Geraldine Fagan
By the mid-1960s, it was common knowledge inside the Russian Orthodox Church that the Soviet state was out to destroy it, and that some of the church’s own clergy were complicit in that destruction. But only two priests dared protest in public. One was Fr. Gleb Yakunin, who died in Moscow 25 December 2014, aged 80. In 1965 he and a fellow priest, Fr. Nikolai Eshliman, wrote an open letter to then Patriarch Aleksy I. It criticized church inaction during Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s anti-religious campaign of 1959-64, when thousands of Orthodox churches were closed and priests barred from leading their own parishes. “Why,” the pair asked, “has the supreme Church authority turned into an obedient tool in the hands of atheist bureaucrats?”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn regretted not acting similarly on reading the letter in early 1966. This was “a bold, pure, and honest voice in defense of the Church,” he wrote, with Yakunin and Eshliman “affirming by their selfless example that the pure flame of the Christian faith has not been extinguished in our native land.”
Expecting the consequences of their letter to the patriarch to be grave, the two priests had concluded it with John 18:23: “If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong. But if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?” Sure enough, in 1966 the pair was suspended from the priesthood until they repented for attempting “to disrupt benevolent relations between the Church and the State.”
In 1975, the Soviet Union’s endorsement of civil rights in the Helsinki Accords gave Fr. Gleb another opportunity to lobby for religious and other liberties. That December, he wrote to the World Council of Churches, an international ecumenical forum, urging its support for dissidents under arrest in the Soviet Union. In 1976 he went on to found the Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights in the U.S.S.R., which documented Soviet persecution of numerous religious communities.
Again, the consequences were all too predictable. Yakunin was arrested in 1979 and sentenced the following year for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” The first part of his sentence – five years’ imprisonment – was mostly served in a labor camp in the Ural Mountains region. He had completed half of the second part – five years’ internal exile in distant Yakutia - when a personal amnesty from Mikhail Gorbachev freed him in 1987, just as perestroika was gathering steam. Yakunin was restored to the priesthood and allocated a parish in the Moscow region.
But he had no intention of leaving public life. As a parliamentarian in the Supreme Soviet from 1990 to 1993, Yakunin fought to establish religious liberty in the new Russia, including as a drafter of a since-undermined law On Freedom of Conscience. On delving into the archives of the KGB department charged with controlling religious life, he also uncovered the code names of senior Russian Orthodox hierarchs, including then Patriarch Aleksy II. The archives were swiftly closed.
“For 30 years I have openly defended my Church,” Fr. Gleb later explained, “and tried to speak impartially about her afflictions, believing that ulcers driven inwards lead only to death.” Defying a new church policy barring clerics from running for political office, he was elected to Russia’s State Duma in 1993. The Moscow Patriarchate responded by defrocking him. In 1997 it went on to excommunicate Yakunin for “anti-Church activities,” but he had earlier transferred to the breakaway Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kyiv Patriarchate). He never recognized either defrocking or excommunication as legitimate.
In 2000, Yakunin began a Movement for Orthodox Renewal, which developed into the small, independent Apostolic Orthodox Church. One of its first acts was to canonize reformist theologian Fr. Aleksandr Men, who had been instrumental in influencing the young Gleb away from an interest in Buddhism in the 1950s, leading to his ordination in 1962.
Right up until the brief illness prior to his death, Yakunin was unshakeable in the pursuit of his vision of justice. Yet the glee with which he greeted any unmasking of power was childlike, not vindictive. When he once bumped into his Soviet interrogator on a Moscow street, recalled fellow priest Fr. Yakov Krotov, the pair went to catch up over a beer.
Such eccentricity – especially Yakunin’s transfer to the Kyiv Patriarchate, whose Filaret (Denisenko) he had identified in the KGB archives as agent “Antonov” – led some who might otherwise have condemned him to wonder whether this was in fact that quintessentially Russian quality: yurodstvo, or foolishness-for-Christ. Informally, he thus retained respect even within Moscow Patriarchate circles.
Yakunin’s fearlessness was similarly childlike. During a wake for him at Moscow’s Sakharov Center on 27 December, his wife for 53 years, Iraida, recalled his response to those asking why the family had not emigrated like so many others, given Yakunin’s long imprisonment and life of suffering. “He said, ‘You tell them that Gleb wants everything to be all right in Russia, so he’s staying here.’”
Geraldine Fagan, Washington, DC, is author of Believing in Russia – Religious Policy after Communism (London: Routledge, 2013).