8
EPILOGUE: MARTYRS OF RELIGIOUS
PROTEST
This article appeared in Sunday Telegraph of 28 May 1972. It was written by the "Close-up Team" — Michael Bourdeaux, Stephen Constant, Elga Eliaser, David Floyd, John Miller, and Ronald Payne. It is reproduced here because it shows, first, that many others are now prepared to stand on ground which was first liberated by Aida Skripnikova in the early 1960's; second, it illustrates the increasing diversity of Christian people now struggling to achieve religious freedom in the Soviet Union.
The publication of this article in a major newspaper — the first time in history that a Western newspaper has reported at such length on Christianity in the USSR — itself shows that at last the Western world is beginning to realize just how important a role religion continues to play in Russia.
So it was with Aida. So it is with thousands — more probably millions — of people of all denominations in the USSR, for whom the joy of the Risen Christ, their personal knowledge of their Savior, is the great reality of their lives.
Tertullian, looking back on three centuries of tribulation under the Romans, or shortly before Constantine ac-
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cepted the new faith as the religion of the empire, said: "The more you persecute us, the more we grow. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church." Those words are still true in the 1970's. While the full story of Russia's modern martyrs remains to be written, this account of some events in Aida Skripnikova's early years shows she will deserve a chapter in it.
Working in a Siberian labor camp this Sunday morning are two middle-aged Baptists, a man and a woman. They were sent there as a punishment for the grave offense of handing out Bibles and teaching the Lord's Prayer to Russian children.
Their action and the punishment it brought stand token for an important element in the protest movement in Russia today and the way the State reacts to it. Religious dissidence has its own martyrs and its own underground propagation of the faith through samizdat or self-publication.
Every Soviet believer has the constitutional right to organize and take part in religious worship. For good measure the Government has signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948, article 8 of which runs: "Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion; this right includes freedom . . . to manifest, practice, worship, and observance."
Despite this, hundreds of citizens have been arrested for preaching the Gospel. Particularly during the past 12 years, a bitter and little-publicized antireligious campaign has been conducted by the State. Its special target has been the Baptist Church, with perhaps three million members, but it also oppresses the Russian Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholics, and sects such as Jehovah's Witnesses. In spite of the persecutions there are still three and a half million Catholics, and the Orthodox Church
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claims to have as many as 30 million adherents.
The churches in Russia are tolerated only within strict limits. The law bans religious organizations from taking part in social and cultural activities, they may not do charitable work, and they are forbidden to organize Biblical, literary, or social groups. They cannot set up playgrounds for children, and they may not even organize church outings.
On the one hand the State "guarantees" freedom of worship; it also underwrites freedom of antireligious propaganda. And under this heading good party members are encouraged to knock religion as hard as they can.
The two Baptists now serving sentence in Siberia were only recently put on trial in the small western Ukrainian town of Nikolaev. The trial was held in secret, but another Baptist illegally took notes of what was said in court and the transcript was smuggled out of the Soviet Union. This document is the source for the story which follows.
Georgi Zheltonozhko and Nadya Troshchenko were two factory workers, converted to the Baptist faith, whose fervor led them to break with the "official" and recognized Baptist Church and join the Initsiativniki, the Action Group of reformed Evangelical Baptists. The original Baptist Church was firmly established in preevolutionary Russia by German and British influences. Its simple Bible Christianity appeals strongly to workers and to people in labor camps, and its reformist wing in particular has long been in trouble with authority. In the past decade no fewer than 600 Baptists have been imprisoned, and nearly 200 are still inside.
The trial of Georgi Zheltonozhko and Nadya Troshchenko lasted three days. Georgi was charged with receiving and distributing "Bibles, New Testaments, and other spiritual literature, thereby trampling on Soviet laws," and with holding prayer meetings at his home.
It is highly likely that the literature bore the imprint
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"Christian Publishing House," an organization which on its clandestine press has been producing Bibles, hymnbooks, and magazines. This has been one of the most daring and effective ways of protest by the breakaway Baptists. The movement's illegal journal Fraternal Leaflet made its first appearance in 1965 and was handwritten and mimeographed. But since last year it has been offset printed, and the KGB have so far failed to shut down the illegal printing works.
To the annoyance of the Government some 40,000 New Testaments and hymnbooks have been run off and circulated to Baptists throughout the Soviet Union. It is the movement's way of replying to the Government's refusal to print religious works for them or give them permission to do it themselves.
It was for receiving this "illegal" literature from Georgi that Nadya Troshchenko found herself in court. It was further alleged that she had read New Testament stories and poems to children and that she had made them kneel in prayer.
At the beginning of the trial the judge asked Georgi: "Did you import and distribute literature?"
"Yes, and I gave it to everybody," replied Georgi, who had already refused to accept help from defense counsel on the grounds that "Truth does not need any defense."
Judge: "Where is it printed?"
Georgi: "Praise God, I don't know."
"Why did you do this?"
"According to Lenin's decree on religion, citizens are permitted not only to believe, but also to confess their faith and propagate it. Lenin granted freedom, he didn't limit it; the same is true of the United Nations convention on human rights."
He complained to the judge about the coarse behavior of Soviet officials who broke up a prayer meeting he had organized. Some were drunk, and they insulted the be-
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lievers and called them rabble.
"You tell us to preach only in a house of prayer. The Lord says: 'Go into all the world and preach the Gospel.' "
Judge: "The Gospels were written a long time ago; they can change, like our laws, according to circumstances. The Bible was written for those times; today the author would have written something different."
At this point the prosecutor intervened. "If I have read my Romans right, I find at 13:2 it says, 'Obey the authorities.' "
Georgi: "The answer to that is Ephesians 6:12 — 'We are not contending against flesh and blood but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness.' We are fulfilling the law of Christ, the Gospel, which says, 'Who should we obey, man or God?; the lesser yields to the greater. I submit to God; to whom do you submit?"
Nadya Troshchenko was formally charged at this point with gathering children together, reading the New Testament and poems to them, and teaching them prayers. The judge asked, "Do you plead guilty?"
Nadya: "No! Christ said, 'Suffer the little children to come unto me.' "
Judge: "Children can choose for themselves after the age of 18, but you are brainwashing schoolchildren of 11 or 12 years old."
Nadya: "But before they have to choose their own path, they should be taught both sides. No parents can abandon their children to ruin and death."
Judge: "Did you read the New Testament to children, and do you intend to continue to do so?"
Nadya: "Yes, in the presence of their parents. As for the future, I hope I needn't read the New Testament to them any more. I hope they will read it to me."
A 12-year-old boy called as a witness "confessed" to
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kneeling with Nadya and to saying the Lord's Prayer. He was asked to repeat the words of the prayer before the court, which he did. He then burst into tears and was sent outside.
Finally Georgi was given an opportunity to speak in his own defense. "You are trying me for my faith, and not for breaking the law," he said. "Our faith cannot be contained only in a church building. Faith without works is dead, as a body is dead without the spirit."
He accused the authorities of not allowing children to be brought up in a Christian spirit. "You start educating children into Communist movements. We have to train our children, too, because when they grow up it may be too late to tell them about God. I lost 27 years before being converted, and I don't want to see them do the same."
Nadya also defended herself. "In the laws on religion," she said, "it is forbidden to speak the word of God except in church and it is forbidden to teach children. That means that faith itself is prohibited. A Communist needs the party rule book, and a Christian needs the New Testament and spiritual literature. The Bible is tolerated in our country, yet we cannot buy one in a shop."
In conclusion she said: "Our Lord teaches us to love everyone, not to hate. Whatever sentence you give us I will pray that the Lord may open your eyes."
Georgi Zheltonozho was sent to a labor camp for three years. Nadya Troshchenko got 18 months for teaching the Bible to children.
"What about our children — should we inspire in them a love of the Church or not? Yes . . ." Alexander Solzhenitsyn, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, made this defiant assertion in his Lenten letter to Patriarch Pimen, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, which was published in the Sunday Telegraph on 9 April 1972.
Many people seem surprised to hear such an affirma-
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tion of the Christian faith from one of the Soviet Union's outstanding personalities 54 years after the State adopted a policy of atheism. But Solzhenitsyn had made his Christian sympathies known years ago, and thousands of other Russians have been writing and signing such letters for more than a decade.
Solzhenitsyn made two points which reinforce the protests of many other Russian Christians, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant. First, many Christians are denied any possibility of worshiping legally, because there are vast areas where the Soviet authorities refuse to license churches. Second, the present leadership of the churches is not strong enough in resisting the State's control of church life.
Both these points have been consistently made by Russian Christians for more than a decade. Years before Soviet Jews began addressing the outside world, Russian Christians were putting their case for religious freedom logically, cooly, and with a wealth of documented fact.
The Russian Baptists began to write letters of protest in 1960 when Khrushchev inspired the most vigorous antireligious campaign since the early 1930s. They have indeed been protesting against persecution for their religious beliefs for nearly one hundred years. Their history has made them resilient and has left them with a keen memory of the strength of evangelical Christianity in the world outside.
Their numbers grew in adversity to an estimated three million in the late 1950s, and since then many have been converted. Baptists protested strongly when the Government began closing churches, imprisoning religious leaders, and generally putting intolerable pressure upon young people who showed even a passing interest in the Christian faith. These churchmen appealed in turn to the leaders of their own denomination, the State authorities, their coreligionists outside the country, and finally to the
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United Nations and other international bodies. Their case was that they and countless other believers wished to be loyal to their country, but were being forced to act illegally because the Soviet authorities would not license religious worship for thousands as Christian groups all over the Soviet Union. Where registration was granted, this meant submitting to a surveillance which was unacceptable. Countless people could not enjoy even that minimal degree of religious freedom which the Soviet Constitution was supposed to guarantee.
The violent reaction of the State against these protests was perhaps predictable. The reaction from the Moscow Baptist Church leadership, and the lack of it from the Church in general, was more surprising.
The Baptist leadership in Russia had already compromised itself in the eyes of many believers by accepting a Letter of Instruction from the State which went beyond the law in the restrictions on evangelism and work with young people.
Surprisingly, the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians and Baptists ruled that "an elder presbyter must be clearly aware of and remember the main objective of divine service nowadays is not to attract new members" (that is to say, they should refrain from finding new members). It also decreed that an elder presbyter had the duty of suppressing "unhealthy missionary phenomena" — meaning that such people should not proselytize.
These and other compromising edicts split the Protestant movement in Russia. (Solzhenitsyn himself complained about similar compromise in the Orthodox Church). A considerable number of rank-and-file Baptists broke with their leaders. In the end the church leadership had to rescind the offending Letter of Instruction, but the damage had been done.
The driving force of the reform Baptists in the past few years has been the Council of Baptists Prisoners' Relatives.
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Despite the arrest of successive groups of leading members, the council collected precise information about Baptists in prison and sent a series of letters to the United Nations but without any result.
John Miller, then in Moscow, talked to a breakaway Baptist, Mrs. Yakimenkova at House 84, Desna Village, in the Leninsky District of the Moscow Region, who was one of five women to write to U Thant, UN Secretary General, after their menfolk had been arrested. On a bitterly cold day he found her in a simple wooden house without water or electricity. In the living room, furnished with only a table, two chairs, and a cupboard, was Mrs. Yakimenkova with her mother and two small children.
For holding illegal prayer meetings there, her husband was serving a two-year prison-camp sentence. Once convinced that her visitor was not a KGB agent, Mrs. Yakimenkova began to weep and spoke freely about the unhappy life of a Soviet Protestant. "Tell the United Nations that we hear nothing from them," she said. "Our prayer meetings are broken up by the police. They send our men to the camps. We, the wives, our aged parents, and our children are left to die from starvation."
The Baptists are encouraged by the thought that more people outside are at last prepared to sponsor their cause. A concerted movement of Western public opinion like that which has sustained the Jews could help them enormously, and in this cause, a day of prayer for Eastern Europe has been organized for 4 June. It is sponsored by the British-based Centre for the Study of Religion and Communism.
A parallel movement of protest within the Russian Orthodox Church was begun by two priests, Father Nikolai Eshliman and Father Gleb Yakunin, with the support of Archbishop Yermogen. The priests wrote an open letter to the Government requesting that religious freedom
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tolerated under the law should be allowed in fact. Another letter complained that the church leadership had failed to take a sufficiently strong stand against the illegal inroads of atheism. For this they were dismissed. Archbishop Yermogen made a similar approach to the Patriarch, and is now in enforced retirement.
Here, perhaps, is the greatest tragedy of Christian life in Russia today — the State has such a hold over the churches that it bars the most worthy from office. This is not to say that all bishops and official Baptist leaders are traitors to the Gospel. Many of them struggle to keep their church afloat and sustain a ministry of high quality, as Archbishop Yermogen did until 1965. Nevertheless, the pressures of atheism are tremendous, and they lead some individuals and groups into sorry postures.
Last year the Sobor (General Council) of the Russian Orthodox Church met for the first time since 1945. Metropolitan Pimen became Patriarch (there was no other candidate), and the church signally failed to raise any of the most crucial problems which confront it — lack of sufficient theological education, religious books, and parish churches in thousands of towns and villages, and the inability of the priest to control matters in his own parish because of the current regulations putting all administrative matters in the hands of a council of laity (whose membership is itself controlled by the atheist authorities, according to Soviet law). The only mention of such problems was in a gathering exclusively for bishops the day before the Sobor officially convened. This meeting was uncanonical, but at least it had the merit of containing some freedom of speech, which was totally absent from the monumental boredom of the set speeches.
Before the revolution Russia had some 80,000 Orthodox churches, chapels, and monasteries. Perhaps only about 8,000 still function today. Church leaders are reluctant to give figures. All they will say is that there are
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8 metropolitans, 30 archbishops, 35 bishops, and 2 ecclesiastical academies and 3 seminaries.
The Soviet Government's attitude to religion is to say there is nothing to worry about because the congregations consist largely of elderly people. But evidence reaching the West suggests that for the first time in one hundred years younger people and especially intellectuals are beginning to return to the fold.
One remarkable example is provided by the case history of Sergei Kourdakov, a 22-year-old from the Kamchatka area of the Soviet Far East who is now in Canada. As a zealous Komsomol (Young Communist) leader, he was a part-time KGB informer and he specialized in harrying the Baptists in his district.
For Kourdakov the moment of revelation came one night last year when he and his friends broke into a clandestine prayer meeting.
"There was one old lady there who kept on praying as we set about them. I was so angry that I was about to do her in. I raised my hand. Then I realized that she was not praying for herself — she was praying that God might forgive me. Suddenly I felt somebody holding my fist in check. There was nobody, but I knew there must be something special there."
Kourdakov desperately wanted to become a Christian. In the providence of God, he joined the Russian navy and went to sea as a radio operator. He jumped ship just off the coast of Canada and found freedom and salvation in Christ thanks to some Christians who took him in. [webmaster's note: you may see Sergei's story here]
Another Soviet weapon against the spread of religion is confinement in an asylum for the insane. A document in samizdat about this, called "Notes from the Red House," recently reached the West. Its author is Genady Shimanov, who was incarcerated in the notorious Kashchenko Mental Hospital in Moscow as a "semiviolent" patient.
One of his doctor-interrogators said to him: "If you had grown up in a religious family or had lived some-
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where in the West, well, then we could have looked at your religiousness in another way. But you were educated in a Soviet school and were brought up in a family of nonbelievers. You are an educated person; I'm ready to admit that you know more about philosophy and religion than I do. And suddenly — snap — you're religious!
"Your symptoms are a one-sided fascination with religion. You've cut yourself off from life. After all, how do healthy believers behave? An old dear pops into church, crosses herself, goes away, and gets on with other things. Already she has forgotten about God. There are still such people, but they are getting fewer. With you it is quite different. We are worried about you."
Religion, it seems, is acceptable to the regime so long as it can be seen to be dying out.
Throughout his time in the mental hospital Shimanov, a distinguished army officer cashiered for his Christian belief, showed himself a tough nut to crack. He devoted himself to proving that it is possible to be "normal" and at the same time a devout Christian. It took a hunger strike to free him. As soon as he was outside again, he bravely used his notes of the interrogation to write and publish a full account of his time in the mental hospital.
The Roman Catholics, like the Jews, were victims of oppression in Russia long before the Communists took over. Imperial Russia feared the Roman Church as a powerful rival to Orthodoxy and an undesirable foreign influence. The Soviets saw the Vatican as a threat to their dream of world Communism. They feared its political authority, spiritual discipline, and implacable opposition to the godless State.
Catholicism might have been stamped out as a result of ruthless persecution between the two world wars had not the Red Army seized Lithuania, Latvia, and Eastern Poland, all areas with large Catholic populations.
Before 1940 Lithuania had three million people, of
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whom 80 percent were Catholics. Almost half the churches have since been closed. The number of priests fell from 1,500 in 1940 to about 800 at the end of the 1960s. There are only four active bishops instead of fourteen, and two others are under permanent house arrest.
An appeal in March to Mr. Brezhnev, the party leader, was signed by 17,000 Lithuanian Catholics and sent directly to Dr. Waldheim, the new United Nations Secretary General, as previous appeals had never reached the Kremlin leaders. It was explained that there would have been many more signatures, but police had detained collectors and seized lists. The appeal said: "We expect such effort from the Government as will help us Catholics to regard ourselves as citizens of the Soviet Union with equal rights."
This appeal fell on deaf ears. Ten days ago the upsurge of religious feeling in that part of the Soviet Empire, coupled with renascent nationalist aspirations, led to bloodshed in the streets.
Young Lithuanians clashed with Russian troops in the streets of Kaunas, the second largest city in the republic, after a 20-year-old Roman Catholic factory worker named Roman Kalanta had burned himself to death in a public park. His gesture had both religious and political motives.
What brought the crowds out to shout, "Freedom for Lithuania," was frustration and resentment kindled by such incidents as the arrest last summer of a Roman Catholic priest, Father Zdebskis. Six KGB men broke in and took him as he was preparing children for their first Communion.
He spent more than two months in prison awaiting trial and was beaten.
Although the authorities tried to keep the date of the hearing secret, 600 people gathered outside the district court on the day. Reports smuggled out described the
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scene:
"Many girls brought flowers. But the militia moved in to break up the crowd. One woman had a rib broken, another fell unconscious from a blow on the head. Women and girls were beaten and dragged to police cars.
Father Zdebskis was sentenced to a year in an internment camp.
Another group of Eastern-rite Catholics, probably numbering about four million, who came under Soviet rule with the annexation of the western Ukraine in 1939, has been equally repressed. They have never fitted either into the Orthodox or the Catholic framework, but as they owe an allegiance to Rome, they are highly suspect to the Kremlin. Their churches and schools have either passed into Orthodox hands or been closed, but the church continues to flourish underground.
Other religious minorities, such as the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Pentecostals, and the Jehovah's Witnesses, have also suffered badly during the recurring antireligious campaigns, particularly during the "black years" of the Khrushchev era. These sects are treated as nothing more or less than fanatical underground political movements. But they survive.
One of the most colorful characters in the Christian wing of the protest movement in Russia is Anatoli Levitin, a teacher and literary scholar.
Since 1959 Levitin has been a frequent and bold contributor to samizdat on religious themes, and particularly against violations of religious freedom. He has spoken out against constant interference by the authorities in the life of the churches and against the unchecked power of elders appointed by the State. His special target has been the Orthodox Church hierarchy itself for quietly acquiescing to State edicts.
Levitin was quick to see that freedom was indivisible and that there could be no religious freedom if basic hu-
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man rights were curtailed. Throughout the late 1960s he organized protests on behalf of young Russians arrested for political offenses and saw to it that they were aired in samizdat. It was, of course, only a question of time before Levitin's protests were stifled. Last year he began a three-year sentence in a labor camp for "anti-Soviet activities."
To witness an Easter liturgy in the Russian Orthodox Church is to experience a spiritual reality which renders the question, "Can religion survive in Russia?" purely academic.
The procession of clergy and deacons walks around the church, looking for the body of Christ. Not finding him, they fling open the door of the darkened church and ask where he is. "He is not here. He is risen — Khristos voskres!" comes back the answer.
A few voices inside the church take up the call — Khristos voskres — at first murmuring as though in disbelief. Then more and more voices join in, until it becomes a triumphant shout. The choirs reaffirm the news in jubilation.
As the volume swells, so the light in the church becomes brighter. First, only a single point of light, then two, then more and more, as the faithful light their candles, passing the flame from one to another.
Each one is a pool of light which frames the face. On that face is the affirmation of faith achieved through suffering. For them, resurrection is not something to be argued about, it is a reality here and now, the most positive experience of their lives.
