Pilgrimage to Siberia

The few churches are alive and well and more accessible.

One man’s impressions of its Christians and their churches.

Twenty-five years of study and even occasional writing about Siberia had not prepared me for the reality. At New Year there was less snow in Irkutsk than in England. The majestic Angara river, the only outlet from the huge Lake Baikal, never freezes as it sweeps through Irkutsk. Neither does the hospitality of the people, which becomes warmer as you go east. The immense distances shrivelled on the last day when I travelled from a hotel in Irkutsk, four-fifths of the way across Asia to the Pacific, to my bed in Kent, England, between sunrise and midnight (with, of course, a time difference of seven hours).

Siberia. The word strikes terror, bringing with it associations of exile and death. But Siberia is also a land of opportunity and it has areas of great natural beauty interspersed among the expanses of the taiga, the evergreen-forested plain.

Although I found time to see Lake Baikal and other wonders of nature, people were at the heart of this visit, as they have been on other journeys to the Soviet Union. Intourist provided a major surprise in Siberia, for never before in my experience has a meeting with a priest been included as part of an excursion. We were but an ordinary tourist group with no religious affiliation; yet our charming Intourist guide, a Ukrainian now living in Siberia, not only took us into two active Orthodox churches, she even prearranged with the priest of the church in the little village of Listvyanka on the shore of Lake Baikal to welcome us and open the church of St. Nicholas.

Father Andronik greeted us warmly at the door of his church under a cloudless sky, with the village behind him sparkling in the piercing clarity of the atmosphere—an enormous contrast to the industrial pollution of Irkutsk, 50 miles away. Our guide invited us to put questions to the priest and asked me to interpret. Father Andronik is 29, recently ordained a monk. He began a career in engineering, eventually combining it with study by correspondence for a theological degree.

One of our group, who had visited the Russian monastery on Mount Athos, asked about the significance of the new policy of the Soviet regime that allows a limited emigration there. Fr. Andronik said he knew personally some of the 25 who had already gone and said these were to be followed soon by another 15. Would he like to be one of them, we queried. Although he did not say, he was enthusiastic about his priesthood. It has taken him first of all to the only Orthodox church in Ulan-Ude, the capital of the Buryat-Mongol Autonomous Republic, where he worked “as though a missionary” among the Buddhists in their main stronghold in the Soviet Union.

I could scarcely believe my ears: I was hearing all this from a young monk, in the context of an Intourist tour, though the official line for decades has been that religion was dying out and no longer played any significant role in the country at large.

The other official visit was to the Znamensky (“Sign”) Convent. The convent has long since lost its nuns, but has become the cathedral, replacing the beautiful church in the city center a mile away. The latter is now empty, except for a workman or two engaged in the huge task of restoring the interior. But the Znamensky Convent was a hive of activity, even in the middle of the afternoon on a working day, two hours before the start of the daily service. There must have been 50 old women there, absorbed in buying candles, praying, and crossing themselves. This was insignificant, however, compared with the service of daily liturgy two days later on a Friday morning. There was a half-full church at eight, with at least 15 schoolchildren present—not a single one looking as if he had come for any other reason than to pray.

Although unannounced, I was received with the warmest hospitality by Bishop Serapion, who lives within the cathedral compound. The Anglican Bishop of the Arctic does not have so daunting a task as that which faces the Bishop of Irkutsk. He may have the largest diocese in the world: 29 open churches scattered over an area larger than the whole of Europe, east and west. His jurisdiction encompasses the whole Pacific coast, from the Bering Strait, 3,000 miles northeast, and Vladivostok in the southeast, to the Krasnoyarsk Region, 600 miles northwest.

The minute number of open churches reflects the region: except for Antarctica and Alaska, it is the most sparsely populated in the world; it also bears a legacy of persecution suffered under Stalin and Khrushchev. Memory of one of the victims is still fresh in the minds of tens of thousands of local people. He was Archbishop Veniamin of Irkutsk, one of the most loved and respected of all postwar leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church, a man prepared to face the authorities head-on and suffer the consequences when the rights of believers were being infringed. In 1961 he was brought to court on the absurd charge of acquiring heating oil for his cathedral illegally. That there was no other charge virtually proved this man’s complete integrity. Somehow he survived this and succeeding years of intense pressure at his post before he was removed in 1973—probably by political maneuver—three years before his death.

Following this man of heroic faith, Bishop Serapion, who came from Moscow, cannot have found life easy, either practically or spiritually. Yet he told me he had consecrated new churches in no less than four towns in the far east last year, including the important centers of Sovetskaya Gavan and Komsomolsk-na-Amure.

The central square of Irkutsk contains the only Gothic building in Siberia, a Roman Catholic cathedral erected by Polish exiles in the nineteenth century. It is now a “concert hall,” boasting a fine organ, but there are no signs of a Catholic congregation here or anywhere else. As though to compensate for the loss of one Christian minority, however, others have emerged and show signs of vigorous life.

There are two registered Protestant congregations: one Baptist and one Lutheran; the latter is not even found in Moscow or Leningrad. I could not find the Lutherans, as the only map and information I possessed were inadequate. Perhaps Intourist will eventually provide the traveller with all he needs for his varied travels and will not consider such aid against the interests of the state. Persistence, however, did lead me on the very first morning to the Baptist church, a green, newly-painted wooden building in a suburb on the other side of the Angara from the town center. On a Wednesday morning, the building was shuttered and barred. There was not even a notice positively identifying it as a church; it could have been a large, private house. But several people had been helpful in pointing out the way, thus it was evidently known in the area. The caretaker eventually came, and she told me there would be a service in the evening.

I returned at six, happy to miss my evening meal for the opportunity to worship with this isolated group of people. The service followed the usual Soviet Baptist pattern of hymns, prayers, and sermons in sequence; it lasted an hour and 40 minutes. Pastor Yevgeni Raevsky, the Senior Presbyter of Eastern Siberia, was in charge, assisted by a group of five younger men. There were 14 in the choir, 10–7 girls and 3 boys—in their teens or early twenties.

There were about 40 people in the Wednesday congregation; undoubtedly on a Sunday the church would have been crowded beyond its capacity of a hundred or so. After the service I was caught in a conflict I had experienced before. While the congregation crowded around, wanting me to talk, the pastor had issued instructions to one of his deacons to bring me immediately into the vestry. To my chagrin, after a brief formal conversation, the pastor called for a taxi to take me back to the hotel. I protested that I wanted to stay and talk to people, whereupon one of the younger assistants interceded for me and I was allowed to remain, and this proved to be one of the highlights of my entire visit. I found this was a young people’s prayer meeting, with 22 young people, divided evenly between male and female, crowded into the vestry. The prayers were fervent and uninterrupted, lasting for an hour. Six of the youths took turns reading a few sentences from the Bible, reflecting, and then leading the group in open prayer. They emphasized support for the “suffering” and “those in difficult circumstances in the Red Army” (military service is compulsory).

Such a meeting is still illegal, according to the strict letter of the law. But the registered churches have recently followed the lead of those that are unregistered in organizing special activities for their young people, and they have gained a new following in so doing. It was wonderful to see Bibles in the hands of six or seven of those present, a sign of an improving situation. If every tourist would take in only the one Russian Bible that Soviet authorities usually allow (there was a legal import for the first time last year of 25,000 Bibles), that situation could be slowly but steadily improved even further. Sadly, the majority of tourists are afraid to do this, or they are unaware of the help they might bring.

I left Siberia and the burgeoning faith of its young for Mongolia with its religious void. It may be one of the few countries in the world without a single Christian; but that is another story.

G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.

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