THE SUFFERING CHURCH OF RUSSIA — HER HEROES AND HER BLASPHEMERS by GLEB RAHR Report read at the Third Sobor of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia HE representatives of the Moscow Patriarchate abroad of- ten have to answer questions as to how many Orthodox believers there are in the Soviet Union. On such occa- sions it is understood that they are all in submission to, and looked after by, the Patriarchate, an episcopacy which is controlled by the Soviet authorities, and a clergy which is registered by an official of the Soviet for Religious Affairs. Almost always the representatives of the Patriarchate reply that there are about 30 million Orthodox in the U.S.S.R. at the present time. At the last census in January, 1970, the total population of the country was found to be 242 million. Of these, 192 million belonged to peoples connected with Orthodoxy by their spiritual culture and history. And if we are to believe the figure of 30 million Orthodox believers, prescribed for use abroad by the organs which supervise the activity of the Patriarchate, then we would have to come to the conclusion that only 16 per cent of the total number of Great Rus- sians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Georgians, Moldavians, Karelians, Chuvashes, Mordvinians, Udmurts, Bulgarians and Greeks living in our country remain faithful to their Church. Igor Rostislavovich Shafarevich, a member and correspondent of the Academy of Sciences, a member of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights and a very close collaborator with the president of this committee, Andrei Dimitrievich Sakharov, is the son of an Orthodox priest who was tortured to death by the communists and he knows well the situation of the Church and of believing Christians in the Soviet Union. Two vears ago, he, nevertheless, presented a report to the Human Rights Committee in which he showed that, in their policy of repressing Orthodox Christians, the Soviet authorities are working not on the basis of 30 million, but of completely different figures. If you carefully coordinate all the various figures used in the Atheist’s Handbook, published in Moscow in 1971, then you will come to the conclusion that no less than 70 million people in the Soviet Union —2B3—ORTHODOX LIFE remain faithful to Orthodoxy. And this is not 16, but 36 per cent of those peoples who developed spiritually under the influence of Orthodoxy. Igor Rostislavovich Shafarevich notes that the figure of 70 million does not give a precise picture, since we do not know on what principles it was composed — for example, we do not know whether children and adolescents under 18 years of age were counted as having the same religion as theit parents or not. Two years ago, through the channels of “Orthodox Action,’”* some fairly accurate information was obtained about the number of registered baptisms, funerals and church weddings in Leningrad and Leningrad province. After comparing these data with fragmentary data from other parts of the country, we have attempted to extrapolate these figures and have come to the conclusion that sixty per cent of the traditionally Orthodox peoples of our country, or about 115 million people, continue to consider themselves Orthodox. Of course, we have in mind not only that part of the population which has the opportunity to take part in the services and Church life of the open part of the Church. In one of our articles devoted to this question and published abroad (Posev”’, No. 3, 1973), we wrote: “The Church recognizes as Orthodox those Christians who have been baptized in Orthodoxy, who have recourse to the mysteries of the Church and ‘rightly glorify’ the Holy Trinity. In this analysis we also will be so bold as to give this Church definition a somewhat broader interpretation. Under the conditions of a totalitarian, theo- machistic state, we will also call Orthodox someone who, although he has lost contact with the earthly Church, is still drawn to her by the command of his conscience and takes up Orthodox spiritual positions in his life. If he is not baptized, he is not yet in the Church. If he has not happened to read the Gospel, he is not even a catechumen. But ii his conscience has not allowed him to deny Christ and call him- self an unbeliever; if he has renounced material conveniences so as not to make himself out to be an adherent of the ideology of Anti- christ; if he has not betrayed his comrades; if he has fed a hungry per- son; if he has stood up and spoken the truth—he has turned his face to- wards Christ, he has ‘breathed and spat’ upon Satan, he has performed the decisive act of the will which is demanded of one who enters the Church. No, we do not share the ideas of the priest Sergei Zheludkov about the ‘Church of People of Good Will,’ in which one can remain an atheist. We are speaking of those who have not remained without baptism through their own will, or remained igno- rant of the dogmas and canons through pride. We are speaking of those who have preserved inner faithfulness, in whom conscience * See p. 31-84. ~—4—THE SUFFERING CHURCH OF RUSSIA is alive, who distinguish truth from falsehood, who know that they are not atheists, who call themselves Orthodox.” It is of such people, as we think, that even in contemporary Russia one can count no less than 115 million, that is 60 per cent of the peoples who are Orthodox according to their spiritual culture. It happens, incidentally, that individual members of the clergy in submission to the Moscow Patriarchate not only confirm figures such as these, but even name higher ones. There is a story about a late bishop to the effect that when he went abroad and was asked about the percentage of believers, he answered: “I will not attempt to speak for the country as a whole, but in Byelorussia we have 95 percent.” On his return to the homeland, an official of the Soviet for Religious Affairs summoned the bishop who had disobeyed Kuroye- dov’s instructions and, as popular rumour has it, began to reproach him with expressions like this: “Who do you think you are? Don’t you count us atheists as people any more?’ How many party mem- bers have we got? How many Komsomol members? How many academics, writers, artists, professors, civil servants and teachers? More than five per cent, surely? And what have you done with them? They’re all atheists, you know.” According to the same Byelorussian popular rumor, the offending bishop did not give in, but supposedly answered the official: ‘You see, until they retire they’re yours. But as soon as they retire, they're mine. Just step into the cathedral on a Sunday’. We will not, of course, undertake to judge of the accuracy of the estimate according to which 95 per cent of the population of Byelo- russia are believers, and still less can we bring ourselves to apply that percentage to other parts of the country. But there can be no doubt that Byelorussia, which was not completely under the heel of com- munism until a quarter of a century later than the other parts of the country, and where almost all the intelligentsia are the sons or grand- sons of priests, is one of the most living centers of Orthodoxy in the country. It is sufficient to turn the pages of the “Journal of the Mos- cow Patriarchate” to be convinced what a large proportion of Byelo- russian surnames there are in the lists of graduates from the remaining seminaries and academies, and among the clergy of Siberia and the Ural region. The proportion in Volhynia is analogous. Of course at the present time, when, in the words of Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky, the young intelligentsia has ‘shifted its interests onto the side of rel- igious-philosophical problematics” (he has not yet come to speak of an authentic process of rebirth), the religious centers which have sur- vived and, perhaps, been newly strengthened in Moscow, Kiev, Yar- oslavl, Kazan, Pskov and also in the city of St. Peter, now called —15—ORTHODOX LIFE Leningrad, also have great significance. “Orthodox Action” is in possession of information about how the Paschal processions around the Holy Trinity Cathedral of the former St. Alexander Nevsky Lavra proceeded with special spiritual elevation, and continued right up to the Ascension. The apodosis of Pascha coincided with the patronal festival of the Cathedral of St. Nicholas by the Sea, and almost 20,000 people were gathered within its walls and outside. Now Kharkov is also included among the towns where the church- es are particularly crowded and the percentage of youth in the con- gregations is noticeably increasing. The northeast of European Rus- sia — the Vyatsk, Vologda, Kostroma and Cheboksarsk dioceses — remains undoubtedly a stronghold of Orthodoxy, despite Khrushchev’s blitz on the Church in the 1960’s. Boris Vladimirovich Talantov, that confessor of our days who perished in a Soviet jail, devoted some of his writings which have reached us to the result of the blitz. How many churches are open in the U.S.S.R.? However, the satisfactory or hopeful state of Church life in a few large towns and a few relatively sparsely populated regions of the country does not alter the fact that, in the country as a whole, the situation remains completely catastrophic. At the beginning of this year (““Posev’”, No. 1, 1974) we attempted, on the basis of data collected through the efforts of “Orthodox Ac- tion” about the quantity of “active” churches in 27 dioceses, to com- pare the numbers of open churches with the traditionally Orthodox population of a given territory, and so arrive at the coefficient of pro- portionality between these two figures for various zones of the Sov- iet Union. Then we attempted to determine by extrapolation the number of open churches in the remaining dioceses also. In contrast to the figure of ten thousand open churches in the Soviet Union, which the representatives of the Moscow Patriarchate like to use, and in contrast even with the more modest figure of seven thousand churches, which was recently mentioned by the supervisor of Church Affairs, Kuroyedov, as a result of our calculations we have come to the conclusion that in fact on the territory of the Soviet Union there exist 5,835 open churches of the Moscow Patriarchate and sixty-two of the Georgian. Over the past half year we have been able to make some figures more precise. It turned out that, in all cases except one, our method of extrapolation had led to results that were very close to reality. On the basis of new, more precise and verified data, we can now say that the number of open churches of the Moscow Patriarchate is in fact somewhat lower than the figure we obtained, while at the same time the number of churches in the Georgian Patriarchate is neverthe- theless as high as eighty. The total number of open Orthodox churches ~16—THE SUFFERING CHURCH OF RUSSIA on the territory of the Soviet Union lies somewhere between fifty- seven and fifty-eight hundred. These open churches are insufficient for serving one hundred and and fifteen million Orthodox people, particularly in view of the fact that the churches are not all evenly distributed over the territory of the country. No less than fifty-three per cent, i.e. more than half the churches of the nation, are in territory that was united to the Soviet Union after the Second World War. About half of these, i.e. no less than a quarter of all the open churches are former Uniate churches. A further twenty-six per cent of the open churches are in the the zone that was occupied by the German or Rumanian forces at the very beginning of the war in 1941, and remained under occupa- tion for a comparatively long time. This entire quarter of the now open churches, with very rare, individual exceptions, was renewed and restored during the occupation period, with the permission or even collaboration of the occupying nationals, and not of the Soviets. Only a littie over twenty per cent of the open churches are sit- uated to the east of the main battle fields of the war years, and only these churches — about twelve hundred in all — can serve as some sort of indicator of Stalin’s so-called change of course in relation to religion during the war years. If in the Mukachev diocese even now there is still one open church for every 2000 head of population, if in the Minsk and Kiev dio- ceses, which were under occupation, an open church on average is to serve no more than twenty thousand people, still, in the Moscow region the ratio of open churches to population is 1:100,000, and in the Urals, in the Chelyabinsk diocese, it is 1:200,000, while for the whole of eastern Siberia, the Far East and the North, including also the Archangelsk diocese, there is one open church for every four hundred thousand people! What is the number of clergy in the U.S.S.R.? In 1961, before the Khrushchev blitz, the number of clergy regis- tered by the relevant supervisory bodies, i.e. of priests who were al- lowed to conduct services as well as a limited number of ministrations (baptisms, funerals, etc.), apparently amounted to about fourteen thousand bishops, priests, deacons, monks and nuns. This figure is quoted, at any rate, in the brochure published in Leningrad in 1962 called The Truth about the Holy Things of Petersburg. According to the data of this atheistic propaganda brochure, there were one hundred and fifty clergy in Leningrad in 1961. Accord- ing to the data of “Orthodox Action”, in this same Leningrad in 1971 there were already only ninety-two members of the clergy in possession of official registration. This is a reduction of thirty-nine per cent. If we assume that the number of priests in the country as a whole has —17—ORTHODOX LIFE decreased proportionately, then we must come to the conclusion that at the present time throughout the country 8,540 people in holy orders have the right to conduct services. The general of state security, Kuroyedov, who is putting into prac- tice the policy of suffocating and politically exploiting the open part of the Russian Church in the Soviet Union, recently made a speech in which he expressed his complete satisfaction with affairs on the “ecclesiastical front.” According to him, every year about four hun- dred priests go out of circulation, but only about one hundred and twenty new ones receive registration. The three remaining seminaries — Moscow, Leningrad and Odessa — produce fewer than one hundred priests per year. The remainder of those who are ordained are people who are prepared under the guidance of old bishops or priests, become chanters and deacons, then register with a seminary for correspondence courses, take their exams, and only then are admitted to the priest- hood. In most cases these are elderly people During the Khrushchev blitz on the Church of 1961-62, about one half of the churches which had existed hitherto were closed. Con- sequently the priests of these churches were also deprived of regis- tration. Over the twelve years which have passed since then, these priests, or the younger of them, constituted a kind of reserve for the Moscow Patriarchate, which they could draw on to ensure that the existing open churches were supplied with a minimum number of clergy. At the present time this reserve is coming to an end, and if Kuroyedov’s authorities do not allow more young people to enter seminaries — and there is no hope of that for the present — then the clergy problem will soon be felt very acutely. Attentive observers of Church life in the country point out also that the total attendance of open churches in cities like Moscow and Leningrad is hardly increasing at all. Truly, we are glad that in both cities the percentage of young people among the regular church goers continues to rise. But from purely biological reasons the basic con- tingent of the congregation, on which the open churches have been holding out for the past thirty years, is passing away. This contingent is made up of elderly people, principally women, who came to spiritual maturity before the mass persecutions of the Church under Stalin The passing of the elderly is not completely compensated numer- ically by the flood of young people. Despite the fact that a genera! thirsting tor religion is coming to life, it must be noted that in some places, churches which were filled to overflowing every Sunday a few years ago, can now accommodate their congregations without difficulty, and the proverbial apple does have somewhere to fall. —8—THE SUFFERING CHURCH OF RUSSIA Church life under Soviet control At the same time the party and state authorities are continuing to take all possible measures to prevent youth from joining the Church. Under Khrushchev they were going to attempt not to let children and adolescents into church at all, and to forbid priests from beginning services until all minors had been taken from the church, but these attempts seem to have been abandoned at present. But, as before, adolescents under eighteen are categorically forbidden to go on the cliros (choir) or into the altar. Even priests’ children can neither sing nor serve at the altar. Any kind or form of instructing minors in the Christian faith is punished by confinement in a prison camp, that is to say, a common regime camp, in which criminals reign with complete sway over the other prisoners. In his book The Struggle with Infringements of the Laws on Religious Cults, the Soviet jurist Klochkov expresses the thought that an infringement of this law should be understood as “holding classes to teach minors religion in any form, except for parents teaching their children”. This author states, nevertheless, that teaching religion to one’s sisters or brothers, or a grandmother teaching her grandson, would be fully within the meaning of article 142 of the criminal code, and be pun- ishable by corrective labour. In June of this year, in the journal “Sowietunion Heute,” which is published in German by the Soviet consulate in Bonn, the Soviet Archpishop Pitirim Nechaev, chief editor of the “Journal of the Mos- cow Patriarchate,” confirmed that the official, registered part of the Church in the Soviet Union does not instruct minors in the faith. In the opinion of this archpastor, religious instruction would cultivate prejudice, and would conceal elements of spiritual and moral coer- cion of the consciences of the young... When he attains maturity, he says, the young person will decide for himself whether to enter some religious society or not. Religion, from the point of view both of the Church and of the state, is the private affair of each cit- izen. Thus, at any rate, asserts the editor-in-chief of the “Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate”, Archbishop Pitirim Nechaev, in the pages of this semi-official Soviet propaganda magazine. A priest who conducts services in an active church, baptizes forty or tifty children after the Liturgy on a Sunday, preaches the Word of God within the walls of his church, and hears the confessions of hundreds, if not thousands, of young and old people worn out with suffering, exhausted, subjected daily to derision and persecution (under such circumstances, of course, general confession has to be resorted to, and individual confession performed only at the penitent’s special request) — such a priest will naturally hold his registration dear, for it gives him the chance to work openly for the good of the Church as long as possible. He understands that if he is deprived of —19—ORTHODOX LIFE his registration he will be placed in completely different conditions, in which, certainly, he may feel freer inwardly, but he will only be able to care for individuals or, at best, for a few dozen human souls. All the laws and regulations established under Khrushchev, at the beginning of the 1960's, retain all their force at the present time. Formally, Church appointments are made by the Church authorities. The Patriarch appoints bishops to their cathedras, and the diocesan bishops appoint priests to their parishes. But the so-called “Instruc- tions for the Registraticn of Religious Societies, Prayer Houses and Buildings, and also for the Order of Registering the Executive Bodies of Religious Societies and Servants of the Cult”, confirmed by the Soviet for Religious Affairs on 31 October, 1968, states unequivocably that ‘a servant of the cult can commence his activities only after... receiving notification of his registration”. Thus, while it is true that the officials of the soviet are unable directly to appoint their own can- didates to positions in the Church, on the other hand, any of them can keep a priest who is disagreeable to him from performing his ministry. In practice, therefore, before appointing a new priest to a parish, any diocesan bishop of the open part of the Church in Russia has to check unofficially, by telephone, with the local official whether he will give that priest registration or not. The decrees about the appointment are then formulated accordingly. Such and such a priest is appoirted to such and such a parish, and is obliged to start carrying out his duties immediately upon receipt of registration from the official. As tar as the so-called executive bodies of religious societies are concerned (in popular language the dvadsatka — “twenty”), for- mally they are not in submission to any Church authority at all. The local gorispolkom (i.e., town or area executive committee) registers them and confirms them, and they are responsible to it for providing a given religious society with a church and its necessary equipment, and also have to give it an account of all their financial dealings. Any acquisition, any repair, any church maintenance, even though it be paid for exclusively by the parishioners, is possible only with the permission of the official or of the relevant ispolkom (executive com- mittee). In one town in Siberia the cold church had a single heated room adjoining it, where babies were baptized in winter, although the door opened directly onto the street; it took the parishioners years to get permission to build even a small awning onto the second door to protect the babies from the cold blasts of blizzards and the Siberian frost. For years the official had obstinately refused to grant permis- sion for the awning, saying: “You haven't got the right conditions for baptisms? Well then, don’t baptize!” In the majority of cases, the officials of the Soviet for Religious Af- fairs are punctilious to insure that the registered priests do not —20—THE SUFFERING CHURCH OF RUSSIA perform any services or ministrations outside the boundaries of their own town or village. Going to a neighboring village where there is no church and serving even a short moleben in someone’s home is regarded as breaking the rules, which can lead to being deprived of one’s registration. The total ban on performing any ministrations in one’s parishion- ers’ homes, about which the priests Nikolai Eshliman and Gleb Yakunin once wrote, is being relaxed slightly in some parts of the country. A priest, in civilian clothes, of course, not in a riassa, can visit a sick parishioner in the hospital. He can even hear his confession and give him Communion, but without singing aloud any prayers in such a way that other sick people could join in the prayer. Conducting a service like that would be regarded as religious propaganda and agitation, in- fringing article 142 of the criminal code. This is by no means a joke when they explain that a priest may keep books of a religious con- tent at home and read them; but if he gives them to his matushka to read, that is also an act of religious agitation and propaganda, not permitted by law. Church funerals are conducted everywhere, but only in church. A priest cannot accompany the deceased to the cemetery in vestments. Only a few officials allow even a litya to be served at the grave. On the other hand, in some places church bells have been allowed to be rung again. Processions are not allowed everywhere, and if they are, then of course only within the boundaries of the church or monastery enclosure. Cases are known where open agents of the authorities, who never come to the services and even admit that they are atheists, are intro- duced into the dvadtsatka. But still, such instances, which make the priest's work especially difficult, are exceptional. In the majority of cases, simple people faithful to the Church join the dvadsatka, and although the state laws, as well as the relevant decrees of the Moscow episcopal sobor in 1961, have even deprived the priest of being truly in charge of his parish, turning him into a sort of performer of a religious cult hired by the dvadsatka, still, in fact, the members of the dvudsatkas almost everywhere treat their spiritual guides with appropriate respect, and take their requests and advice into account. Religious literature in the U.S.S.R. The book situation is catastrophic. Service books from pre- revolutionary times are stuck together and lovingly made service- able, together with Bakhmetiev’s book of Church music dating from the eighties of the last century. Seminarians copy out the priest's Service Book and the Trebnik (Book of Needs) by hand. It is impos- sible to obtain these books printed or in a convenient pocket size. When individual copies of the Service Book, which have passed on — 2 --ORTHODOX LIFE through channels of “Orthodox Action”, come into the hands of young priests — ana not only young ones — they evoke an amaze- ment, a joy and gratitude that are difficult to convey. Unfortun- ately, we have heard a reproach from a bishop of the open part of the Church in Russia who has been abroad: while for years the Roman Catholics have been sparing no pains to give Russian priests and bish- ops who come abroad the Service Book and Trebnik which they pub- lish, containing petitions for the Pope in every litany, Orthodox Rus- sians unfailingly and indiscriminately see in everyone who comes an agent of the Soviet authorities, an atheist, and do not even try to give him so much as the Jordanville edition of the Service Book, which in Russia is worth more than its weight in gold. In addition to the three editions of the “Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate” (in Russian, English and an abbreviated and altered Ukrainian edition), the patriarchate was allowed to publish, until re- cently, a journal of imposing size called “Theological Works,” which was intelligible at least to the teachers and students of theological schools, to diocesan bishops and some priests. It seems that at the present time the journal has been forced to cease its existence. it is perfectly natural, under these conditions, that it is not only service books that are copied out by hand or on a typewriter; a Church samizdat could not fail to appear, reproducing works of theology, religious philosophy and apologetics. Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky testifies that he was imprisoned in a concentration camp with several people who had been convicted for writing and distributing manuscript or typewritten books of this sort. Judging by the pris- oners’ stories, these books belong mostly to two categories. The first consists of appeals to repentance, to return to the Orthodox path. Ten years before Solzhenitsyn, some unknown Christian wrote the Soviet leaders not just a letter, but a whole book, in which he showed them where they had led the country with their atheism, and appealed to them to save their souls by repentance, disbanding the Communist Party and the organs of terror, returning the country to Christian norms of life. This unknown Christian sent his book straight to the Kremlin, was immediately arrested and received ten years. The other category of books extremely widespread in the Church samizdat consists of prophecies or commentaries on the Apocalypse, adapted to contemporary Soviet conditions. Not many specimens of Church samizdat have come into our hands abroad, but still (except for Gennady M. Shimanov’s Notes from the Red House) our publishing organizations cannot bring them- selves to republish them and send them out to Russia. Meanwhile, “The Messenger of the Russian Student Christian Movement” is 32