The most serious act of public defiance within the Orthodox Church during the Brezhnev era was, in the Centre’s view, the foundation in December 1976 of the Christian Committee for the Defence of Believers’ Rights in the USSR by Father Gleb Yakunin, Hierodeacon Varsonofy (Khaibulin) and a layman, Viktor Kapitanchuk. The declared aim of the committee, which worked in consultation with the Helsinki Monitoring Group, was to help believers of all denominations “exercise their rights in accordance with their convictions.”45 “Yakunin and his associates,” reported the Centre, “are in practice engaging in a struggle with the existing order in the USSR… proclaiming a national religious revival in Russia as an alternative to Marxist-Leninist ideology”:
The committee has an extensive network of correspondents among religious fanatics; they are the main suppliers of information about the situation of believers in the USSR to places abroad.
In order to cause a schism in the Russian Orthodox Church and to set up a new Church organization taking up anti-Soviet positions, the Christian Committee has launched a campaign to compromise clergy loyal to the Soviet state as unfit to defend the interests of the believers.46
By 1980—to the consternation of the KGB—eleven volumes of documents totaling 1,189 pages of Russian text, obtained by the Christian Committee, had been published in the West.47
The KGB eventually demolished the Christian Committee by its traditional techniques of destabilization, agent penetration and persecution. The Fifth Directorate concluded that the most vulnerable of the committee’s founders was Hierodeacon Varsanofy. With the assistance of GALKIN (an unidentified agent in the Orthodox Church), Varsanofy was assigned early in 1978 to a church in Vladimir region whose incumbent, VOLZHSKY, was a long-standing KGB agent. Finding it difficult to stay in touch with Yakunin and Kapitanchuk, Varsanofy resigned from the Christian Committee. According to Varsanofy’s file, VOLZHSKY introduced him to a sympathetic psychiatrist (also a KGB agent, codenamed BULKIN), who persuaded him that he was suffering from a nervous illness and should give up membership of the Christian Committee in order to reduce the stress he was under and prevent his illness from getting worse. The KGB claimed the credit for inducing Varsonofy “to abandon political activity and concentrate on research work in the field of theology, using materials from the Oblast archives.” While he was working in the archives, another KGB agent, codenamed SPIRANSKY, succeeded in winning his confidence and allegedly “deflected Varsanofy from his obsession of becoming the spokesman of believers in the Soviet Union”:
Finally he was persuaded to send a letter to Patriarch Pimen of All Russia and to senior personalities in the Russian Orthodox Church apologizing for the hurt that he had caused.48
On September 28, 1978 the Centre secretly promulgated KGB order No. 00122 on “Measures to Strengthen Agent Operational Work in the Struggle with the Subversive Activity of Foreign Clerical Centres and Hostile Elements among Church People and Sectarians”: a lengthy document which reflected both the KGB’s addiction to conspiracy theory and its obsession with “ideological subversion” of all kinds. It also paid unwitting, if irritated, tribute to the courage of the persecuted believers and the vitality of their faith. Mitrokhin’s notes on order No. 00122 include the following:
Under the pretense of concern for the freedom of belief and the rights of believers in the USSR, imperialist intelligence services and foreign anti-Soviet centers were organizing ideological sabotage, aimed at undermining the moral and political unity of Soviet society and undermining the basis of the Socialist system; they sought to discredit the Soviet state and social order, incite religious organizations towards confrontations with the state and stimulate the emergence of an anti-Soviet underground among sectarians. With encouragement from abroad, hostile elements had launched active organizational and provocational activity aimed at forming illegal groups and organizations within the sectarian milieu, setting up printing presses and establishing contacts with foreign clerical centers.
Following the directives of the May 1975 conference of leading officials of KGB agencies [dealing with religious affairs], it had been possible to carry out measures to strengthen operational positions in international religious organizations, to expose and compromise their leaders, officials and emissaries of clerical centers. Experienced and reliable agents had been infiltrated into the leading circles of some sectarian formations and measures to identify, prevent and terminate the subversive activity of hostile elements among the clerical anti-Soviet underground had become more effective, the further strengthening of the positions of progressive religious figures had been ensured, as well as their active participation in the struggle for peace and other political measures.
Operational work, however, still did not meet present requirements of the present time. The operational situation in a number of sectors of KGB agency work remained tense. The work of disrupting and detaching believers, especially among young people, from the influence of hostile elements was being carried out feebly. Agent positions in the leading ranks of the dissident Baptists, the Catholic and Uniate priesthood, the Pentecostalists, the Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and among the irregular Moslem clerics, were weak.
The USSR KGB Collegium decided as follows:
1. To raise the level of agent operational work designed to struggle against the subversive activity conducted under the cover of religion by imperialist intelligence services, clerical centers abroad and hostile elements within the country. The basic task was to identify in good time, prevent and put an end to the subversive designs of the adversary to stimulate anti-Soviet activity in the sectarian environment, creating religious formations hostile to the Socialist system and drawing believers into their sphere of influence.
2. The FCD, the SCD and the Fifth Directorate of the KGB were to identify the foreign anti-Soviet clerical organizations which, evidence showed, were being used by the adversary’s special services and were to submit proposals for identifying and cutting off subversive channels, identifying and intercepting communication channels with hostile elements in the sectarian milieu…
3. The Fifth Directorate and the local KGB agencies were to take steps to put an end to hostile activity designed to undermine loyalty to the Soviet state and the social order by the largest religious organization in the USSR, namely the Orthodox Church; they were to prevent the penetration of individuals with hostile attitudes in the leading ranks of the Church; in 1978-80, they were to take steps to strengthen the operational positions [i.e. the number and quality of agents] within the structure of the Orthodox Church (in Metropolitan provinces, Eparchies, parishes, monasteries and educational establishments), and to compromise and remove reactionary and anti-Soviet elements…49
The Christian Committee for the Defence of Believers’ Rights sought to protect itself against KGB penetration in part by remaining small, never having more than four members at any one time.50 In May 1979, however, it was joined by Father Vasili Fonchenkov, unaware that nine years earlier he had been recruited by the Fifth Directorate as agent DRUG (“Friend”). According to his file, “He was involved in the cultivation of specific individuals [in the Orthodox Church], carried out his assignments conscientiously and showed initiative.” Since 1972 Fonchenkov had been a lecturer at the Zagorsk theological academy as well as holding a position in the foreign relations department of the Moscow Patriarchate. In 1976-7 he had been the incumbent of the church of St. Sergi in East Berlin and editor of Stimme der Orthodoxie (Voice of Orthodoxy), the journal of the Patriarchate’s central European exarchate.51 His contacts with foreign churches may well have helped to recommend agent DRUG to his unwitting colleagues on the Christian Committee.
The KGB campaign against public dissent in the Orthodox Church reached its peak in 1979-80, with a wave of arrests of leading dissidents—chief among them Father Gleb Yakunin—who were later imprisoned or persuaded to recant. Probably to protect his cover, Fonchenkov was summoned for interrogation by the KGB and issued a statement saying
that he was threatened with arrest, but was never charged.52 During a visit to West Germany in March 1980 Archbishop Pitirim of Volokolamsk (agent ABBAT)53 bizarrely declared that there had been “no wave of arrests.”54 The first major success of the KGB campaign was to persuade the charismatic Moscow priest Father Dmitri Dudko, whose offenses included calling for the canonization of Orthodox martyrs of the Soviet era, to make a public recantation on Soviet television in June 1980. Dudko’s resistance had been broken by a particularly skillful KGB interrogator, Vladimir Sergeyevich Sorokin, whom he had come to regard as “my own brother.” He said later that he had hoped that parts of his confession, such as his condemnation of “the sabre-rattling of the Carter administration,” would be recognized as words placed in his mouth by the KGB. His reputation, however, never fully recovered.55
There was no prospect of a recantation by Yakunin. Only his wife was allowed to attend his trial. The rest of his family and friends, along with the Western press, were refused admittance, while what one correspondent described as “burly young men in ill-fitting suits,” selected by the KGB, filed into the courtroom. Probably to protect his cover, Fonchenkov was among those who were turned away.56 Those called to give evidence against Yakunin included several KGB agents inside the Orthodox Church, among them Iosif Pustoutov (YESAULENKO), former representative of the Moscow Patriarchate at the Prague headquarters of the Christian Peace Conference, who testified to the harmful international consequences of the Christian Committee’s work. Yakunin accepted his sentence of five years’ imprisonment, followed by five years’ internal exile, with the words, “I thank God for this test He has sent me. I consider it a great honor, and, as a Christian, accept it gladly.” The British Council of Churches sent an appeal to Brezhnev, urging the court to reconsider its opinion. Attempts to gain the support of the World Council of Churches for a similar appeal met with no response.57
A change in WCC rules before its Vancouver Assembly in 1983 ensured that the KGB suffered no repetition of the embarrassment caused by the discussion of the Yakunin and Regelson letter at the previous assembly seven and a half years earlier. Under the new regulations, probably prompted by the KGB agents on the WCC council:
Appeals from groups or individuals for World Council of Churches intervention cannot be acted on by the assembly without the support of delegates or member churches, but will be followed up by the WCC general secretary.
An open letter from Vladimir Rusak, a Russian Orthodox deacon who had been dismissed for writing an unauthorized history of the Church after the October Revolution, appealed to delegates at Vancouver to “stop treating the propagandistic claims of Soviet delegates as the only source of information” on religion in the Soviet Union. He also urged the assembly to hold a frank debate on religious freedom. The mere discussion of the Yakunin-Regelson letter at Nairobi had “yielded some definite results” by embarrassing the authorities into the “hurried publication” of some copies of the Bible. The assembly also received another letter on behalf of thirty-five imprisoned Soviet Christians and 20,000 persecuted Pentecostalists who wished to emigrate to the West. Unsurprisingly, neither letter received support from Soviet delegates and neither was discussed at the assembly.
The embarrassment of the Afghan War was also successfully contained. Despite the desire of a minority of delegates for “a condemnation of Soviet aggression and the unconditional withdrawal of Soviet troops,” the final compromise resolution called for a Soviet withdrawal only “in the context of an overall political settlement between Afghanistan and the USSR” (conveniently ignoring the fact that the Kabul regime had been installed by the Soviet invaders) and “an end to the supply of arms to the opposition groups from outside” (in other words, the denial of arms to those resisting the Soviet invasion). These were precisely the conditions which the Soviet Union itself laid down for the withdrawal of its troops. Unsurprisingly, the Russian Orthodox delegation praised the final resolution as “balanced and realistic.” The Vancouver Assembly had no such inhibitions in condemning the West. Western capitalism was duly denounced as the main source of injustice in the world, responsible for the evils of sexism, racism, “cultural captivity, colonialism, and neo-colonialism.”58
The success, in Moscow’s view, of the Vancouver Assembly, probably helps to explain why the Centre established as one of the priorities for KGB active measures for 1984:
Exerting influence in our favor on the activity of… clerical organizations on the questions of war and peace, and other key contemporary problems.59
Looking back on his career in the KGB, Oleg Kalugin concludes that, like “the stranglehold over the Church inside the Soviet Union,” the penetration and exploitation of the Russian Orthodox Church abroad was “one of the most sordid and little known chapters in the history of our organization.”60 Mitrokhin came to the same conclusion, commenting at one point in his notes that the files contained “a whirlpool of filth.”61 The KGB used its agents among Russian Orthodox clergy in the West not merely to spy on émigré communities but also to identify possible agent recruits.62 Though the Russian Orthodox Church in north America was split, the faction which remained loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate was, according to Kalugin, “riddled with KGB agents.”63 Among the agents identified in the files noted by Mitrokhin was a cleric codenamed PETROV, who was sent to north America in the 1970s. His case officers in north America contacted him by using the passwords “Pyotr Mikhailovich,” the first name and patronymic of his Fifth Directorate controller in Moscow.64
The file on Arkadi Rodyonovich Tyshchuk (VORONOV), a priest who was posted to the Nikolsky Russian Orthodox cathedral in New York from 1977 to 1982, contains evidence of a hostility to the United States which may also have helped to motivate other Orthodox priests in the KGB’s north American network. The United States, VORONOV told his KGB case officer, suffered from the sin of pride—“and pride comes before a fall:”
When a country declares itself to be the most powerful and the richest, and that its government is the smartest and possesses the best weapons—that is not maturity, it is bragging, and is the reason for the downfall of all the powerful nations of the past.
VORONOV usually met his controller from the New York residency either at the Soviet mission to the United Nations, where he went to collect his correspondence from Russia, or on board the ship Mikhail Lermontov, which regularly came into port at New York. More difficult to explain than his hostility to the United States was his apparent admiration for the KGB which, according to his file, he bizarrely described as a “good shepherd” and a “true Russian spiritual guardian and shepherd.”65
Russian Orthodox priests in the West were also used by FCD Directorate S to collect material for use in devising the well-documented legends of KGB illegals. In the early 1970s, for example, two KGB agents in the Moscow Patriarchate were sent to carry out detailed research on parish registers in Canada. Ivan Grigoryevich Borcha (codenamed FYODOR), who worked as a priest in prairie parishes of Ukrainian and Romanian communities, studied registers in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Viktor Sergeyevich Petlyuchenko (PATRIOT), who was assigned to Orthodox parishes in Edmonton, carried out further research in Alberta.66
The Russian Orthodox Church, both at home and abroad, took a prominent part in the Rodina (“Motherland”) Society founded as a front organization by the KGB in December 1975 to promote “cultural relations with compatriots abroad,” and thus provide new opportunities for agent recruitment among émigré communities. Its vice-president, P. I. Vasilyev, was a senior member of the FCD’s Nineteenth (Soviet émigré) Department and headed a secret Rodina intelligence section.67 Metropolitan Aleksi of Tallinn and Estonia (agent DROZDOV),68 the future Patriarch Aleksi II, who was made a Rodina council member, told its opening conference, “We are all united by our love for our Socialist motherland.” Through its exarchates, dioceses and parishes in Europe, America, Asia and Africa, the Orthodox Church “continued to maintain spiritual ties with our compatriots” and was “doing i
ts best to keep these contacts alive and active.”69 Metropolitan Aleksi is unlikely to have been unaware that these contacts were exploited by the KGB. According to a KGB document of 1988, “An order was drafted by the USSR KGB chairman to award an honorary citation to agent DROZDOV” for unspecified services to state security.70
THOUGH NEVER FULLY satisfied by the extent of its stranglehold over the Orthodox Church, the KGB was far more concerned by the “subversive” activities of those Christians over whom it had no direct control. The largest of the underground churches was the Greek Catholic (or Uniate) Church of Ukraine (nowadays the Ukrainian Catholic Church), whose liturgy and structure followed the “Eastern Rite” but which accepted the authority of Rome. Fearful at the end of the Second World War that the Uniate Church would provide a focus for Ukrainian nationalism, Stalin set out to terrorize it into submission to Moscow. In 1946 a mock synod in Lviv cathedral, staged by the MGB with the assistance of a small number of Uniate stooges and the blessing of the Orthodox hierarchy, announced the “reunion” of the Greek Catholics with the Russian Orthodox Church. Greek Catholic Archbishop (later Cardinal) Josyf Slipyj wrote later:
Our priests were given the choice of either joining the “church of the Regime” and thereby renouncing Catholic unity, or enduring for at least ten years the harsh fate of deportation and all the penalties associated with it. The overwhelming majority of priests chose the way of the Soviet Union’s prisons and concentration camps.
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