spent most of his career as an accountant, had little theological education, and conducted the service strictly by the book because he was unable to venture outside the rigid order he had memorized earlier.45 The result was an unimaginative, unattractive situation that all too often characterized churches in the countryside.
In the first years following his election as patriarch, Aleksii II stressed the importance of overcoming the psychological attacks of the Bolsheviks on the religious consciousness of the Russian people. On September 15, 1993, in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, he spoke about the fundamental need facing the country: “Our task,” he said, “is to resurrect faith in the hearts of those who, over the course of many years, had it driven out of them.”46 Given the turmoil in which Russia presently found itself, reinstilling this faith would not be easy to accomplish, but the church had to accept this difficulty as a “cross it had to bear for the good of the Fatherland.”47 The patriarch, therefore, connected the Orthodox Church’s spiritual responsibility to Russian patriotism, both of which were necessary to rebuilding the country’s core foundation.
Like Yakunin, Aleksii II considered the moral reconstruction of Russia essential to its future well-being. He, too, viewed social trust as fundamental to fostering trust between individuals and their neighbors as well as to generating confidence in the governing authorities.48 Unlike Fr. Gleb, however, he did not claim that this trust derived from a clear and consistent system of laws; it came about through a religious sensibility that knew the difference between right and wrong. Trust also required, the patriarch said, “an openness towards other people,” a willingness “to understand that they see the world and its problems differently and what may be the cause of our disagreements.”49 This openness, the sensitivity to Indigenous peoples, and the capacity to see beyond the interests of the self, the patriarch maintained, came best through the teachings of the church and other religious traditions. When the church regained its strength in post-Soviet Russia, it would have the capability to provide this service. On this point, Yakunin fundamentally disagreed. His disillusionment with the church was unwavering; he did not have confidence in its leadership, thanks to its past compromises with the Soviet government and the KGB.
The discussion of capability points to a major disagreement between Yakunin’s views and those of the Russian patriarch. After difficult decades of suppression, the church, according to the patriarch, needed time to regain its bearing and to recover central components of its rich heritage. In its present weakness, it needed protection from those who acted to dismember it and benefit from its fragility. “Today is the time to gather stones and not to scatter them,” the patriarch said.50 Most significantly, Aleksii II identified the problems the church faced with those confronting the country, which grew larger “by the propaganda of Western and Eastern pseudo-religious people who glorify the violence that floods our television screens and movie theaters.” He decried the West’s assault on Russia’s intrinsic values, especially what he saw as a “systematic campaign to get people drunk” with alcoholic beverages imported from the West. He also criticized the grandiose promises made by foreign missionaries, and the competition for Russian souls between the church and outsiders who preyed on Russia’s weaknesses as it tried to recover its identity.51 Presently, the church “lacked the means to carry out missionary work at the highest level.”52 To face these challenges, the patriarch wanted the government to limit the incursion of foreign missionaries as well as the cultural assault brought about by Western commercial interests.
But it was Western Baptists and other Protestant groups that most troubled the patriarch. For the sake of national unity, he wanted to curtail their activities, asserting that they wanted to see the Russian people “with an outstretched hand, begging for the humanitarian aid that they had come to offer.”53 These groups exacerbated the divisions that already existed in Russia, Aleksii II said in an address he gave in the Ivanovo Diocese. Russia, he asserted, “must stand on its own legs” and must not fall into the nefarious clutches of those interests that wanted to divide the country.54 Again, he asserted that the Orthodox Church’s interests paralleled the national interests of Russia.
Yakunin fought against this view. He believed it injurious in the long term to limit freedom of conscience, as the patriarch was inclined to do. He accused the patriarch of taking the same path that the leaders of the church had followed in the past: faced with a challenge to its authority, the patriarch pursued a familiar course—to prohibit the troublemaker.55
Yakunin supported the Protestants’ activities in Russia. He wanted to limit neither their presence in Russia nor their missionary activities. By forcing the church to enhance its social role, the pressure on the Orthodox Church, he believed, would only make it stronger. Operating in an atmosphere of greater openness, the church ought to be able to stand on its own, and he sharply criticized the patriarch’s efforts to limit the freedom of exposure to other faiths: “The patriarch is trying to cast us back to a medieval situation.… I do not know of one instance in which the Baptists have stolen anyone from the Orthodox patriarch.… I am from the Orthodox Church and I believe my faith is the right one, and if my belief is all-powerful and true, I would be ashamed to try to close the mouths of others.”56
Both Gleb Yakunin and Patriarch Aleksii II confronted the ambiguities and possibilities of developing an open pluralistic society and, in such a setting, how church-state relations should operate. Surveying Russia and its diverse religious traditions, the patriarch recognized their variety. But his appreciation of these diverse faiths did not extend beyond certain confessions that had a long history in the countryside—specifically, Catholicism, Islam, Protestantism, and Buddhism—which he singled out as legitimate. “I do not call on all of us to be Orthodox,” he said.57 Nevertheless, “each person must think about what his/her roots come from,” and in tracing those roots, the patriarch identified Russia with Orthodoxy as the bedrock of Russia’s history.58 He said little about other minority confessions other than naming several extremist sects. Yet the patriarch’s views were unmistakable: for the sake of national unity, he did not countenance the existence of newly arrived confessions that, he claimed, tore at the foundation of Russia’s national life.
“The Church exists to serve God,” Patriarch Aleksii II emphasized.59 The Orthodox Church and its servitors, he pointed out in 1990, “did not have any [political] program for Russia’s revival.”60 He asserted that the church had a peacekeeping mission, sought to resolve disputes and to serve as a mediator during conflicts, and opposed the use of violence. As a mediator, the patriarch claimed that the church stood above politics, above the unsavory, often intense partisan conflicts that engulfed opposing political parties.61 Yet the various services he emphasized had political implications. While he professed that the church separated itself from political struggles and took no political position, its actual behavior spoke otherwise.
Russian federal laws proclaimed freedom of religion and the separation of the church from the state, but many agencies contradicted the laws. Educational institutions collaborated with the church in introducing courses in their curricula on the history of Orthodoxy; the Moscow Patriarchate concluded agreements with the Defense Ministry and the Ministry of the Interior, which gave the church a prominent role in the military and the police. Faced with a paucity of funds, the patriarchate often relied on the Russian government to provide the financial resources to restore newly reopened churches and monasteries, rebuild theological schools, and refurbish the heavy operational budgets of theological academies and seminaries. “Violating, but without changing the laws,” Sergei Filatov argued, on an increasing scale in the 1990s, “the government carried out a series of actions directed at giving the Moscow Patriarchy significant rights and privileges, which elevated the church to a high official status.”62
Prohibiting the Troublemakers
Shortly after the bloody confrontation between the Russian Parliament and President Yeltsin in September 1993, Patriarch Aleksii II chastised priests on both sides of the political battle. Instead of acting as peacemakers, he said, they had fomented violence, in violation of their priestly oath. The patriarch accused them of promoting schism and discord within the church, rather than encouraging unity and harmony. Therefore, he ordered Russian priests to desist from engaging in politics in the future, to withdraw from standing for elections, and to return to their time-honored duties as advocates of peace.63
The patriarch’s order had immediate ramifications for Fr. Gleb Yakunin. He and the Orthodox monk Innokentii (Pavlov) had filed for the December elections to the State Duma. On October 8, 1993, the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church issued a special federal decree that emphasized the time-consuming responsibilities of elected representatives, which made it impossible, the decree read, for priestly delegates to fulfill their pastoral obligations.64 The Holy Synod called on them to uphold the integrity of their priestly calling and exhorted them “not to promote trouble in the church and in social life.”65 A few weeks later, on November 1 and 2, 1993, the Holy Synod invited Innokentii and Fr. Gleb to a special session to discuss their situations. During the meeting, this supreme church body, citing the canon law of the Russian Orthodox Church, ordered the two men to terminate their candidacies in the elections to the Federal Assembly in the Russian legislature. Innokentii agreed to comply with the synod’s decision; Fr. Gleb, on the other hand, refused. The Holy Synod, citing Fr. Gleb’s disobedience, ordered him defrocked as an Orthodox priest.66
On the surface, the Holy Synod’s action, in concert with the patriarch, appeared justified, given Yakunin’s defiance of their directive. His compliance, however, would have contradicted everything for which he had fought for many years, including his conviction that the church, to its detriment, had played too passive a role in the nation’s social and political struggles.67 Although he drew firm lines between church and state in the political arena, he was reluctant to dismiss the church’s voice in the making of state policy. The creation of a just legal system that protected freedom of conscience required wider representation than input from the patriarch and the church hierarchy, given their past complicity with the Soviet administration and the KGB.
Stripped of his priestly rank, Yakunin fought back. Asserting the illegality of the Holy Synod’s defrocking him as an Orthodox priest, he filed a criminal case against the Moscow Patriarchate.68 In January and February 1994, he wrote two open letters to Aleksii II, both of which accused the Holy Synod of acting unjustly. These letters represented a cogent, closely argued case that attempted to indict the church hierarchy for its hypocrisy and illegitimate use of canon law. At the heart of his appeal was the claim that the Holy Synod violated an earlier resolution that was passed in August 1918 by the All-Russian Church Council. Last convened in 1917–1918, during the Russian Revolution, the council represented the supreme governing body of the church. It had restored the Moscow Patriarchate, two hundred years after Tsar Pyotr I had abolished it. The resolution to which Yakunin referred had prohibited the persecution of priests who engaged in political activities, and the Council had rehabilitated a priest (Grigorii Petrov), who had suffered abuse for his participation in the former State Duma.69 Since the church had never repealed this earlier decision, it remained binding. Moreover, canon law allowed the defrocking of a priest only for severe misbehavior consisting of violations of church dogma or immoral conduct, neither of which applied in his case.70
“Your Holiness,” Yakunin wrote, “I regard holy orders as too valuable a treasure to give up without a fight: my religious conscience and moral principles will not allow me to submit to your decision, which contradicts canon law.”71 In this and his subsequent letter, he accused the patriarch of having a personal vendetta against him for calling the patriarch and members of the church hierarchy to account and for labeling the hierarchy a “church nomenklatura.”72 Both of Yakunin’s letters exhibited a fearless, withering attack on the entire Moscow Patriarchate.73 He accused it of pandering to the nationalistic forces in Russian politics, expressing nostalgia for a “lost ‘totalitarian paradise,’ ” suppressing dissenting voices, and contributing to the moral decay that continued to hinder real reform of the church.74 While strong in their claims, his words also expressed anger and a determination never to give in to threats and denunciations.
Yakunin’s letter to Patriarch Aleksii II was significant for another reason: it concisely laid out his understanding of Russian democracy. He called it the primary road to the church’s resurrection, the basic principle that held a key to the rebirth of democratic government within the Orthodox Church. Once again, Fr. Gleb cited the resolutions of the All-Russian Church Council of 1917–1918, which had laid the groundwork for bringing laypeople and the clergy directly into determining the course that the church should take. The council’s resolution had thus redirected power from the top of the echelon of the church to the Orthodox community. According to Yakunin, after the Bolsheviks consolidated control over the country, they deliberately concealed the democratic resolutions of the All-Russian Church Council of 1917–1918 from the Orthodox faithful. He accused “the leadership of the Moscow Patriarchate of hiding this information from church and society, since it contradicted the current Regulations [Ustavy] of the Russian Orthodox Church,” over which the Bolsheviks had exerted a strong influence.75
The council’s resolutions on power and authority in the church, Yakunin pointed out, rested on the principle of conciliarity (sobornost′). It was the opposite of the top-down hierarchical structure of the Moscow Patriarchy, which had been in place since its resurrection by Stalin in 1943. This autocratic structure had placed authority in the hands of the bishops and had given them “absolute power over the people of God,” enabling them to appoint and remove the clergy, move them around, and control their behavior—in short, “to enslave people’s souls with lies and spiritual terror.”76 Was this why the church had been so reluctant to participate in the democratic transformation of Russia, he asked? He saw the authoritarian mentality as deeply ingrained in the Moscow Patriarchate, which explained why it was so consistently drawn to the methods used in the past as well as to the policies presently advanced by nationalist parties in Russia. The building of a democratic Russia, he asserted, required the church to reclaim the principle of conciliarity, which would remove power from the Moscow Patriarchate and restore it to where it rightfully belonged—in the local community. Conciliarity, Yakunin maintained, would help the Russian people “overcome the legacy of totalitarian slavery” and ensure that no one had “the right to infringe on the conscience or faith of the individual.”77
Despite the setbacks he suffered at the hands of the patriarch and the Holy Synod, Yakunin continued to promote the conciliar approach to governance. He won his seat in the Federal Assembly of the State Duma in 1993. Although the Holy Synod had forbidden him to wear the vestments and crucifix of the priestly rank, he kept them on, to the chagrin and often the anger of ultraconservative deputies in the legislature.78 As he had done throughout his life, notwithstanding the misfortunes and severe blows that he endured, he did not relinquish his belief in the rightness of his cause; he held fast to the ideals that he considered essential to the well-being of the Orthodox Church and the future of Russia.
It would be misleading, however, to claim that the resolution of the Holy Synod to remove him from the Orthodox priesthood did not wound him personally. In spite of its flaws, he had committed himself to the church, believing in its core theological principles: love for all humankind, sacrificial spirit, and humility. Yet the resolution of the Holy Synod left him with an abiding sense of rejection. It was manifested in the first letter he wrote to Patriarch Aleksii II in 1993, after the Holy Synod had defrocked him. In his letter, Fr. Gleb referenced the time, nearly thirty years before, when Patriarch Aleksii I had suspended him and Fr. Nikolai Eshliman. In 1965, he wrote, they had been punished after “Patriarch Aleksii I received an order from the KGB and the Council for Religious Affairs to ban us from church ministry. Obedient to the persecutors of the church, he denied us the opportunity to fulfill our priestly duty.” After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the freedom he had to seek out, the punishment was even more severe: “In those remarkable days, only in a nightmare could I have foreseen that in the kaleidoscopic series of events shortly to come—the collapse of the USSR, of communism, of the power of the soviets and the KGB—I would again be repressed; but this time by the free ‘good will’ of the patriarch and the bishops. And I would be repressed more cruelly than before—by defrocking: even the godless state did not go as far as that.”79
Yakunin would again be an outcast, but his dismissal only intensified his resolve to fight.
Fighting Back
The tension between the patriarch and reformist elements inside, and, in Yakunin’s case, outside the church, soon developed an increasingly sharp edge after his defrocking. First, Yakunin refused to give up his priestly vestments, and his appearance in them during sessions of the Federal Assembly of the state legislature drew increasingly vigorous rancor on the part of traditionalist and nationalist deputies. On Saturday, September 11, 1995, their hatred provoked a wild scene on the floor of the Federal Assembly. Following the reading of a complaint sent by the patriarch proclaiming that Yakunin was continuing to pose illegitimately as an Orthodox priest, the ultranationalist delegate Nikolai Lysenko rushed up to Yakunin and struck at him. Vladimir Zhirinovsky joined Lysenko in berating Yakunin and tearing at his cassock. A liberal deputy, Evgeniia Tishkovskaia, came to Yakunin’s defense and attempted to remove the assailants from him.80 Her efforts further inflamed Zhirinovsky, who, she said, “grabbed me by the hair, pulled me away, injured my hand, and proceeded to choke me.”81 In the melee, Lysenko stripped Yakunin’s pectoral cross from around his neck and triumphantly waved it in the air. The entire scene was filmed and was shown that evening on all the major national television networks. This “outrageous vilification,” a Russian commentator wrote, amounted to the “slandering and desecration of the cross” in the Federal Assembly by supposed defenders of the church.82
Second, the conflict between Yakunin and the Moscow Patriarchate escalated further in the discussion over legislation concerning freedom of conscience. As mentioned above, the patriarch wanted legal restrictions on foreign missionaries, agreeing with the words of Metropolitan Kirill (Gundiaev) of Smolensk and Kaliningrad in his address to the World Council of Churches Conference on World Mission and Evangelism in November 1996:
As soon as freedom for missionary work was allowed, a crusade began against the Russian church, even as it began recovering from a prolonged disease, standing on its feet with weakened muscles. Hordes of missionaries dashed in, believing the former Soviet Union to be a vast missionary territory. They behaved as though no local churches existed, no Gospel was being proclaimed. They began preaching without even making an effort to familiarize themselves with the Russian cultural heritage or to learn the Russian language. In most cases, the intention was not to preach Christ or the Gospel, but to tear our faithful away from their traditional churches and recruit them into their own communities.83
In his criticism of the foreign missionaries who had rushed in after the fall of the Soviet government, Metropolitan Kirill’s assessment was accurate. But his judgment about the present threat in late 1996 was overblown. By the mid-1990s, the “totalitarian sects” that had earlier proliferated had failed to attract a following and had largely disappeared. The Russian sociologist of religion Sergei Filatov showed in a detailed study of major religious trends in Russia that the influx of foreign missionaries had not succeeded in sustaining large numbers of converts and had mostly left the country.84 Humanitarian aid provided by churches in the West continued to offer relief to needy communities in provincial Russia, but there was little evidence that Protestant groups had either flaunted Russian laws or taken advantage of local communities to undermine the Orthodox Church.85
Western governments, including the United States and Great Britain, urged the Yeltsin administration to retain the provisions of the 1990 Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations. They saw it as a progressive law that would align Russia more closely with the democratic, open societies of the West. It would further ensure that the country would not revert to the authoritarian political order that had characterized its past.
Despite the political pressure coming from Western governments, Patriarch Aleksii II maintained that Russia, as a sovereign state, had to seek its own road. It had no tradition of religious pluralism and lacked any historical experience with such a model. Most important, in the present difficult time of the country’s transformation, the Orthodox Church served as a source of national stability. Orthodoxy, in the patriarch’s terms, formed the core of Russia’s religious identity.86 All these arguments catered to the nationalists’ views of the path the country ought to take, and they gave priority to the Orthodox Church as the key element in Russia’s process of national rebuilding. The Orthodox Church alone provided a bulwark for strengthening the post-Soviet moral order, in contrast to nontraditional religions whose presence threatened the spiritual unity of the Russian people.
In the contentious political and religious climate of the 1990s, Patriarch Aleksii II faced several competing factions within the church. The unity that he sought depended on his ability to balance these various interests. Although the majority of Orthodox priests occupied the middle of the political spectrum, a reform-minded series of Orthodox communities operated on the more liberal end. On the other side were radically different circles composed of ultranationalists who viewed Orthodoxy as the core of Russia’s unique cultural traditions. Represented by the passionate fundamentalist Metropolitan Ioann (Snychev, 1927–1995), the ultranationalists embraced a militant religious nationalism that railed against what they saw as destructive influences—democracy, pluralism, and ecumenism—as a betrayal of Russia.87 Although the ultranationalists made up only a small fraction of the clergy, they nevertheless had a public presence that exceeded their numbers, which the patriarch could not ignore. His ability to maintain a central position between these competing perspectives within the Orthodox Church would have a large bearing on his success in bringing about the church’s revitalization.
Yakunin and other religious reformers, however, understood the restrictions on religious freedom as a fundamental attack on freedom itself. They believed it important to preserve the ideals set forth in the 1990 Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations, because they provided a linchpin for the future development of a democratic society. To Yakunin and other religious reformers, restrictions on freedom of conscience set dangerous precedents: they violated the 1993 Constitution, undermined ecumenism, bred intolerance toward non-Orthodox faiths and traditions, and severely hindered the chance for religious reconciliation.
Meanwhile, after the church defrocked him, Yakunin underwent a personal crisis. Angered by what he considered the church hierarchy’s mistreatment, he made a bold and perhaps reckless move concerning one of the most contentious political and religious issues in the post-Soviet period. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Ukraine seized the opportunity to loosen its ties with Russia. This act met with strong and determined opposition from the Moscow Patriachate, which considered Ukraine an integral, long-established part of the Russian state and the birthplace of Orthodox Christianity in Russia. Committed to keeping intact the territorial integrity of the Russian Patriarchate, Patriarch Aleksii II adamantly opposed Ukrainian independence. After his election as patriarch, he had appointed Metropolitan Filaret (Denisenko) to head the Exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine. Metropolitan Filaret promised to preserve the Ukrainian Church’s traditional relationship with the Russian Patriarchate. In June 1992, as Ukraine began seeking independent statehood, Metropolitan Filaret, looking for his own political advancement, reversed course in his commitment. In an audacious and surprising move, he and Metropolitan Antony of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church announced the formation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyivan Patriarchate.88 In 1995, when Filaret was made patriarch, it was the capstone of the stunning turn of events that had infuriated Aleksii II, who viewed Filaret’s actions as a betrayal.
In 1996, facing his own troubles, Yakunin made a similarly bold move: he transferred his allegiance to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kievan Patriarchate. Soon he received an appointment as “priest of a parish in the vicinity of Moscow,” over which the Kiev-Patriarchate had jurisdiction.89 This step bewildered and disappointed many of his followers. It seemingly contradicted Yakunin’s earlier expressed commitment to reforming the Russian Church from within. Given recent events, however, reformist possibilities seemed, to Yakunin, increasingly unlikely, and, defrocked by the church hierarchy, he no longer had either a voice or status within the Russian Church. The Ukrainian Church offered him the chance to serve and regain his priestly position. A political consideration also played a part in his decision, because he knew the Ukrainian Church challenged what he viewed as the self-indulgent arrogance of the Russian Patriarchate.
The disagreements between Yakunin and the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church soon reached a crescendo. Warned earlier by the Assembly of Archbishops to cease wearing his priestly dress and to repent, Yakunin repeatedly disregarded these orders. In reality, however, the fundamental conflicts between Yakunin and the church hierarchy went much deeper than the issues of priestly vestments and contrition. They concerned larger questions of the church’s jurisdictional authority and legitimacy. In addition, differences over Russia’s future development as a multiconfessional society deeply divided the patriarch and his antagonist. The Assembly of Archbishops, intending to diminish the public effectiveness of his voice and terminate his membership in the Russian Orthodox Church, took a decisive step on February 19, 1997, after having defrocked him three years earlier: they excommunicated Fr. Gleb Yakunin for disobedience to the orders of the church’s authorities. In the same session, the Assembly of Archbishops also excommunicated Patriarch Filaret.90
In retrospect, looking at the life of Fr. Gleb, Archpriest Boris Razveev portrayed him as “undoubtedly a religious person, but he had an obstinate character; if he considered himself right on this or that question, he held to it totally, and it was difficult to dislodge him.… He wanted to be a great dissident and absolutely wished to sit in prison … and in the end, he preferred a political career to a priestly position.”91
Razveev’s characterization of Yakunin has prevailed in the official literature of the Russian Orthodox Church. Only in part, however, is this portrayal just: his resolute unwillingness to bow down before any authority whose actions violated freedom of conscience. Yet the description of him fails to capture the complex, multifaceted aspects of Fr. Gleb’s ultimate desires. Despite the difficult obstacles he confronted, Yakunin’s commitment to truth and the dignity of the human spirit remained consistent. Razveev’s contention that Fr. Gleb’s fondness for a political career is a repetition of the former Soviet effort to disparage people by accusing them of personal ambition, self-aggrandizement, and fundamental disloyalty to the established political and religious order. As a critic of the status quo and a fervent believer in the capacity of the Russian people to build a democratic society, Yakunin was willing to suffer for that cause. He consistently chose the path that, to his mind, furthered this goal. He separated the church from the state, but he refused to separate religion from politics. The development of a moral and just democratic society, in his view, required their integration.