An Interview with Dr. Roman Skakun of the Ukrainian Catholic University
From Lviv, Roman Skakun is Deputy Director of the Institute of Church History, which belongs to the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) in that city. He currently also runs the Institute’s publishing projects, which to date have included 30 books on church and general Ukrainian history, both new and in translation, as well as eight issues of the journal Kovcheh [‘Ark’].
Dr. Skakun is among researchers best acquainted with material concerning religion within the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine] historical archives. In late 2018 the editor of the East-West Church Report spoke with him in Lviv about his findings. The conversation took place in English.
How long have you been working in the SBU historical archives?
Since 2011. The gradual process of declassifying these documents began around 2009. At first I could get almost nothing. I began working with the criminal files of those people who were repressed by the Soviet regime. For a long time that was the only type of document available to researchers. I would list the names of people who were repressed, and the archivists would confirm whether they had the criminal files of those people. To get access to something more—that is, to the extant operational documents of the former KGB and its predecessors—was a very difficult process. Even once they were gradually declassified, I could not get access to the archival catalogues initially. I would find citations of some documents in publications by “privileged” SBU historians and produce those, and the archivists would confirm that they indeed had those documents. Later on they made some catalogues accessible, but then access was restricted once again under the pro-Russian president Yanukovych, and I could get almost nothing—not even documents that I had been working on previously. Finally, our parliament passed the new law regulating these matters in 2015.
What is the scope of the SBU material pertaining to religion?
From 1927-29 we have weekly reports from the secret services of Soviet Ukraine to the Communist leadership, which include sections about religious matters. We have some directives from the OGPU [a predecessor to the KGB] regarding religious matters dating from the 1920s and 30s. We have all the criminal files of those who were repressed, including for religious reasons. They are all in place and accessible right now. But if we turn to the various operational materials, the situation is different. There is a clear line—we have very little after about 1961 or 1962. The later materials have been purged very thoroughly. For example, the collection of documents of the notorious Fifth Directorate, created in 1967 and tasked with countering “ideological diversions” (including religious ones) was destroyed almost completely in 1990-91, so that only eight files remain. However, from the 1940s and 50s there are detailed monthly reports about religious matters: about different operations performed using secret agents, including agent penetration of different faith groups. These agents would gather information that was later used to prosecute people, in what was termed agenturnaia razrabotka—the development of agent intelligence. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was the target of a huge agenturnaia razrabotka operation code-named Rifi [“Reefs”]. This consists of some 32 volumes spanning the period from 1939 to the early 1960s. We also have the socalled nabliudatel’nye dela—or files concerning the Ukrainian KGB’s control and co-ordination of operations led by its local departments—on Greek Catholics from various regions in Ukraine. I am currently working on an article about the KGB’s agent intelligence operations in the Greek Catholic community here in Galicia during the first Soviet occupation of 1939-41. This is mostly based on the Rifi files. [Editor’s note: Entitled “Their Brothers’ Keepers: Soviet Intelligence Activities against the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church in Galicia in 1939– 1941,” this article appeared in Ukrainian in volume 8 (2018) of UCU’s Kovcheh. A Journal of Church History. See https:// www.academia.edu/38386759/_Сторож_братові_своєму_ агентура_органів_безпеки_СРСР_у_середовищі_грекокатолицького_духовенства_в_1939_1941_роках.]
The 1940s and 50s was the period when a new type of Soviet religious policy began to take shape. From one perspective there was resurgence in religious life, but at the same time, this resurgent religious life was being brought under control. The MGB [Ministry for State Security]—from 1953 on, the KGB—exercised very tight control over all legally sanctioned religious groups, including by introducing its agents into key positions within those groups. We have documents about how the MGB organized the 1943 Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Church Council of 1945, as well as documents for 1947 from which we may infer that, out of 17 or 18 Orthodox bishops in Ukraine at that time, at least 15 were MGB agents. There is a directive from Moscow requesting close monitoring of the behavior of these bishop agents, as well as reports prepared in response that contain observations about how each of those bishop agents behaved: how he did or did not collaborate with the MGB to de-mask different anti-Soviet trends among the clergy, or help to identify Nazi collaborators. Nazi collaboration had a very broad meaning in the opinion of the Soviet security services. In fact, most people who remained in the Nazi-occupied territories and were active in religious or public life were later viewed by the MGB as collaborators.
We also have some files concerning foreign Orthodox delegations visiting Soviet Ukraine and the ways in which they were monitored by the KGB, including through agents among local clergy, surveillance on the streets, and bugs in their hotels. There are transcripts of what those delegates were talking about.
How about the later Soviet period?
Very little is preserved from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s: mostly various reports from the KGB to Communist Party leaders here in Ukraine. All the operational materials from the later period have been destroyed, although some traces may be found here and there in different collections within the archives.
The missing documents were destroyed back in the late 1980s and early 90s. Around 1990 there was a KGB decree along these lines: “In view of the processes of democratization and glasnost’, given that these materials are starting to attract interest from academics and the general public, and that there is a possibility they could be transferred to public archives, we must review our procedures for storing documents, and such and such types of documents should no longer be stored in the operational archives of the KGB.” Several categories of archival materials were destroyed around that time. These included most of the personal and working files of KGB agents, apart from some that were spared due to their historical significance.
What material have researchers focused upon so far?
Typically, the results of the KGB’s activities: what operations were conducted and what their aims were. For example, the 1946 Council that was organized here in Lviv to achieve the unification of the Greek Catholic Church with the Orthodox Church; the unification of the Pentecostals with the Baptists; the dismantling of different underground groups from within. But such publications have tended to avoid naming agents, apart from some people whose collaboration was quite obvious. The documents that we have actually give plenty of information about these agent operations, so this part of the picture awaits further research.
Does the SBU archive corroborate any material known previously from other sources?
You probably heard about the commission to investigate the KGB’s activities created by the Russian parliament in the early 1990s. That commission got access to the KGB archives in Moscow and made some excerpts from operational reports, including those of the late 1980s. Various sensational fragments were published from which you could make deductions. [Editor’s note: Dissident Orthodox priest Fr. Gleb Iakunin was a member of the commission. Together with journalist Aleksandr Nezhnyi, he matched KGB agent code names with senior Orthodox clergy by comparing details described in the archives with past news items in the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate.] From what I have seen here in Ukraine, what they published is indeed what those reports look like, and those inferences they made are mostly true, as far as I can tell. Some code names from those excerpts—like Antonov, the Kyiv Metropolitan Filaret Denysenko—can be found in the Ukrainian KGB materials from the early 1960s.
Then we have the so-called Mitrokhin Archive [compiled by Vasilii Mitrokhin, a retired KGB archivist who defected to the UK in the early 1990s with notes he had copied from the archives he supervised in the 1970s]. I have found some documents that correspond to what you can find in the documents published by Mitrokhin. For example, there is a fragment in the Mitrokhin Archive about a KGB agent among the Greek Catholic clergy in the Vatican, code-named Vernyi [“Devoted”], whose name was Ortynskii [See “The Vernii (Devoted) Case. Folder 92. The Chekist Anthology,” June, 2007, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/110783]. Here, we have a document that indicates that this priest was indeed the subject of KGB interest and was intended for recruitment as an agent. So this is indirect proof that what Mitrokhin published was not his invention, and that his archive may be relied upon.
However, I think I have almost a complete picture of what is in the SBU archive, and there is almost nothing there about the foreign activities of the KGB. It’s not that the Ukrainian KGB was not engaged in those activities—in tandem with Moscow, it had its own foreign agents who worked along operational lines, especially concerning the Greek Catholic Church and the Vatican, because here in Ukraine we had the largest concentration of Roman Catholic communities in the Soviet Union outside the Baltic republics. But most of those foreign intelligence materials that were not destroyed in 1990-91 were transferred to the archives of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine, which remain closed to researchers.
We do have several mentions of foreign agents working in the Vatican. Cardinal Josyf Slipyj, who was released from Soviet imprisonment in the early 1960s and lived in Rome for a long time, was active there in organizing the Greek Catholic Church abroad. The KGB had an agent in his milieu who was the husband of his niece and used to transmit his correspondence. This agent was code-named Rey, and we have his six-volume file in a collection of personal and working files of agents. These are mostly from the World War II period, because in the directive in accordance with which materials were destroyed circa 1990, documents were spared pertaining to wartime agents who worked beyond the frontline in Nazi-occupied territory. Besides these wartime agents, only several dozen files remain, pertaining to agents who worked among Ukrainian and Russian émigrés or the intelligentsia, in the Ukrainian nationalist underground, or in various religious groups. Most of these files are still classified.
One was Agent Literator, who worked here in Lviv in the milieu of Greek Catholic Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky. This was a young student who was introduced to him and pretended to be interested in wanting to become a priest. He was introduced to a form of underground seminary that existed here in 1940-41.
Another was Agent Popov, a very strange person. He moved in both Orthodox and Catholic circles in Kyiv and later Lviv. He was born in present-day Finland; his father was French and his mother Polish, so he spoke both French and Polish. He was also a homosexual. In the 1930s, he sold different religious items like icons and crucifixes near churches in Kyiv, and he also provided homosexual partners to various clerics. He was providing the NKVD secret police [a predecessor to the KGB] with information from the Orthodox milieu from the late 1920s. After that, in the 1940s, he played the role of a Greek Catholic priest consecrated by Metropolitan Sheptytsky during his stay in St. Petersburg [then Petrograd] in 1917. The Metropolitan attempted to create a Greek Catholic Church in Russia and consecrated several people there. So this Popov played the role of a Russian-French Greek Catholic priest consecrated by Sheptytsky—the MGB provided him with a fake consecration document with Metropolitan Sheptytsky’s signature and also the necessary liturgical items. He was later sent on an intelligence mission to the Catholic church at the French embassy in Moscow. Maybe I will write about this one day.
It almost sounds like a novel! How did you first become interested in this sphere?
As a doctoral student I was interested mostly in various religious sectarians. My doctoral thesis was about the so-called Murashkovtsy, or Evangelical Christians of the Holy Zion—a very strange sect of Pentecostal origin, the result of a kind of indigenization of religious trends coming from the West. [Editor’s note: Led by one Ivan Murashko, this was a 1930s millennialist movement that arose in then-Poland. It was notable for acts of sacrificial bloodletting performed by Murashko’s wife, styled the “Mother of Zion”. See https://www.academia.edu/6643930/БУДІВНИЧІ_ НОВОГО_ЄРУСАЛИМУ_ІВАН_МУРАШКО_І_МУРАШКІВЦІ.] That was quite a curious first topic for a student!
When I started out in 2003, I wanted to write a history of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, because they had a really complicated history in different regions that have since come together in present-day Ukraine. The Jehovah’s Witnesses were under different regimes in the interwar period: Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union. Once they were all inside the Soviet Union, they were one of the most persecuted religious groups—the reason was quite obviously that their headquarters were in America, in Brooklyn, New York. In the early 1950s the KGB tried to create a parallel governing center for the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Ukraine composed of its agents; it later succeeded in intercepting the line of control over the community by infiltrating the Witnesses’ National Committee, and even influenced the Brooklyn center to change some aspects of its rhetoric and doctrine.
When I first started talking with members of the community, they spoke about KGB agents among their leaders in Ukraine and fake Watchtower magazines. This sounded like nonsense to me. I knew that the Jehovah’s Witnesses had had a change of doctrine in the 1960s—previously they had interpreted calls to obey authority in the book of Romans as referring to Jehovah and Jesus Christ rather than to civil government. That interpretation underlay their opposition to the Soviet regime. This was a very important doctrine for them, and I assumed they had not been able to accept it changing. I thought this was why they believed they had received fake Watchtowers— one group later claimed the Brooklyn center had fallen into apostasy, while another group thought that genuine Watchtowers did still exist, but were simply not reaching Soviet Ukraine, as the KGB was intercepting them.
So I wrote this off as the—perhaps understandable— product of paranoia. But in the archives I discovered that the KGB had indeed been printing fake Watchtowers, to boost the credibility of its false Jehovah’s Witness leadership. It had to print them, because in the underground, the leaders would be recognized if they had contact with Brooklyn, which meant they would have religious literature. And so the KGB had those Watchtowers prepared by its agents, printed at its printing press, and distributed through its channels. The operation was discontinued after Stalin’s death. It was somewhat wild—even for the KGB—to print Watchtowers, as you might guess!
Then later, once the Witnesses’ Ukraine-based National Committee in the USSR was under KGB control, the KGB filtered the literature that Brooklyn tried to smuggle into the USSR. Simultaneously, its agents persuaded the Witnesses’ governing body that some aspects of that literature, perceived as anti-Soviet, should be toned down so that believers would suffer less persecution. Among other things, the agents insisted upon a more traditional interpretation of the book of Romans—which was soon changed.
So you came upon the SBU archives because these forms of religious life were in the sphere of competence of the KGB and its predecessors?
Yes. First of all I was thinking about criminal files, because you have a lot of material there—correspondence, doctrinal texts, witness statements—all kept in those files as material evidence. Step by step I began to get more material, a fuller picture.
It takes time, but gives interesting results. You can identify agents. You can identify the instruments used—not only the final results. Not only what they arrived at, but also how they arrived at it. Intelligence agents were one of the most important instruments that the KGB relied upon. The arrests that were made are very often described in a random way; how they came and arrested someone because some other person wrote a denunciation against him. There was actually a system of operational accounting, or operativnyi uchet. They kept accounts of all the categories of people deemed anti-Soviet, including clergy, collecting “compromising materials” of all sorts in people’s personal files, or uchetnye dela.
Once they had enough material, they opened an agenturnoe delo—or agent case—that was if their target was a group of people. If it was an individual, the dossier was called a deloformuliar. They continued to gather material, now purposefully, via agent surveillance. Then, once these cases were ready to be “realized”—it was called realizatsiia or likvidatsiia, liquidation, of the case—only then were people arrested, when it was the right time from various perspectives. So if you want to understand the logic of the arrests—including those of different religious people—you have to look into those agent cases. Also, agent reports contain plenty of first-hand information about religious life as it was, information that you could probably find if you interviewed people using oral history methods, but many of the people concerned are long dead. I managed to find two or three people who were in Soviet prison camps, who had been arrested under Stalin or later. But few were alive, and now almost none.
This is very dense material—you have to invest a lot of time in order to work on it properly. If you collate documents— especially those files that are preserved in full—for some topics or periods, you can get more or less the full picture, as for our Greek Catholic Church. You can find how materials were gathered, how they tried to influence the internal politics of religious communities, how they tried to move aside some people and to move the ones they needed up into particular positions—including KGB agents, how they tried to control different kinds of activities. You can obtain interesting insights into Soviet religious policy.
