The question of how and to what extent Christians should be active in politics has long been debated here in the United States. And now, in one of the most surprising fruits of glasnost, that debate has been taken up in the Soviet Union.
With the formation of the Christian-Democratic party in Moscow earlier this year, hundreds of Christians have poured into the Soviet political process. Leaders of the movement say the large number of their candidates elected this spring proves the Soviet people are behind them.
“The fact that I’m a Christian and everybody knows it ensured my victory,” said Valery Borshchov, elected to the Moscow City Council with 70 percent of the vote, against four Communist opponents once part of the establishment.
According to Victor Aksyuchits, newly elected People’s Deputy in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (parliament), Christians were elected “at all levels” of government. “We have something to tell our society, and the society is ready to accept what we have to tell them,” he said. In July, the Moscow News estimated that the Christian-Democratic party has a 30 percent popular support.
The irony of this happening in a nation that only a few years ago was violently attempting to stamp out all religion is not lost on Russian Orthodox priest Gleb Yakunin. Like Aksyuchits, Yakunin was recently elected a People’s Deputy. He was released in 1987 after spending five years in labor camp and nearly three years in exile for his Christian work, which was viewed then by the government as spreading “anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation.” He said, “Today I do on the state level the same activities I did in the past as a dissident.”
Yakunin said his priority—and that of the others—is passage of a long-awaited law guaranteeing freedom of conscience for all religious believers. The work has been complicated, Yakunin said, because many of the law’s drafts have been greatly influenced by the KGB.
Borshchov, Yakunin, and Aksyuchits recently visited Washington, D.C., to cultivate Western support for their fledgling Christian-Democratic party. The new party’s tenets include “a priority of Christian values in all areas of life”; a staunch stand against communism; and an “enlightened patriotism” that embodies love of Russian culture and history, but also rejects “extremist nationalist and chauvinist ideologies.”
Many Jewish and other minority groups fear such a philosophy could lead to Russian Orthodox domination and discrimination, but the three leaders deny this possibility. (Though the party’s leaders are primarily Orthodox, the effort is supported by some evangelicals and opposed by some in the Orthodox hierarchy.)
“Our party is open to all religions and those with no religions,” said Borshchov. Added Aksyuchits, “Tolerance, responsibility, respect for one’s freedom and that of others must be the key.”
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