CHAPTER 1 Beginnings
The town of Anan′ev is located in the Odesa region in southwestern Ukraine on the northern coast of the Black Sea. In the late eighteenth century, as a result of the Partitions of Poland and Empress Catherine II’s imperial projects, the Russian Empire acquired a large number of Jewish settlers, who lived in what later became known as the Pale of Settlement. A thriving commercial center within the Pale and known as the “pearl of the Black Sea,” Odesa enjoyed a large multiconfessional and multicultural population. It was the birthplace of both the great poet Anna Akhmatova and the founder of jazz music in the Soviet Union, Leonid Utyosov. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the area around Odesa was a rich agricultural center where local inhabitants cultivated grains, oilseeds, fruits, and vegetables. Located a short distance inland, Anan′ev also had a thriving textile industry. Founded in 1753, the town attracted Jewish settlers. In 1926, they numbered 3,516 out of a total town population of 18,230, and many of them worked in the town’s textile enterprises.1 Life in Anan′ev, however, did not consist of peace and security. Some of the country’s most violent pogroms took place there: on April 27, 1881, antisemitic mobs demolished 175 Jewish homes and 14 small businesses, most of them in the poorer parts of the town; on October 17, 1905, gangs murdered 44 Jews and plundered a large number of shops; and in early 1920, a marauding band killed 220 of the 300 members of a Jewish defense organization.2
In the 1920s, in Anan′ev, lived two families who would play a large part in the Yakunins’ story. The Zdanovs were the first of these. A family of small crafts-making people, they had moved to the area from Poland. Orthodox believers who had converted many years earlier from Catholicism, the Zdanovs practiced their Orthodox faith assiduously and raised their children to do the same. Living next door to them were the Yakunins. Descendants from the Russian nobility, they enjoyed a prestigious status before the Russian Revolution. The grandfather was once the vice-governor of Samara province in southwestern Russia, then governor of the prominent Novgorod district in the north. After the revolution, he and his wife moved to the south, bought a house in Anan′ev, and settled there to raise their children, of which they had many.3 Their talented oldest son, Pavel Ivanovich Yakunin, completed the university and afterward matriculated at the conservatory, where he specialized in playing the violin.4 He then made a decision that proved extremely unsatisfactory to his parents, particularly his father: he asked his neighbor’s daughter, Klavdiia Iosifovna Zdanovskaia, whom he had known since his childhood, to marry him. His father considered her much below the status of his son. Poorly educated but lively, warm-spirited, and extroverted, this black-haired young woman expressed strong devotion to Pavel Ivanovich and the family life they both desired.
Wishing to establish themselves on their own, in the early 1930s, Pavel Ivanovich and Klavdiia Iosifovna moved to Moscow. They settled in the capital when Moscow was undergoing a large population expansion, a time of rapid economic growth, and a period when optimism about the Soviet Union’s prospects seemed nearly unlimited. Pavel Ivanovich found employment as a professional violinist fulfilling a lifetime ambition, and he and his young wife enjoyed what appeared to be a promising future in a country on an upward trajectory, when most Western economies were mired in the Great Depression.
In 1934, shortly after the Yakunins settled in Moscow, Klavdiia Iosifovna gave birth to their son, Gleb Pavlovich. This event added to their sense of well-being, and the two parents were overjoyed by the bright, energetic child in their midst to whom they devoted a great deal of attention. As the child grew, they were delighted by his kindheartedness and his curiosity about nearly everything, but also by his interest in learning, which was sometimes tempered by a mischievous personality. Music, tenderness, and care for each other pervaded the entire household, which created for the child a warm, nurturing environment fostering his confidence in his capacity to make his own way in the world. The feeling of well-being, however, did not endure for long. As the German army rolled across the Soviet frontier on June 22, 1941, life in Moscow descended into chaos, and many families, including the Yakunins, left the city for the deep interior. In 1943, as the Soviet army succeeded in pushing back the German forces from Moscow, Pavel Ivanovich, unable to find employment suited to his musical skills, decided to return to the capital city, temporarily leaving his wife and son in the Russian interior. In Moscow, however, during those wartime conditions, he had no success in landing a position as a violinist and found work only as a boiler man. Pavel Ivanovich was unaccustomed to the physical demands of his job. His body steadily weakened from stress and the scarcity of food in a city whose main lines of supply were in near total disarray. In 1944, he suffered a heart attack and died. His unexpected death left Klavdiia Iosifovna, unemployed and a single mother, the parent of a ten-year-old child, without a regular means of financial support.5
The family’s situation soon underwent another major change. In 1945, at the end of World War II, Gleb “acquired two additional mothers” who, according to his later friend Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov, strongly shaped the world in which Yakunin grew up: two of Gleb’s aunts, having fought at the front in the war, resettled in Moscow, where they and his mother doted on the fatherless child. The whole family spent a lot of their time in church; they were not only religious, but deeply churched: “Icons and lighted lamps in all the rooms of their apartment,” Levitin-Krasnov wrote, “the constant attendance in churches, the acquaintances with priests, and also the meticulous observance of Orthodox rituals—this was the style of the family.”6
In reality, however, Gleb Yakunin grew up in two different and conflicting spheres: the world of the church, so passionately embraced by his mother and aunts, who fervently sought to pull him into its orbit, and the world of the school and Soviet culture, which moved in an opposite direction. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Soviet government and its educational institutions pursued a rigorous atheistic agenda. Although the government had relaxed its policy of closing Orthodox Churches and permitted the reopening of some religious institutions, beginning in 1943, official policy continued to use atheistic propaganda as a means to reeducate the population. The entire school system required atheistic teaching.7 Caught between these two competing worldviews, the young Gleb Yakunin could not have avoided making some difficult choices. At the age of fourteen, he declared himself an avowed atheist.8
Yet this declaration did not prevent Yakunin from exploring fields that offered a different view from the one his teachers attempted to drum into their students. At the time, in the secondhand bookstores in Moscow, one could still find older works in philosophy, theology, and history, and Yakunin often haphazardly scoured these bookshops. As a bright and intellectually rebellious teenager, he developed a special interest in ancient religions and their various responses to the gods and the mysteries of creation. He had a curious mind, one that, even at an early age, desired to investigate more fully subjects his classes in school only touched upon, and this inquisitiveness, combined with skepticism toward official pronouncements, already characterized his personality. He took little at face value—neither the ritualistic religion of his mother nor the ideological certainties articulated by the political establishment.
A New Friend
Like most other Soviet youths of his generation, Yakunin had a strong disposition toward the sciences. In making the decision about his future, according to Levitin-Krasnov, “he chose for himself an unusual profession—that of hunter and biologist. The romantic attracted him, the romance of nature, the forest, and wild animals. Before him stood the image of Lieutenant Glahn and other heroes of [the novels of Knut] Hamsun.”9 The young Yakunin, Elena Volkova writes, dreamed of becoming “a man with a weapon, a person of strength, who had the ability to defend himself and others, to spend his days in the forest, hunting his own food, enjoying nature, and singing songs by the campfire. After the small rooms in Moscow’s communal apartments, school drills, yard punks, wars, repressions, and sweaty fear, to suddenly turn into a free person, who awakened in a haystack, shared wine with others at a hunting stand, and filled his breast with freedom … this was his dream.”10
After finishing his secondary education, therefore, Yakunin enrolled in the Institute of Zoology, which focused on fur-bearing mammals and was located in the southern suburbs of Moscow. This decision would change his life in major ways, particularly because of a noteworthy relationship he developed and the experiences he encountered at the institute. It was here that he met another student, Aleksandr Men, who had a similar interest in biology and who would have a formative influence on the young Yakunin’s worldview.
On a Sunday afternoon in 1953, Gleb Yakunin was aboard the suburban train that took him from his home in Moscow to the institute. He noticed a young student sitting alone in a corner of the car and reading. Yakunin had never seen him before, and out of curiosity, approached the unknown student, who, he quickly learned, was Aleksandr Men. Yakunin—redheaded, short in stature, and with a pleasant look on his face—politely inquired about the book his new acquaintance was reading. Then, in a low voice, Yakunin asked him whether he had any books on Eastern religions and mysticism. The subjects lay outside the Soviet mainstream; in the late Stalin period, a person with an abiding interest in these topics would have instantly aroused suspicion. Immediately, Men became wary, not knowing whether the stranger intended his question to be a provocation. Uncertain about how to respond, Men gave a generic answer, mentioning only a standard Soviet textbook. “That is not what I asked you,” retorted Yakunin.11 The two students struck up a conversation about different subjects, which revealed that they had much in common, including a love of books. Both were voracious readers and both had an interest in world religions, the sciences, and the relationship between religion and science. This began a long-lasting friendship that, in Yakunin’s case, changed his view about many topics. Yakunin had not abandoned his atheistic beliefs, but, as he later told me, he was in the process of seeking his own way.12 His encounter with Aleksandr Men took place at an opportune time in his life:
I was not a Christian at that time but, as the saying goes, “I was on the way.” When I was a child, my mother often took me with her to church. She was a devout believer, but, as is often the case, also somewhat simpleminded. Naturally, she could not answer the many questions that had steadily emerged in my mind. She was a traditionalist, who abided by all the church traditions without questioning them, as she had been taught to do. But growing up in the general environment of the 1930s and ’40s, in effect, I lost my childhood faith in God, and by the age of ten or eleven, I had become a diehard atheist. Later, however, primarily through my reading in philosophy, and the humanities, I gradually became an idealist of sorts. I recognized the existence of God, but not as something concrete and real.… It was at that point that I met Aleksandr Men and we became friends.… Under his influence and through my connections with several other Moscow friends, some very intelligent people, I had started to take an interest in Christianity.13
In 1955, the Soviet government decided to relocate the Institute of Zoology to the central Siberian town of Irkutsk, a main juncture on the Trans-Siberian Railroad and in the heartland of the institute’s teaching and research. The location would give students firsthand exposure to the main resources of their study as well as to the furs that had become such valuable commodities on the international market and major sources of revenue for the Soviet state. The city was a crossroads of diverse nationalities and languages, which exposed a person directly to different social and religious ways of thought and belief. In this frontier city, state control over various institutions was not nearly as restrictive as in Moscow and the central regions of the country. Moreover, the city’s historical and cultural significance predominated over an enormous part of the Soviet Union. Since the time of Peter the Great, Irkutsk had served as the administrative center of eastern Siberia, extending from the Yenisei River to the Pacific Ocean. For the past two hundred years, the city had been a central location to which the government had sent political exiles as well as the Polish citizens whose lands the Russian state had incorporated; Irkutsk, therefore, had one of the largest concentrations of Catholics in the Soviet Union. It also contained large settlements of Old Believers, the Orthodox sect that had left the church in 1666 in protest against the state’s required church reforms.14
“At first, he [Men] did not like Irkutsk,” Zoia Maslenikova writes. “The atmosphere was heavy and gloomy, and the same endless taiga oppressed him. He disliked the wooden pavement, the thick, broad faces, the squat wooden houses, the soot from the factory chimneys, the objects hanging over the streets.”15 The move placed Yakunin and Men in an unfamiliar city whose diverse population and flat layout required a significant adjustment in their perspectives. Gone were the cultural attractions of Moscow, and in their place were the rough-hewn, simplistic ways of a frontier city. The city and its environs had to grow on them, and, in time, both of them developed a liking for the multiethnic population and its diverse customs. Irkutsk had much to offer to a young person in the process of questioning everything, seeking new perspectives on life and belief. Its relative openness, the friendliness of its people, and its hospitality to outsiders made the city an attractive place to study and to broaden one’s outlook on society as well as the multiethnic and religious composition of the Soviet Union.
Yakunin and Men chose to room together in Irkutsk. They elected, however, not to live with other students in the institute’s dormitory, but to settle elsewhere, so they could pursue their interests without the distractions of other students. They found a place in a rooming house on the outskirts of the city. The institute’s curriculum was not intensely rigorous, so they had plenty of time to explore the city and its surrounding area; they also had the opportunity for conversations with each other about mutual interests. The living arrangements they secured in Irkutsk brought the two students close together, although in theological matters, at this time in their lives, Men was far more advanced than Yakunin. Baptized in the Orthodox Catacomb Church as a baby, Men had been raised in the Catacomb Church in Zagorsk (Sergiev Posad), and the spiritual life he led was anything but the ritualistic forms of practice that Yakunin, at an early age, had learned to dislike. Tutored by several outstanding priests and a remarkable nun who encouraged him to discover the deepest wellsprings of Orthodox tradition, the young Men had known some of the best and most creative teaching the church had to offer.16 In addition, Men’s mother and “aunt” had recognized his unusual intellectual gifts, and they exposed him at any early age to philosophical and theological texts much more advanced than anything the school system had to offer. As a result, by the time he and Yakunin teamed up, Men had already acquired a vast reservoir of knowledge about a wide variety of topics, both Russian and Western, and he imparted some of it to Yakunin. “We talked a great deal,” Yakunin said, “about the role of the Orthodox Church in society and what it ought to look like in the future of Russia.”17 Men gave Yakunin a firsthand tutorial about the history of many related subjects.
When he arrived in Irkutsk in the fall of 1955, Aleksandr Men brought with him a large trunk filled with books and papers that he intended to use in writing a history of religion from its origins to the birth of Jesus Christ. He had already written a draft of the first volume and intended to continue his work on this ambitious project while a student at the institute. Already in the middle of writing the second volume of the history, he had tentatively titled it Magic and Monotheism: The Religious Path of Humanity up to the Epoch of the Great Teachers. In Gleb Yakunin, he had a trusted friend with whom he could discuss his work and share ideas, someone who also had a keen interest in learning. Their friendship developed at a fortuitous time for both young men.
Yakunin’s relationship with Men contributed to his future development in one additional way: Men had a long-lasting effect on his friend’s theological outlook. Yakunin’s view of Christianity closely paralleled the views Men expressed in his History of Religion.18 In the early drafts of that multivolume work, Men understood Christianity as only in the first stages of its development. It was not yet completed, and people who claimed to have absolute knowledge of truth were misguided. His was not a static model of world history, but a dynamic one “[in] which the whole cosmos is in movement,” constantly evolving towards something different from what existed earlier.19 History was evolutionary, and Christianity followed a similar pattern. This understanding of Christianity strongly imprinted itself on Yakunin. He would later take a firm stand against conservative apologists for Christianity who aspired to preserve the past and “close the doors” against attempts to breathe fresh air into Christianity.20 He would also acknowledge his debt to Aleksandr Men for opening his eyes to a deeper and clearer conception of Christianity than he had previously known. Yakunin emphasized his debt to his friend in a long narrative poem he wrote later in his life:
This very menu
For the poor in spirit,
Came into being from the penetrating thought
Of Aleksandr Men.21
When Yakunin and Men lived together in Irkutsk, the ideas in Magic and Monotheism were on Men’s mind, and he had little reticence about sharing them. He had begun to develop his ideas on sin, suffering, and evil, themes to which he returned in all the volumes of his History.22 As Men used the term, “magic” represented the desire “to be like God”; it denoted the aspiration to “acquire the power of God” and to remake the world to fit one’s own image. He connected it to the biblical view of original sin and the separation from God. This estrangement marked a spiritual sickness, the revolt against God, and the near total focus on the self. Magic placed the self, not others, at the center of existence and worship; it promoted a blind religion and “an almost maniacal faith in all-powerful rituals, incantations, and pledges.”23 In his later critique of Stalinism, Yakunin expressed similar views of the incantations and rituals as well as the cult of power that the Stalinist system promoted. The church, he would argue, had fallen under the sway of this all-embracing power.
Most important, in Magic and Monotheism, by drawing on anthropological studies of primitive societies, Men showed how magic could exercise a dominant influence over an entire group, encouraging people to meld with their native tribe. In this tribal setting, a person “did not have his own life, his own judgment, his opinion, and his own doubts, but fell under the hypnosis of ‘collective ideas.’ ”24 Men cited the French philosopher and anthropologist Lucien Lévy Bruhl’s study of the primitive mentality to show how these ideas were passed from generation to generation.25 In a primitive society, according to Lévy Bruhl, ideas were “imposed on individuals in the group, awakening in them, according to their circumstances, feelings of respect, fear, worship, etc. and how they should relate to different objects in the world.”26 In such a collective society, individuals relinquished their capacity to exercise their own free will. Subjugation made the society easier to govern, manipulate, and control. What Men called the tsar-magician endeavored to gain total domination over the creative impulses of the state’s citizens and to suppress the freedom that lay at the core of Christianity.27
It is difficult to discern precisely when, during his student years, Gleb Yakunin embraced these ideas. But a close look at Men’s central beliefs, those already present in his early writings, suggest that Yakunin, in coming to Christianity, found them compatible with his own understanding. Like Men, Yakunin viewed Christ as unique, as more than a teacher, and as different from other prophetic voices of the ancient world. Christ offered a new way of looking at human beings as containing a divine and creative presence.28 Threaded through all of history, two opposing forces had emerged, and they continued to play out, even within the Christian Church: “On one side, a creative, always searching movement,” illustrated by a “dynamic spirituality” and “reverence for the Almighty.” On the other side, a turning inward, accepting repression of the mind, and prizing comfort above all else, attitudes that are fully compatible with the worship of pagan secular rituals and static symbols of faith.29 The conflict between these two opposing forces ran throughout Men’s History of Religion. They provided a religious and intellectual framework from which Yakunin drew as he began to develop his own ideas about the role of the church in the world.
In addition, Yakunin’s experiences in the multiethnic region of Irkutsk led him to appreciate, firsthand, the desires and human sensibilities of these diverse nationalities. These experiences made Yakunin a strong advocate for an open form of Christianity that reached outward, broke through the self-imposed barriers, and exhibited compassion for all of humanity.30 A Christianity based on fear and exclusion was not a correct understanding of Christ’s teachings or of the Apostle Paul’s view that in Christianity “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Reconciliation between different religious faiths would become major goals of both Men and Yakunin, although their approaches eventually took very different forms. As students in a frontier city, in order to broaden their theological understandings, they began to take a closer look at the Orthodox Church for comparison with the practices of other religious traditions.
Religious Communities in Irkutsk
The visits of Yakunin and Men to various churches in Irkutsk and the surrounding area began out of curiosity. Because the earlier experiences of both students had chiefly taken place in Moscow (in Men’s case, also in Zagorsk), they wanted to compare the two settings, primarily to get a better view of religious life in this distant provincial city. As a longtime member of the Orthodox Church, Men quickly became a regular participant in the main Orthodox Church in Irkutsk, where he developed a relationship with the head priest and several diocesan officials.31 Yakunin occasionally went with him, although the services left him uninspired. Both men were disappointed by the church’s passivity and the priest’s failure to explore important matters of faith more deeply and speak to social concerns. The differences with other religious communities they visited were “striking,” Men wrote. “A half-empty church, the disorganized order of the service, depressed, melancholy elderly women, [and] a very short sermon heavily laden with political information (something about China)” distressed him, and these weaknesses similarly made a strong impression on Yakunin.32 Neither young man found there the kind of open, creative approach that both of them desired.
Visits to a local Catholic community produced a different response. Yakunin and Men went there several times and soon developed a friendship with a young Catholic priest with whom they had many lively, wide-ranging conversations. Well-read, highly intelligent, and open-minded, the priest had traveled abroad, studied in the Vatican, and only recently returned to Russia. He was conversant with the writings of contemporary Catholic theologians who advocated dialogue with other religious confessions, a proposal he impressed upon Yakunin and Men. The priest did not at all fit the stereotypes of Catholic priests described in the Soviet press as poorly informed, doctrinaire, and slavish followers of the Roman pope. He invited them to attend Catholic services. Again, however, they were disappointed. They found the services to be mechanical, unimaginative, and not particularly welcoming, although the priest privately exhibited none of the qualities they witnessed in the services.33
Irkutsk had many different Protestant denominations, and they attracted the attention of the two students. They visited a Baptist church, whose membership, Men wrote, consisted mainly of local factory workers who warmly welcomed them into the service. Yakunin and Men observed there the kind of close-knit, welcoming church community that they admired and rarely saw elsewhere. But they did not find the services themselves appealing and they expressed disappointment at the theological shallowness of the pastor and the congregants. The pastor spoke extremely well to the members of the church community, but neither student appreciated his theological approach. They did not return.34
Men and Yakunin had conversations with other religious leaders in the city, including a Muslim imam, whom they found extremely well-read and personable. An Orthodox priest, a Fr. Vladimir, who served in a small church near Lake Baikal, however, unexpectedly made the greatest impression on Yakunin. “He was a very unique priest who had once served as a history teacher in Ukraine before his arrest by the state security police. We visited him shortly after his release from prison. With him, we developed a feeling of mutual trust. It was from him that I learned about the true history of the church, including the Catacomb Church.”35
In addition to providing the chance to explore the environs of Irkutsk, the atmosphere of the institute had one other advantage: it connected study in the classroom to life in the world outside. Although it had a firmly set academic curriculum, the institute allowed plenty of time for leisure pursuits, personal exploration, and fraternization. The teaching faculty encouraged students to get acquainted as much as possible with the natural world, an opportunity that the Institute of Zoology readily accommodated, particularly during the summer months. Valentina Bibikova, a fellow classmate, remembers that “life was gay and happy”:
At the end of the first year, we decided to camp in the Prioksko Nature Reserve. We needed money for a gun for someone, a camera for someone, and shoes for still another. Our everyday dress consisted of a ski suit, sneakers, and a backpack, and Alik (Aleksandr) also wore a summer hat. We were told to check the nature reserve’s hollows for tits, flycatchers, bats, and small animals. We lived on the cordon; in the evenings, we boiled potatoes over a fire, caught from the Oka the unique fish of those years, and brought back what we could find in nearby village shops: crabs, cod liver in butter, and bread. Aleksandr Men played a guitar, and we listened to the sounds of the forest at night and the fish splashing in the river.36
In the late summer months, students were sent to a summer camp where they helped to harvest the crops. By day, they gathered potatoes, and in the evening, they typically swam and sat around a campfire, where they told stories and sang folksongs, accompanied by a guitar that one of them had brought.37 Men and Yakunin were assigned different camps that were some distance apart. Near the end of the season, anxious to be reunited with his friend, Men journeyed to the camp where Yakunin was quartered, and the two of them went several times to speak with the above-mentioned Fr. Vladimir. Yakunin and Men learned that he had taught in a secondary school before becoming a priest. After being imprisoned for several years in the Gulag, he had recently been released as part of the large number of church officials freed after Nikita Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin speech in February 1956. To Yakunin, the meetings with Fr. Vladimir proved a revelation. As he recounted: “It was there, during our conversations, with Aleksandr present, that I learned for the first time that Aleksandr’s mother and aunt were not connected with the churches of the Moscow Patriarchate, but with the underground church. Aleksandr and I had long conversations with Fr. Vladimir, and he educated us about the true history of the church. He said that the official Orthodox Church was not the real church; the true church was the one that operated underground.… Aleksandr knew much of this history already, but, to me, it was shocking.”38
In the conversations with Fr. Vladimir, Yakunin learned about the Catacomb Church and the conditions that had spawned its emergence after the revolution. In 1927, under enormous political pressure from the government, Metropolitan Sergei, the locum tenens of the Orthodox Church, pledged the church’s loyalty to the new Bolshevik power, and Orthodox priests were required to do likewise. In order to preserve their status and to prevent what they feared would be the church’s destruction, most priests complied with the requirement, but not all were willing to compromise either their own or the church’s integrity. At great risk to their lives, these priests went underground and continued to hold services in secret, often in the most dangerous circumstances for them and their parishioners. These underground communities emerged in many places in the Soviet Union, sustained by the belief that they were upholding the purity of the Orthodox faith without giving in to the atheistic state and compromising time-honored traditions.39 By the late 1950s, most Soviet citizens had no knowledge of this history.40
In Aleksandr Men, Yakunin had with him a fellow student who had spent his early years in the Catacomb Church in Zagorsk. Men’s experiences with the elders in that unofficial church community had deeply shaped his theological perspectives and vision of what the church should be.41 The priests who served in the Catacomb Church in Zagorsk had the same approach as the famous Optina pustyn′ elders in their relationships with the people they came in contact with. In the Optina pustyn′ monastery, the elders engaged in open conversation with people, counseled them, and gave them guidance in their lives. After the Bolshevik government closed the Optina monastery in 1923, its traditions lived on in the Catacomb Church in Zagorsk, where Fr. Serafim (Batiukov), who served there after having spent part of his early training at Optina pustyn′, formed a warm, caring community. When he first heard of the Catacomb Church, Gleb Yakunin learned of a church community that operated outside the heavy-handed influence of the government, a memory that remained with him for a long time.42
In addition to his conversations with Fr. Vladimir, Yakunin’s views of his society were sharpened by yet another experience he had during his student years. The rooming house where he and Men lived was located near a railroad track, on the other side of which stretched a large, open field. On a clear day, in the early morning, they could see a line of prisoners shuffling along, slumped over, heads bent down being marched to their daily work in the fields nearby. Even on bitterly cold mornings, Yakunin and Men witnessed the procession, and the image of prisoners’ plight made a deep impression on both students.43 Growing up in Moscow, Yakunin obviously knew about the labor camps, but in Irkutsk, he witnessed them firsthand, and this experience burned in his consciousness. His compassion for the voiceless in the camps and his understanding of the reasons for their incarceration made him acutely aware of the dichotomy between the state’s rhetoric about a free society and the social realities he encountered.
In Irkutsk, following his conversion to Christianity, Yakunin began to think a great deal about the fate of the church, particularly with regard to its responsibility to the outcast members of Soviet society. In the weeks following their conversations with Fr. Vladimir, he and Men spent a great deal of time talking about what the Orthodox Church would look like “free of intimidation by the KGB and free of state control.” They discussed “what it would take to reform the church, and how, in present circumstances, to make this reform a reality.”44 Yakunin well understood that their aspirations represented youthful ideals. In hindsight, however, in looking back over the course of his career, key aspects of Yakunin’s character as well as one of his perceived flaws, were already apparent at this time. All his life he continued to imagine that change was forthcoming and that with courage and the right approach, a new beginning could be achieved. Despite the most difficult of circumstances, he held firmly to a positive view of the world and the human beings he encountered. He had little use for pessimists, those who were indifferent to social injustices, or those who remained compliant with the institutions that fostered those injustices. Regrettably, though, he often underestimated the challenges he faced and the support he had for what seemed to him to be reasonable changes. The miscalculations, even with the best of intentions, would subject him to much suffering.
Yakunin’s long-term goal was to liberate the church from the domination of the political powers. During his student years in Irkutsk, he had not fully defined this ambition, but it had begun to form in his mind. Like Men, and perhaps under his influence, Yakunin already understood that for the Orthodox Church to be effective and to develop an authentic voice, it had to be open to the world. Based on the Gospels, this openness would serve as one of the distinctive features of Aleksandr Men’s later vocation as an Orthodox priest. It also played a significant role in Yakunin’s future endeavors and gave him a powerful, if controversial, voice.
Although the two friends would take vastly different roads, they shared the belief that the church ought not to turn its vision of the world inward, as it had done since the late 1920s. It had to serve the society actively, speak to its needs, develop a compelling voice for those individuals searching for a holistic view of life, and reach out to a suffering humankind. It had to find the means to educate the members of Russian society in the fundamental teachings of the Orthodox tradition and the Holy Scriptures during a time when the state’s assault on religion had nearly obliterated those teachings from the minds of the Russian people.45
The questions that arose during his experiences in Irkutsk concerned Yakunin (as they had Men) long after he graduated from the institute. These questions were not determinative, and he considerably refined them later, but Irkutsk and his relationship with Men essentially focused the main issues in his mind. He wondered how the church might uncover the sources of its tradition and, most important, convey these sources effectively to the Russian people. During a time when state policies narrowly restricted its ability to reach people beyond the physical boundaries of its property, he recognized the importance for the church to express its compassion for people in need, including those who aspired to practice their faith freely. In Irkutsk, after his conversion to Orthodox Christianity, Yakunin most likely began to question the capacity of the Moscow Patriarchate to satisfy the spiritual needs of the Russian people. He connected the official church with state violence, the suppression of believers, and a reluctance to address the problems that concerned him.46
It is unknown precisely when Gleb Yakunin made the decision to become a priest. His association with Men and their conversations about the role of the church in Russian society played a part. Most likely, this idea formed only gradually in his consciousness. He would have seen the vocation of priest, if practiced responsibly, as an enormous challenge, particularly given the severe obstacles the priesthood faced. Given the patriarchate’s passivity toward the defense of the priests who failed to strictly adhere to the state’s dictates, he could have expected little support from the church hierarchy. During his stay in Irkutsk, however, he had come to see the importance of the church and the need for its dynamic presence in Soviet life, despite the challenges. “By my nature, I am a fighter,” Yakunin later claimed.47 In his early twenties, this quality of his personality had already begun to manifest itself in his choice of vocation.
Discovering Berdiaev
Like Men, Yakunin had a love of reading, and the two of them often scoured the antiquarian bookstores in Irkutsk in search of books not easily found in Moscow. After Men discovered a stack of old volumes in the church where he worked as a part-time boiler man, their reading intensified. Someone had discarded the books, leaving them in a closet in the church where they were gathering dust, and a cleaning lady told Men to take any of them he wished.48 Several volumes in this treasure trove of books were written by the talented leaders of Russia’s religious and philosophical circles at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Men devoted a great deal of time to reading their works and introduced Yakunin to several of them, including the work of Nikolai Berdiaev, who would have a large influence on his fellow student.49
Born in 1874 (d. 1948) to a noble family in Kyiv Berdiaev had an aristocratic upbringing. As a student at the University of Kyiv, he converted to Marxism and joined a radical Social Democratic group. But he never fully embraced Marxism and was never comfortable with its narrowly focused, restrictive views on human freedom. After his expulsion from the university for his political activities and his exile in Vologda, in 1924, Berdiaev moved to Paris. His encounters with leading intellectuals such as Sergei Bulgakov, Zinaida Gippius, and Dmitry Merezhkovsky led him to renounce his Marxist affiliations. Several reasons accounted for his change of mind. The Marxist perspective claimed to be a totalistic view of human existence, but it did not explain everything, including such irrational feelings as love, compassion, and self-sacrifice. Since childhood, Berdiaev wrote, he had always had a predisposition to religious questions. Most important, while in Paris, he read the great Slavophile philosopher and poet Aleksei Khomiakov, whose writings opened up a completely new world for the young Berdiaev. “His [Khomiakov’s] idea of freedom as the ground of Christianity and the Church had a special significance for me,” he noted.50 He developed a strong belief in the importance of the free, unfettered personality and one’s right to choose one’s own course in the world.
After his return to Russia in 1908, Berdiaev worked as a journalist and a teacher of philosophy, all the while moving closer to Orthodoxy, although he had difficulty with the church’s administrative structure and its leadership’s narrow-minded views of society. But the beauty of Orthodoxy, the creativity of its teachings, and its emphasis on spiritual freedom spoke profoundly to him. After the revolution, he stayed in Russia, for a brief time serving as a professor of philosophy at Moscow University and teaching at a private institution, the “Free Academy of Spiritual Culture.”51 During this period, Berdiaev wrote his first significant works: The Philosophy of Freedom (1911) and The Meaning of Creativity (1916), books containing central themes on which he elaborated in his later publications.52
It was the first of these books that Aleksandr Men recommended to his friend when they were students in Irkutsk, and Gleb Yakunin read it for the first time then.53 He would repeatedly return to it for guidance and ideas, several of which, given his evolution as a student, would have had an immediate appeal.
In his Philosophy of Freedom (as well as The Meaning of Creativity), Berdiaev emphasized the importance of the free human personality, which he contrasted with the mentality of the crowd. This personal gift, which the Creator gives to every individual, must be allowed to develop freely and permitted to act and to think unrestricted by outside pressures to conform. The free personality, he maintained, was “one of the highest features of spirituality”; it was, he asserted, the very “image of God” that lived in each person; it represented a person’s “I.”54 Mass society tended to reduce the human being to a cog in a vast machine, a number, an address, a particle in a whole society. Christianity, in contrast, underscored the supreme importance of the person as a child of God. The Philosophy of Freedom defended “personalism” as the sacredness of the individual against the impersonal forces brought about by recent scientific discoveries, technology, and attempts to reduce human beings to automatons.
Freedom, Berdiaev maintained, allowed the individual to make a choice, a choice that was mystical and formed the very essence of creativity.55 Freedom meant spiritual freedom, the capacity and openness to hear one’s own calling and the willingness to respond to that calling, despite the powerful societal pressures that pulled one in a different direction. Religion, he claimed, did not lead to a sense of dependence, but to a “sense of independence.” “If God does not exist,” Berdiaev wrote elsewhere, “a person is a being wholly dependent on nature or society, on the world or the state. If God exists, the person is a spiritually independent being; and the individual’s relation to God is to be defined as freedom.”56
As a student in the process of rejecting the atheism he had formerly and unthinkingly adopted, Gleb Yakunin found these ideas liberating. They encouraged him to seek his own course and affirmed the legitimacy of his ultimate decision. In concert with Men, Yakunin began to conceive of the spiritual as an essential part of human creativity. Spirituality flourished when it had the chance to develop freely, whether in the world or within the individual. Like Berdiaev, Yakunin would come to abhor the objectification of nature and human beings that turned them into passive objects for profit or human pleasure. Berdiaev despised and characterized as sins against God all forms of slavery and all attempts to delimit the “freedom of the creative soul.” Yakunin held a similar belief for the rest of his life. It strengthened his commitment to “freedom of conscience,” which soon became one of the core elements in his theology.
All too often, Berdiaev noted, people willingly sacrificed their freedom, the most important possession a person had, in exchange for security, certainty, and material gain. He cited a passage from Dostoevsky’s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” from the novel The Brothers Karamazov, in which the Grand Inquisitor reproaches Christ: “You desired the freedom of man, that he should follow you freely, seduced and captivated by you.”57 In this statement, Berdiaev wrote, Dostoevsky clearly showed the meaning of Christian freedom: “Man must carry the burden of freedom in order to be saved. Christianity offers freedom in Christ. Salvation through the use of compulsion is impossible and useless.”58 The church, Yakunin maintained, must never become part of the government, because when it did, it sacrificed its most precious gift, its internal freedom. When the church allied itself with the government in pursuit of power and gain, rather than in the defense of its own internal freedom, the church’s mission was corrupted.59 The church had to retain its capacity to criticize state actions, and it had to strengthen its compassionate voice in order to have a creative presence in the world. Observing the subservience of many Orthodox priests and their failure to remain true to what Berdiaev had referred to as the “divine principle in life,” Yakunin saw the vital need for church reform. As he began to define his own future calling, he also understood the direction he had to follow.
Road to the Church
Looking backward at Gleb Yakunin’s life, one might have the impression that his pathway to the priesthood had a consistent trajectory. But this would be a mistaken impression. He faced many practical obstacles, including the temporary loss of his friend and confidant Aleksandr Men, whom the institute expelled in May 1958, several weeks before Men’s scheduled graduation.60 Yakunin remained determined to complete his course of study and to graduate from the institute. Lacking any formal education in theology and church history or the qualifications that would ease his admittance into the priesthood, he had to decide on the best course to follow.
Before his graduation from the institute and his departure from Irkutsk, one other event took place in Yakunin’s life that had a significant influence on his future. He and Men often worshipped at Znameniia Presviatoi Bogoroditsy (Church of the Miracle, Sign of the Most Holy Theotokos), the Orthodox Church in the city center. Singing in the church choir was a young woman, Iraida Georgievna Semenova, to whom Yakunin immediately felt an attraction. They became friends, and after meeting with her several times, he felt this attraction even more profoundly. Subsequently, she invited him to her home to meet her parents. For Yakunin, the meeting did not turn out to be a pleasant experience. Iraida’s father, a former soldier who had fought at the front in World War II, worked as a carpenter in the military hospital in Irkutsk, and the family lived in an apartment on hospital grounds. Iraida’s father took an instant dislike to Yakunin. Strongly antisemitic, he took the redheaded Yakunin to be Jewish and was overtly rude to him. Iraida’s mother, however, treated him kindly, and the two got along from the outset. Iraida invited Yakunin a second time, for tea, thinking her father would be away. Soon after Yakunin arrived, however, Iraida learned that her father had left work early and soon planned to return home. To avoid a confrontation, the two of them quickly left the apartment and conducted their courtship as they walked on the street.61
Iraida’s acquaintance with Gleb Yakunin, which began in 1957, soon developed into a romance. Sometime later that same year, he proposed marriage to her. He was twenty-three years old and she was eighteen and only at the beginning of her advanced schooling. She went to seek her mother’s counsel: “I like him,” Iraida said, “but I am not ready to get married. I want to study to find my own pathway in life, which I have not yet discovered.” “Well, then, tell him ‘No!’ Mama advised. And I did so.”62
Iraida had wanted to be a doctor, but, following an unsuccessful foray into medical school, she enrolled in a technical institute where she studied economics to become an accountant. Meanwhile, Gleb Yakunin graduated from the institute in Irkutsk, served the compulsory term as a forest ranger, and returned to Moscow. At the same time, he kept up his relationship with Iraida, often sending her letters and packages filled with “journals and books about art and various other subjects in an attempt to enlighten me,” she later recalled. Before he left Irkutsk, he had told her that he would wait for her until she was ready to marry and asked her how long it would be.63 Although she did not give him a definite answer, Yakunin was patient, convinced he had found his future wife.
In retrospect, the two made a good match. Iraida had been raised in an Orthodox family in which the mother, a committed believer, had attempted to instill the Orthodox faith in her three children. She had them in church each Sunday, although, at the time, believers in God were ridiculed and often provoked by other children. “Not just a few times did others challenge us in school and demand that we remove the cross from our neck and try to forbid us to go to church.”64 Neither she nor her siblings ever relented; her two brothers served at the altar in the church, and she sang in the church choir.65 In remaining committed to her, Gleb Yakunin knew that he had found a steadfast person whose life experiences fit well with the life of an aspiring young priest. While he may not have been fully conscious of it, his selection of Iraida replicated his own father’s choice, since he, too, had chosen a young woman from a simple, uneducated, working-class family with whom he would have an enduring relationship.
When he returned to Moscow in 1959, Yakunin did so alone. A year later, he matriculated in the Moscow Theological Seminary and began his studies for the priesthood. He could hardly have chosen a less opportune time to become a priest. The previous year, beginning in February 1959, the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had called for a transition in the state’s approach to religion, moving from active propaganda to a more aggressive approach in which church hierarchs were targeted for removal and churches were closed down. In December, an antireligion storm was underway, and one month later, in January 1960, the assault intensified with the mass closure of churches, the prohibition of pilgrimages and church charitable work, and the publication of hundreds of thousands of atheistic tracts.66 The authorities also decreed that a specified distance separate churches in towns and villages and made it illegal for a priest to represent more than one church.67 The effects of this policy resulted in the closing down of rural churches throughout the country.68
Gleb Yakunin had hoped the Moscow Theological Seminary would be a place of learning and excitement. Instead, he found neither the curriculum nor the professors to be inspiring. He quickly became aware that he would have to accomplish any learning on his own. He lasted less than a year in the seminary. Late in his first year, he borrowed a book from the library: Nikolai Berdiaev’s Filosofiia svobody (The Philosophy of Freedom). Shortly after he checked out Berdiaev’s book, the Party’s Literature Control Office instituted a purge at the Ecclesiastical Academy’s library of certain volumes deemed unsatisfactory. These writings included the collected papers of the Kyivan theology professor Archpriest Pavel Iakovlevich Svetlov and Nikolai Berdiaev’s Filosofiia svobody. Yakunin loved Berdiaev’s book, considered it a rare and penetrating work on the meaning of freedom, and he knew that when he returned the book, it would disappear. He told the authorities he had lost it. Archimandrite Leonid (Poliakov), a professor who sympathized with Yakunin, said to him, “Gleb, try to return the book at any cost; otherwise, they will expel you, and I will not be able to defend you.” As soon as he heard this, Yakunin recounted, “I went on the black market and bought a copy of Berdiaev’s book, but without the library stamp, of course. I told the authorities that I was returning an exact copy in the place of the lost one.” That did not satisfy them, although they immediately confiscated the copy and then told the seminary’s rector to “expel Gleb Yakunin, because he checked out a library book; however, after an urgent demand for its return, he submitted a totally different copy.” “I was ‘guilty’ of an immoral act—I had tried to steal a book, and on this basis, they dismissed me from the seminary.”69
Despite this setback, Yakunin soon experienced several developments that placed his life on a more positive trajectory. While in Moscow, he had continued writing letters to Iraida Georgievna in Irkutsk, affirming his desire to marry her, and in 1961, after completing her course of study, which qualified her as a bookkeeper, she moved to Moscow to be near him. Unable to secure a prominent position in the church, Yakunin took a low-ranking post as a psalm reader in the northwestern suburbs of Moscow. Several days after Iraida’s arrival, they married. The wedding was simple, Iraida recalled (“We had little money”), and Fr. Aleksandr Men organized everything at the dacha of Fr. Vladimir Rozhkov, where all their friends gathered.70 The wedding was the joyous culmination of an extended courtship during which Yakunin never wavered in his devotion to her.
In May 1962, Iraida gave birth to their first child, a daughter whom they named Mariia, who immediately became one of the most beloved people in Yakunin’s life. Another fortunate development soon followed. On August 9, 1962, Yakunin was ordained as a deacon, and the next day Archbishop Leonid (Poliakov), in a ceremony held in the Novodevichy Monastery in Moscow, consecrated him as a priest.71 The church appointed him to serve as second priest in Zaraisk, a small medieval fortress town in western Russia, some 101 miles from Moscow. Iraida worked as a bookkeeper in Moscow, where, despite the distance Yakunin had to travel, they lived with Yakunin’s mother in a small room on Zhukovskaia Street in central Moscow. A curtain divided the fourteen-meter room in which all four of them lived. Yakunin’s mother slept on one side of the curtain, and Yakunin, Iraida, and their daughter on the other.72
A short time later, the church transferred Yakunin from Zaraisk to the medieval city of Dmitrov, forty miles from Moscow and much closer to his home. Located north of Moscow, the city lay on a once major trading route to the north through which grain from the south had once moved, and fur pelts had been transported southward to Moscow. Dmitrov was also the site of magnificent churches whose golden cupolas loomed over the city’s landscape. These churches and nearby monasteries suffered greatly during the antireligion campaigns, and most of them were closed or converted into museums. A small church lying on the outskirts of the city remained the only open establishment, and it attracted people from all the surrounding towns and villages.73 Fr. Gleb would serve this church for the next three years, marking an extremely joyous time in his life. Happily married, the father of an infant daughter, and the head priest of an Orthodox parish, he thrived, even in these challenging times. By all these measures, he was successful. Of Yakunin’s three years in Dmitrov, Levitin-Krasnov wrote, “[Fr. Gleb] was respected and loved by his parish and the people; a person of rare kindness and utmost humility, he won the respect of all people who met him.”74 Yakunin could not have known that an explosive event lay immediately ahead and change his entire relationship to the church and the trajectory of his life.