Almost overnight, the four million Uniate Christians became the world’s largest illegal church. All but two of its ten bishops, along with many thousands of priests and believers, died for their faith in the Siberian gulag.71
In 1963 Slipyj was expelled to Rome, leaving Bishop (later Archbishop) Vasyl Velychkovsky as effective leader of the underground church. The KGB immediately deployed five agents—TIKHOV, SIDORENKO, ROMANENKO, SOVA and PODOLENIN (none identified in Mitrokhin’s notes)—in a series of attempts to discredit Velychkovsky among the persecuted Uniate faithful. TIKHOV, evidently a member of the underground church, periodically sent to Slipyj in the Vatican letters containing disinformation about Velychkovsky fabricated by the Centre. According to KGB files, Slipyj sent his own emissaries to the Ukraine to check the truth of the allegations against his successor, but agents who were planted on them confirmed TIKHOV’s fabrications.72 KGB reports, however, probably overstated the success of their active measures. There is no convincing evidence of a breach between Slipyj and Velychkovsky.
In July 1967 a conference of senior officials of Soviet Bloc intelligence agencies met in Budapest to discuss “work against the Vatican; measures to discredit the Vatican and its backers; and measures to exacerbate differences within the Vatican and between the Vatican and capitalist countries.”73 Two senior KGB officers, Agayants and Khamazyuk, addressed the conference on “The Hostile Activity of the Vatican and of the Catholic and Uniate Clergy on the Territory of the USSR and the Experience of the [KGB] Agencies in Countering this Activity.” A third, Kulikov, spoke on “Some aspects of agent operational work against Vatican institutions.” On the proposal of the KGB delegation, all but the Romanian representatives agreed on the need to intensify “work against the Vatican in close relation with the work against the Main Adversary.” Andropov, who regarded the Uniates as the spearhead of the Vatican’s ideological sabotage offensive in the Soviet Union, wrote to the Central Committee, emphasizing the importance of the conference’s conclusions.74
Andropov’s obsession with ideological subversion by the Holy See was doubtless reinforced by the claim in a 1968 intelligence report that the Vatican’s Secretariat of State had devised a masterplan to shatter the unity of the Soviet Union and had given the Deputy Secretary of State, Cardinal Giovanni Benelli, the task of implementing it.75 A Centre assessment of 1969 repeated the claim that the Vatican was out “to shatter the Soviet Union from within with the help of ideological sabotage”:
Church people were disseminating Church propaganda literature, praising the Western way of life, whipping up nationalist feelings among the population of Soviet Republics and sowing distrust among Soviet people towards Soviet and Party agencies.76
A professional antireligioznik from the Ukraine, speaking at an official conference in 1969, paid unwitting tribute to the continued vitality of the persecuted Uniates:
Nurturing hopes for the restoration of the Uniate Church, its apologists are working on the clergy who reunited with Orthodoxy, trying to persuade them to repudiate the “Muscovites” and to adopt openly or secretly a Uniate, pro-Vatican line. In some regions of the Ukraine, illegal schools were organized to train new Uniate priests. In a series of localities, the Uniates have willfully opened previously closed churches and have been conducting [unauthorized] religious services…77
On April 4, 1969 Andropov approved further “measures to intensify the struggle against subversive activity by the Vatican and the Uniates on the territory of the USSR in 1969-70,” to be implemented jointly by the FCD, the Fifth (Dissidents and Ideological Subversion) Directorate and local KGBs. The FCD was instructed, somewhat ambitiously, to attempt the agent penetration of all major sections of the Vatican bureaucracy, the Jesuit order, the Russicum and other pontifical colleges training priests for Eastern churches, as well as to make operational contact with three Roman clerics—codenamed APOSTOL, RASS and SLUGA—who had been born in the Soviet Union.78 Among the few successes in this ambitious program by the end of 1969 which Mitrokhin found in Centre files was the penetration of pontifical colleges by KGB agents from the legally established Catholic Church in the Soviet Union, particularly the Baltic republics. PETROV and ROGULIN, both agents of the Fifth Directorate, had arrived in Rome in January 1968 to begin three years’ study at the Russicum; in 1969 they went on an intelligence-gathering mission to “Catholic centers” in France and Belgium.79 During 1969, two KGB agents from Lithuania, ANTANAS and VIDMANTAS, were studying at the Gregorian University. 80 Two other Lithuanian agents, DAKTARAS (a bishop) and ZHIBUTE, took part in the working commission for the reform of the Canon Law Codex, held at the Vatican from May 21 to June 11, 1969. DAKTARAS told his case officer that, at a papal audience on June 7, Paul VI had told him, “I remember you in my prayers and hope that God will help the clergy and believers [in Lithuania].”81
With the assistance of the Hungarian AVH, the KGB also succeeded in cultivating a member of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Eastern Church, Uniate Bishop Dudás, who was resident in Hungary. A Fifth Directorate female agent, POTOCHINA, who had probably infiltrated the underground church in Ukraine, traveled regularly to Hungary on the pretext of visiting a relative and—according to her file—succeeded in winning Dudás’s confidence.82 Dudás doubtless never suspected that she was a KGB agent, sent to obtain intelligence on the Vatican’s secret contacts with the Ukrainian Uniates.
The operations against the Vatican approved by Andropov in April 1969 also included a series of active measures. The KGB was instructed to find ways of creating distrust between émigré clerics in Rome and Uniates and other Catholics in the Soviet Union. The leading KGB agents in the Russian Orthodox Church who were in contact with the Vatican—DROZDOV (Metropolitan Aleksi), ADAMANT (Metropolitan Nikodim), SVYATOSLAV and NESTEROV (both unidentified)—were instructed “to cause dissension between Vatican organizations such as the Congregation for the Eastern Church, the Secretariat for Christian Unity and the Commission for Justice and Peace.” In order to put pressure on the Vatican “to cease its subversive activity,” ADAMANT was also instructed to tell his contacts in the Roman Curia that the Soviet government was contemplating establishing autonomous Catholic churches in the Baltic republics and elsewhere in the Soviet Union which would be independent of Rome. The Lithuanian bishop DAKTARAS passed on the same message when he attended a bishop’s conference in Rome in October 1969.83 There is no evidence that any of the active measures had a discernible effect on Vatican policy.
As well as giving higher priority to operations against the Vatican, Andropov also stepped up the persecution of the Ukrainian Uniates. In 1969 the head of the underground church, Bishop Velychkovsky, was arrested and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. The KGB reported that his arrest “greatly helped to achieve a psychological breakthrough in the mind of SERAFIM,” another leading figure in the Uniate underground, who was recruited as a KGB agent. According to Mitrokhin’s notes on his file:
SERAFIM explained in detail by whom, when and in what circumstances he was tasked to direct monks illegally; he reported incidents of criminal organizational activity by Bishop Velychkovsky and his close contacts; he reported on the situation among underground orders of monks… and he drew up a list of Uniate priests operating illegally. SERAFIM’s answers were recorded covertly on tape.
Though SERAFIM agreed to “cooperate secretly” with the KGB, he refused to sign the written undertaking required of most informers. His controller did not insist, on the grounds that it would represent too great “a psychological trial for a man of religion” and leave him in fear of “divine punishment in the next world.” Another agent, terrified of “being cast into Hell,” had once begged the controller, on bended knee, to return his signed undertaking.84
In 1971 the KGB also succeeded in recruiting in Lviv one of the leading members of an underground order of Uniate monks, codenamed IRENEY, who served as one of the main points of contact with the Catholic Church in Poland. The Fifth Department regarded IREN
EY as a tough nut to crack. If confronted directly with his “illegal activity,” he would probably be strong enough to withstand the usual uncompromising interrogation. If given too many details of his activities, he would be able to identify members of the underground church who had informed on him. The KGB decided to begin by mounting a major surveillance operation on IRENEY’s sister and “conspiratorial” collaborator, MARIYA. After MARIYA’s sudden death, with IRENEY in deep depression, his case officer judged that the time was ripe for “a complex recruitment operation.” IRENEY was brought in for interrogation and given extensive details of his ministry in the underground church, carefully designed to give the misleading impression that MARIYA had been informing on him for many years. Mitrokhin’s notes give the following summary of the interrogator’s self-congratulatory report:
The monk lost the power of speech; he was totally stunned by this astonishing thought. His wild eyes, trembling hands, and the perspiration which covered his face betrayed his strong spiritual turmoil… Judging that denials were useless, [IRENEY] described the membership of the illegal leadership of the monastic order in Ukraine; he named Uniate authorities and monks who had come to Lvov [Lviv] through the tourist channel; and he spoke of his own journey to Poland in 1971 and of the meetings that he had held there. A month later, [IRENEY] was recruited… but refused to give a signed undertaking.
IRENEY remained so convinced that his sister had been a KGB agent that, when passing information to his controller, he frequently added the comment, “No doubt my sister told you this.” According to his KGB file, he never ceased to marvel at the way in which sister had succeeded in keeping her KGB connection a secret from him.85
In 1972, like Slipyj nine years earlier, Bishop Velychkovsky was deported to the Vatican. A year later the KGB managed to gain access to Slipyj. Cardinal Felici invited to the Vatican a leading Uniate cleric from Czechoslovakia, unaware that he was a KGB agent codenamed PROFESSOR. Originally recruited by the Czechoslovak StB, PROFESSOR had been used by the KGB in 1971 to go on a supposedly “pastoral” visitation of the Redemptorist Order in Ukraine in order to provide intelligence on the activities of the underground church and its links with Rome. In September 1973 he met Slipyj in the Vatican. Plans were made for PROFESSOR to meet the Uniate leadership in Lviv, but Mitrokhin’s notes do not record whether this meeting went ahead.86
In February 1975 a conference of Soviet Bloc intelligence services considered the coordination of operations against, and agent penetration in, the Vatican.87 The Polish SB, Czechoslovak StB and Hungarian AVH all reported that they had “significant agent positions in the Vatican.” Mitrokhin’s notes record no such claim by the KGB. As at the similar conference in 1967, however, a hugely ambitious and unrealistic program for agent penetration was drawn up, which included plans to cultivate the Uniate leadership and no fewer than seven cardinals (Casaroli, Willebrands, Kînig, Samorä, Benelli, Poggi and Pignedoli), as well as an elaborate series of active measures to influence and discredit the Catholic Church.88
Among the individual targets for character assassination was Velychkovsky’s successor as head of the underground Uniate Church, Bishop (later Metropolitan Archbishop) Volodymyr Sternyuk. Agent NATASHA spread disinformation about Sternyuk’s alleged sexual immorality and the same stories were passed by other agents to the Vatican. As a result, according to KGB reports, “he lost the support of a significant part of the Uniates.”89 In reality, despite a new and vicious round of religious persecution in the early 1980s, the KGB lost its war against the Uniates. In 1987 Sternyuk emerged from the underground at the age of eighty-one with the status of a national hero, openly acknowledged by Rome as head of the Catholic Church in Ukraine—to the dismay of both the KGB and most of the Orthodox hierarchy. Metropolitan Filaret of Kiev and Galich insisted as late as October 1989, “The Uniates will never be legalized in our country.” They were legalized by the end of the year.90
AFTER THE UNIATES and other Catholics, the KGB was most concerned during its war against religious “ideological subversion” in the Soviet Union by the activities of the unregistered Protestant churches and sects, which—like the Uniates—were outside direct state control. In the late 1950s the KGB estimated the membership of what it termed “illegal sectarian formations”—chief among them the Reform Baptists, Pentecostalists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Reformed Adventists—at about 100,000.91
The fact that throughout the Brezhnev era the KGB continued, on Andropov’s instructions, to spend so much time and effort on groups who represented no conceivable threat to the Soviet system is further evidence of its obsession with even the most harmless forms of dissent. Andropov made the keynote of his address to an allunion KGB conference in 1975 the claim that anti-Soviet elements were conspiring against the state “under cover of religion.” The first essential in unmasking and defeating the conspiracies was agent penetration:
This is difficult, since false perceptions of the attitude of the state towards religion which still prevail in their milieu have left a definite mark on the psychology of the believers. Among sectarians there is a prejudice that any assistance to the authorities, including the KGB, is a great sin—treason. There is no trust in the humanism of the Cheka.
Andropov’s complaint that believers failed to trust the “humanism” of the KGB provides further evidence of his limited sense of the absurd. To illustrate the difficulties of agent penetration among the ungrateful sectarians, he gave the example of “one candidate for recruitment, who had almost freed himself from errors with regard to the Cheka, and carried out particular assignments from an operational officer:”
…One day, however, he declared that meetings with his operational officer were sinful. He explained that the Lord God had appeared to him in a dream, had handcuffed him and asked: “Whose servant art thou?” Greatly shaken by this dream, the potential recruit interpreted it as a warning from God and stopped meeting the Chekist.92
Mitrokhin cannot have been the only KGB officer who, as he listened to such speeches or read articles on operations against believers in the classified in-house journal KGB Sbornik, secretly admired their courage and their faith. No hint of that admiration, however, appeared in KGB reports.
By the 1960s the KGB leadership had reluctantly concluded that no amount of persecution would wipe out the sectarians altogether. A conference in March 1959 of senior KGB officers leading “the struggle against Jehovists [Jehovah’s Witnesses]” concluded that the correct strategy was “to continue measures of repression with measures of disruption.”93 The KGB set out to divide, demoralize and discredit the sectarians, as well as to arrest their most influential leaders on trumped-up charges.
In 1966 Pastors Georgi Vins and Gennadi Kryuchkov, the leaders of the Reform Baptists, probably the largest sectarian group, were jailed for three years. After their release, both went underground to continue their ministry. In 1974 Vins was caught and rearrested. Despite a major international campaign on his behalf, he was sentenced to a further ten years’ imprisonment, but was released in a “spy exchange” in 1979 and expelled to the United States. Pastor Kryuchkov remained at liberty until 1989, when he dramatically reappeared in public at an emotional Reform Baptist congress. His success in continuing a secret ministry for almost twenty years without being caught by the KGB remains one of the most astonishing achievements in the history of the Soviet religious underground.94
Remarkably, however, the KGB was even more concerned by Jehovah’s Witnesses, viewed with indifference or suspicion by most governments around the world, than by the Reform Baptists, whose heroic endurance of persecution attracted international sympathy. The head of the Second Chief Directorate, General Oleg Mikhailovich Gribanov, reported in 1962, “The most hostile of the sectarians are the Jehovists.”95 Since their emergence in the United States in the 1870s, no other Christian sect has spent so much of its energies on prophesying the end of the world. Though many of its detailed prophecies have been discredited and the Apocalypse has bee
n repeatedly postponed, the basic millennarian message of Jehovah’s Witnesses has never varied: “The end is near. Christ will reveal himself shortly to bring destruction upon the nations and all who oppose is messianic kingdom.”96
In the course of the twentieth century Jehovah’s Witnesses have been persecuted by many authoritarian regimes. Thousands suffered martyrdom in the death camps of the Nazi Third Reich. No major intelligence agency, however, has been quite as concerned as the KGB by the “Jehovist conspiracy.” The Jehovist obsession of senior KGB officers was, perhaps, the supreme example of their lack of any sense of proportion when dealing with even the most insignificant forms of dissent.
Until the Second World War there had been no Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Soviet Union. The incorporation of eastern Poland, Lithuania and Moldavia in 1939-40, however, turned thousands of Witnesses into unwilling Soviet citizens.97 Many were deported to Siberia, accused of being “an American sect.”98 In 1968 the KGB put the total number of Jehovah’s Witnesses at about 20,000.99 The fact that the Witnesses had originated in the United States and still had their world headquarters in Brooklyn was regarded as deeply suspicious by the Centre’s many conspiracy theorists.100 The almost surreal outrage of KGB analysts, as they denounced the Witnesses for describing the Soviet state (like states in general) as the work of the Devil, would not be out of place in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita:
The sect of the Jehovah’s Witnesses or Students of the Bible is a foreign invention. It is dangerous because it is actively engaged in drawing new members into the sect… The sectarians call Communists and the Komsomols “sons of the Devil.”
They demonstrate that the Soviet state is founded by Satan. Therefore one must not implement Soviet laws, or take part in elections, and they urge people to refuse to serve in the Soviet army. Jehovists extend assistance of all kind to their co-religionists who are in the [labor] camps or in internal exile, supplying them with money, food and clothing.101
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