By all appearances, democracy emerged as the winner of August’s failed coup attempt by Soviet hardliners. But while Christians in the USSR rejoiced with the promise of greater religious freedom, they also noted with discomfort the resilience of their long-time nemesis: the KGB.
The ease with which Western religious groups can travel into the Soviet Union today belies the fact that certain quarters of Soviet religious life have yet to experience freedom from intimidation. No longer is the state police force the monolith of Communist order often portrayed in spy novels. But by no means has it disappeared.
“It’s a mafia within a mafia structure now,” says KGB defector Peter Driabin. “[The KGB] has always been one big mob. Now it’s a bunch of little mobs.”
Soon after the failed coup, Russian parliamentary leaders such as dissident Orthodox priest Gleb Yakunin and rebel KGB Gen. Oleg Kalugin were pressuring Russian President Boris Yeltsin to remove the head of the so-called Fourth Department of the Directorate for the Defense of the Constitution, which for decades has intimidated and infiltrated the church.
Though the Fourth Department’s agents have harassed the church since Khrushchev’s era, only recently has the connection between the Fourth Department and the official All Union Council for Religious Affairs been exposed by noted glasnost-era journalist Alexander Nezhny of the periodical Ogonyek. And much of the KGB’s upper echelon has been removed by Vadim Bakatin, the moderate head of the vast Lubyanka prison complex (who recently opened his jails to Charles Colson’s Prison Fellowship ministry).
The history of sergiansta, a synonym for the Russian Orthodox church’s collusion with the Kremlin, dates back to 1927 when Metropolitan Sergei signed a “Declaration of Loyalty” to the Bolshevik party. So critics were not surprised when Metropolitans Yuvenali, Pitirim, Kirill, and Filaret were silent as tanks rolled toward Moscow. They also complained that current Patriarch Aleksy II’s denunciation of the putsch came several days late and was couched in what Yakunin labeled “extremely diplomatic language.”
Though most of the republics have already banished their respective councils of religious affairs, the still vigorous KGB/party mechanism at regional and district levels remains a threat to believers. In the aftermath of the failed coup, Yakunin, Kalugin, and Nezhny plan to pry open KGB archives to reveal the names of local and regional agents who have worked against believers.
“It is very important to let everyone know the specific names of the agents within the church,” says Yakunin. “We will continue to demand, not only from the KGB but also the leaders of the Orthodox church, that those agents and traitors be jailed immediately.”
By Ted Okada in Moscow.
