GERALDINE FAGAN
Encompassing millions of documents, the historical archives of the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine] in Kyiv is an extraordinarily rich resource on how the secret police dealt with Christian and other religious communities in Soviet Ukraine. The editor of the East-West Church Report here offers brief summaries of several documents she examined at the archive in late 2018.
“To Comrade Fedotov… ‘Concerning the Work and Behavior of Agents among the Episcopate of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine’”
This January 1946 document sheds important light upon the fraught issue of leading Russian Orthodox clerics’ collaboration with the Soviet secret police. In late 1943 Stalin granted the Russian Orthodox Church limited legal status after almost persecuting it out of existence in the 1930s. Here, the then head of state security in Soviet Ukraine, Sergei Savchenko, is reporting to a superior in Moscow, Petr Fedotov, about the Church in his republic.1
Savchenko notes that 12 of the 15 diocesan bishops in Ukraine at the time of writing were consecrated in the years 1944-45; this was soon after the Red Army had recaptured the territory from the Nazis. After listing the agent code names of four bishops discussed in a previous communication, Savchenko gives performance assessments for seven.
These seven are likewise referred to only by their agent code names. Due to biographical details in the assessments, however, the East-West Church Report is able to identify all with complete or near certainty. (The Russian-language website of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty discussed the same document in early 2018, but appears to have wrongly identified two of the seven bishops.2 )
The bishops appear to be cognizant of their obligations to the KGB, as the specific tasks of several are outlined. Agent Petrov, for example—Bishop Nikon (Petin) of Donetsk and Voroshilovgrad [Lugansk]—informed on “anti-Soviet” dissident Orthodox Christians both within and outside the Moscow Patriarchate, providing material that resulted in multiple arrests and the closure of an underground monastery. Agent Pavlovsky—Bishop Antoni (Krotevich) of Zhitomir and Ovruch—is similarly said to have supplied the KGB with “valuable, vetted agent material” resulting in arrests, including that of village Orthodox priest Fr. Platon Bereziuk. Fr. Platon was handed down a 10-year prison term for “antiSoviet propaganda and agitation” within weeks of Savchenko’s report.3
However, Bishop Antoni is the only one of the seven bishops assessed to win unequivocal praise from the KGB. Otherwise lauded, Bishop Nikon (Petrov) is criticized for aiding a wandering monk (in 1946, most monasteries in Soviet Ukraine were not permitted to function). The records of two more—Glebov, a.k.a. Bishop Makari (Oksiiuk) of Lvov and Ternopol, and Usov, a.k.a. Bishop Sergi (Larin) of Odessa and Kirovograd—also appear mixed. While both are said to have been active in alerting the KGB to “hostile elements” in church circles, they are described as working fervently to strengthen Orthodoxy—certainly not an item on the Soviet agenda.
Quite remarkably given Stalin’s continued grip on power and their previous personal experience of arrest, imprisonment, and/or internal exile under the Bolsheviks, the remaining three bishop-agents are found to be outspokenly disloyal.
As well as poorly fulfilling his KGB tasks, Agent Spokoiyni [Russian: “Calm”], a.k.a. Archbishop Andrei (Komarov) of Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozhe, is reported to have “a disloyal attitude towards Soviet power” and to be protecting clergy who are similarly hostile: “He tries to surround himself with such people while characterizing them positively and—in some cases—giving them attention and material assistance.”
Agent Koltsov, or Bishop Feodosi (Koverinsky) of Chernovtsy and Bukovina, is reported to have voiced “antiSoviet expressions among the clergy” and to have appointed priests to the best parishes in his diocese who are suspected of underground ties to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).
Agent Tverdyi [Russian: “Firm”], or Bishop Varlaam (Boriseevich) of Vinnitsa and Bratslav, has dared to ignore KGB instructions to cease summoning clergy from West Ukraine to his diocese. He also reportedly commented to one priest that the Communists “came from the dirt, they are the scum of society and do not know how to string two words together.”
These three bishop-agents are themselves under further KGB investigation, Savchenko assures Moscow.
“To Comrade Melnikov… ‘Concerning the Arrest of Participants in an Anti-Soviet Entity of Sectarian Pentecostals…’”
Two December 1951 communications from then Deputy Minister for State Security in Ukraine Mikhail Popereka highlight how even low-level unsanctioned religious activity was of serious concern to the very top echelons of Soviet government.
In the first, Popereka informs then Ukrainian Communist Party leader Leonid Melnikov about the arrest of seven Pentecostal Christians in the far western city of Lvov.4 At this time, Pentecostals were not permitted to organize separately from the Soviet-recognized All-Union Council of Evangelical Christian-Baptists, and are therefore defined by Popereka as illegal “sectarians.” One—shoe-factory worker Gennady Morozovsky from Poland—joined the community three years before. Aged just 24, he is accused of giving “sermons of a hostile nature in which he slandered Soviet reality, called upon sectarians to reject Soviet laws, military service in the Soviet Army, and defense of the Motherland by bearing arms.”
Originally from Russia, another Pentecostal—39- year-old Olga Alinova—is described by the document as a “prophetess” who “gave anti-Soviet sermons and disseminated provocative rumors about the inevitability of the fall of Soviet power.”
Writing the same month to Aleksandr Volkov, a top secret police colonel in Moscow, Popereka reports on a case code-named Mechtateli [Russian: Dreamers] opened against a similar Pentecostal group in Kiev Region.5 Here too, the concern is that the four leaders under surveillance are giving sermons “in which they slander the Communist Party and the Soviet government, express provocative ideas about the imminent downfall of Soviet power, and call upon participants in the group to refuse to serve in the Soviet Army.” The communication quotes verbatim from the 12 July 1951 sermon given by one leader, Fedor Korshunov, a 40-year-old glazier originally from Russia:
“Brothers and sisters, if you are called up to join the army, do not go, do not take up arms. You will be persecuted and sent to prison, but do not be afraid, we will help you.”
“To Comrade Shcherbitsky… More than 100 Baptist schismatics performed religious songs accompanied by a string orchestra…”
In 1961 Soviet imposition of new rules limiting evangelism and religious instruction to young people led to a split among the state-approved Evangelical Christian-Baptists. Those who broke away in protest were pursued by the KGB as illegal “schismatics”—and also became a top-level government concern. This is clear from a special September 1974 report submitted by the KGB to Vladimir Shcherbitsky, then First Secretary of the Communist Party in Ukraine.6
The report describes an unsanctioned harvest festival attended by more than 100 people in the yard of the private home of factory worker Nikolai Kramarenko in the eastern city of Slavyansk, Donetsk Region. The assembled “performed religious songs accompanied by a string orchestra. Four religious banners were hung on a specially equipped stand.” Alleging that the event caused consternation among surrounding residents, it also states that the “sectarians” did not obey local officials’ orders to stop the meeting, but instead blocked and pushed police trying to enter the yard, “let out screams… and continued to perform religious songs.” After “measures were taken to curtail the gathering,” the participants were taken to the city police department in two buses. Nine—including Kramarenko—were detained, and 65 items of “religious propaganda” were confiscated.
Long in the public realm, an account of the same event produced soon afterwards by the Council of Relatives of Evangelical Christian-Baptist Prisoners can now be seen as concurring precisely on the time, location, and other crucial details.7 However, it adds that the Baptists did promise to fulfil the police order to disperse once they had concluded their worship, and that the congregation was then threatened in ways conspicuously omitted by the KGB:
“Seeing that threats did not produce the desired results, additional police were summoned. KGB personnel arrived. . . . Then the public prosecutor sanctioned the use of force to disperse the believers. . . . It is hard to imagine what our municipal state representatives were guided by as they twisted arms, dragged people along the ground and by their hair, beat men and women…. Searing screams went up from women and children in the yard, who could not remain passive at the sight of the inhumane actions committed against their husbands and relatives.”
“Concerning the Reaction Among Believers in the Republic to the Visit of the pope of rome [sic] to the People’s Republic of Poland”
In the early 1980s, almost daily reports to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine by KGB head Stepan Mukha recorded a hodgepodge of data on foreign citizens, criminal incidents, and religious affairs.
One such bulletin from 10 May 1983, for example, gives precise figures for the number of foreign citizens from capitalist and developing countries present on the territory of Soviet Ukraine (21,942), the latest on a search for whoever damaged the brakes of a freight train in Kharkov Region, and the number of Orthodox, Old Believers, and “registered sectarians”—such as sanctioned Baptists—who attended Easter worship that year: approximately 1.2 million.8 (The items on religion are generally among those alongside which someone has handwritten the Russian abbreviation Unich. in red—apparently an unfulfilled order to Unichtozhit’, or “Destroy.”)
Amid these routine developments, however, the upcoming June 1983 visit of Pope John Paul II to his native Poland was clearly of special concern to the KGB in neighboring Ukraine. While the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church had of course been illegal for nearly 40 years by this time, a two-page report to First Secretary Shcherbitsky on 20 May 1983 notes the presence of 98 registered and four unregistered Roman Catholic parishes in Ukraine, served by 43 priests and uniting around 170,000 faithful.9
“Due to outside influence, a certain revitalization of an extremist portion of adherents of the catholic church [sic] is observed,” warns Stepan Mukha, then chair of the KGB in Ukraine. “Unlike previous years, individual instances of the creation of youth groups on politically harmful grounds have been noted.” He also states that, while “no activization is observed” in connection with the papal visit in eight of the 11 Ukrainian regions where most Catholics live, some in Khmelnitsky, Zhitomir, and Vinnitsa Regions “are ever more insistent in their demands to register Catholic parishes and have church premises returned to them.” The KGB has therefore devised and is implementing measures “to identify subversive schemes and intentions by the leaders of the Vatican” prior to and during Pope John Paul II’s time in Poland, as well as “to prevent negative manifestations” by Roman and Greek Catholics (the latter are referred to disparagingly as “Uniates” in the original document.)
A similar 27 June report—four days after the papal visit to Poland concluded—describes how the KGB worked with border and customs personnel to enhance checks on foreigners entering the USSR during the visit, including 16,000 arriving from Poland.10 Together with the Interior Ministry, the KGB also took “measures to prevent adherents of the catholic and uniate churches [sic] from leaving the country”—an apparent ban on Soviet Catholics joining the crowds of papal wellwishers in Communist Poland.
The follow-up report also examines local public reaction to the papal visit, noting that TV and radio broadcasts from Poland could be accessed in several far western areas of Ukraine, where they were “favorably received.” It further offers sample impressions gleaned from Catholic circles inside Ukraine. Polish specialists working on the construction of the Urengoi-Uzhgorod gas pipeline are said to have feared that the papal visit would “boost the activity of antisocialist elements” in Poland, “destabilizing the situation in the country still further.” (Martial law would remain in force in Poland another month, until late July 1983.) In Lvov Region, leading clandestine Greek Catholic clerics are described as having a “restrained” attitude towards the visit, considering it to be principally aimed at strengthening the [Roman] Catholic Church in Poland. The report does not make clear how this information was obtained.
In addition, the KGB warns, there are “individual religious fanatics” who believe that the papal visit to Poland “will promote greater opportunities for the church in the USSR and ‘put an end to the oppression of believers.’” Revolutionary changes would indeed sweep the region just a few years later.
Notes:
- SBU Archive, f.16, op. 1, spr. 562, 141-51. Names and locations in this article follow the Russified forms used in the original documents.
- [In Russian] Mark Krutov, “Episkopy na sluzhbe Liubianke,” Radio Svoboda, 23 January 2018, https://www.svoboda.org/a/28989881.html.
- [In Ukrainian] Natsional’nyi bank represovanykh, no. 277119, http://www.reabit.org.ua/nbr/?ID=277119.
- SBU Archive, f.16, op. 1, spr. 833, 115-18.
- Ibid., 247-50.
- SBU Archive, f.16, op. 1, spr. 1096, 338-39.
- [In Russian] Biulleten’ Soveta Rodstvennikov Uznikov Evangel’skikh KhristianBaptistov v SSSR, 19 (1975) 12-14.
- SBU Archive, f.16, op. 1, spr. 1208, 14-18.
- Ibid., 55-56.
- Ibid., 189-90.
