An Interview with Fr. Georgi Edelstein

Fr. Georgi Edelstein was born in Kiev [now Kyiv], Soviet Ukraine, in 1932. When the Nazis invaded in 1941 he was forced to flee eastwards to Soviet Russia with his Jewish father and Polish mother. After receiving Orthodox baptism as a young adult, he spent more than two decades searching for an Orthodox bishop prepared to ordain him to the priesthood, his advanced level of education and part-Jewish background being regarded as impediments under Soviet rule. 

Although finally ordained in 1979, Fr. Georgi was suspended from priestly duties in early 1987 after organizing an unauthorized church summer camp. He then rose to international prominence as one of two Orthodox priests invited to meet President Ronald Reagan at a reception held at the US Embassy in Moscow in May 1988. The other was Fr. Gleb Yakunin (1934-2014), who had been sentenced to five years in a KGB prison in 1980 for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” and then amnestied partway through an additional five-year term of internal exile in Siberia. Within days of the embassy event, Fr. Georgi’s suspension was lifted.“My thanks to Ronald Reagan,” he joked recently, “he really did give me back a church!” 

Now aged 91, Fr. Georgi has not receded into quiet retirement. A Duty to Not Stay Silent [Russian: Obiazannost’—ne molchat’], a documentary film about his life, was released in 2019 [available with English subtitles at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LBJU6TLGoQ]. In April 2022 the film’s director and narrator, Russian opposition activist Vladimir KaraMurza, was arrested for criticizing the war against Ukraine and is now serving a 25-year jail term. In a letter to Fr. Georgi from prison published last September, KaraMurza wrote: “I often recall your words that are the title of the film—A Duty to Not Stay Silent. I try to follow this principle in life to the best of my ability; sometimes one has to pay such a price as now.” 

On 19 July 2023 both Vladimir Kara-Murza and Fr. Georgi Edelstein received awards in absentia from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, DC; Fr. Georgi “for his lifelong commitment to truth and religious freedom for the peoples of Russia and Ukraine.” 

Fr. Georgi was involved in perhaps the earliest public criticism of last year’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine to be expressed by an Orthodox priest in Russia. This was a statement published by Fr. Ioann Burdin, Fr. Georgi’s successor as priest at the Church of the Resurrection in the village of Karabanovo, Kostroma region. It appeared on the parish’s website on 25 February 2022: 

Brothers and sisters, Early on the morning of 24 February Russian troops attacked Ukraine. Kiev, Odessa, Kharkov, [Ukrainian: Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv], Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities are being shelled. Russian soldiers are killing their brothers and sisters in Christ. We Christians cannot stand on the sidelines while brother kills brother, Christian kills Christian. We will not repeat the crimes of those who greeted Hitler’s actions on 1 September 1939. We cannot bashfully close our eyes and call black white; evil good; say that Abel was probably wrong to provoke his elder brother. The blood of the inhabitants of Ukraine will remain not only on the hands of the leaders of the Russian Federation and the soldiers who carry out this order. Their blood is on the hands of each of us who approved of this war or who simply remained silent. Fr. Ioann Burdin Fr. Georgi Edelstein

For this and other anti-war statements, Fr. Ioann was fined 35,000 rubles—equivalent to approximately $275 or a month’s local wages—on 10 March 2022. The case has received broad international media attention, including a video opinion piece in The New York Times by satirical US author Gary Shteyngart that has been viewed some 50,000 times [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A04sRuwWWQw]. 

Fr. Georgi Edelstein currently resides with family in the suburbs of Tel Aviv, Israel. In mid-September 2023 the editor of the East-West Church Report interviewed him via Skype. The original conversation took place in Russian.

What moved you to compile a public statement against last year’s invasion of Ukraine together with Fr. Ioann Burdin, your successor as parish priest at the Church of the Resurrection in Karabanovo? Partly due to that statement, Fr. Ioann was fined for so-called “discreditation of the armed forces of the Russian Federation.” Why do you think the police did not indict you also?

What happened was this: on 24 February 2022, the first day [of the full-scale invasion], Fr. Ioann Burdin wrote a short letter to our parishioners and sent it to me. It seemed to me that it was too long, so I cut it down to a third and sent him my version. I did not assume that we would both sign this letter. The next day Fr. Ioann published it with our two signatures. However, when he read it aloud in church [Sunday, 6 March] in the village of Karabanovo—where I used to serve—he was denounced to the police. It was reported that Fr. Ioann had read out this anti-war letter with our two signatures following his sermon. For some reason, there was no complaint made against me, and he—but not I—was summoned to court and fined. However, when the [Orthodox] Metropolitan of Kostroma, Ferapont, subsequently made a statement on local television, he mentioned two names: Fr. Ioann’s and mine. He said that Fr. Ioann supposedly just repeated what I had taught him, and that I, of course, was the main culprit.

Did you support what was said in that letter about the war?

I did not entirely support it. I cannot understand the United States, Germany, or other states, because the war did not start on 24 February 2022. It started in 2014. The Soviet Union occupied Crimea. The Soviet Union occupied Donetsk region and Luhansk region, and the world calmly looked on—or, if it objected, then only in a whisper. 

Here, we categorically must not say that Russian people are fighting against Ukrainians. I fear that by doing so we sow seeds of evil that will germinate into very poisonous shoots. Ukrainian people will hate Russians for 30, 50, or maybe 100 years. It is not the truth—every time we need to explain to people that it is not Russians or Russia that is fighting, but Bolsheviks; Communists. For today we have the very same Soviet power as 50 or 80 years ago. 

Second, I very rarely agree with what Fr. Ioann Burdin says and writes. He is a pacifist in the spirit of Leo Tolstoy or Gandhi, the Indian thinker and political activist. Sometimes he is called Mahatma Gandhi, but to me he is no Mahatma [from Sanskrit, “venerable”] because he is not a teacher. I categorically disagree with both Leo Tolstoy and Gandhi. You and your readers may recall that Gandhi corresponded with Hitler. If Hitler wishes to occupy Britain, Gandhi said, then he should not be resisted: let him occupy. [Editor’s note: In July 1940 Gandhi made an appeal “to every Briton, wherever he may be now, to accept the method of non-violence instead of that of war… to fight Nazism without arms… You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions.”] 

The one who is right in this dispute was Winston Churchill, who tried to defend his homeland with all his might. On no account would he allow a single German soldier or officer onto the island of Britain. He was victorious, and I am very glad that the Allies won. 

In video commentary about the 25 February letter broadcast in early April 2022, Metropolitan Ferapont described Fr. Ioann Burdin as your “pupil.” He also stated that commentary about Russian national or international politics is “the prerogative of the Patriarch and the institutions of the Patriarchate that are designed for this; it is not the prerogative of a village priest” [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj5yv7_P_B8]. There has been no censure of priests who make political statements in favor of the war, however. 

Do you agree that there should be a clear line separating the ecclesiastical sphere from the political, beyond which ordinary priests have no place? 

I must say that I have always greatly respected Metropolitan Ferapont. I respect him as a person, and I consider him an intelligent person. However, he is an entirely Ukrainian troops parade outside Soviet person, in that he says and thinks what he is told by the Moscow Patriarch and the KGB. When he speaks, I do not believe they are his own words—he is told to say something, and he says it. I do not think that he thinks the same thing. 

As for me, I have always been something of a formalist, so when I think about such issues I turn to the documents of the Church. In 1917-18 the AllRussian Orthodox Church Council took place. One of the decisions of that Council was that every cleric may hold his own opinion on any political issue. On the basis of that   decision, a metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church who had been defrocked back in the 18th century was restored to holy orders. His name was Metropolitan Arseni Matseyevich of Rostov [on Lake Nero], which is not so far from Kostroma. During the reign of Catherine II [the Great] he was defrocked and exiled to the city of Revel’ [modern Tallinn, Estonia], where he died in prison. Then, in 1918, he was reinstated by this Council. 

I think that any priest—be they American, French, or Soviet—is both a priest and a citizen. He must always have some sort of attitude towards the country in which he lives and to the government of his country. For 80 years of my life, if not all 90, my attitude towards the government and the political system of the state in which I have lived and of which I am a citizen has been extremely negative. It is not a democratic state but an authoritarian dictatorship. In my view, all rulers of this state without exception— the Party leaders Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev… I won’t name them all, currently Putin—are Communist leaders from whom tyranny is always to be expected; all kinds of deception, agitation, and propaganda, rather than truth. It is always to be expected that they will wage war against neighboring states.

An April 2022 documentary about Fr. Ioann Burdin filmed in Kostroma featured interviews with two local Orthodox, both evidently with a Soviet upbringing [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zf_ gzpXyVYA&t=2s]. One said that he had refused to betray Fr. Ioann to the police: “They thought that we would bark and denounce our priest as in Stalin’s time. No way!” Commenting on the war in Ukraine, the second said, “I will never say anything bad about the authorities… military people better understand the situation. The intelligence services, the KGB, are there.” You say that the authorities in Russia are still Soviet. As well as being residents of this Sovdepiia [Russian: Soviet-dom], as you call it, these two are examples of people who are close to you as a priest. Do you observe any particular life factors influencing some people to perceive the war against Ukraine as contrary to the Gospel, while others sincerely believe the opposite and support it? 

You know, Communist as well as Nazi propaganda had—and still has—a very strong effect on people. I cannot understand it, but people look at white and say that it’s black. They look at black and say that it’s white, just because the radio or the TV or someone else said that that is what to think. 

One small example: when Stalin died [5 March 1953, when Fr. Georgi was a 20-year-old student] my mother woke me up early in the morning. She shook me and said, “Get up, get up quickly! Stalin has died!” I answered, “If he’s dead, then he’s dead—why should I get up? If he’s dead then that means there won’t be any classes at the institute.” She shook me again: “Get up! Get up! Stalin has died!” I said, “Well, it’s a pity they didn’t hang the scoundrel. He simply died a natural death.” My mother never beat me—never in my life. However, on that occasion she swung at me intending to hit me in the face. Fortunately, I rolled over and she hit my head; otherwise, she would probably have broken my nose and there would have been blood everywhere. She then spoke some words to me that greatly surprised me, and I remember them to this day: “Stalin has died! America will probably attack us tomorrow, and we will be hit with atomic bombs. We will all die! Without Stalin, we will die! Get up, you scamp!” 

So I got up and went to the institute. Everyone was walking around wearing red ribbons on their sleeves. I was given one and so I put it on—I wasn’t such an idiot as to be the only person without one. I went to join my group. All the girls there were crying—genuinely crying. Their mascara was running and their lipstick was smudged. They were crying sincerely— they genuinely regretted what had happened. The assistant professor of psychology who was due to deliver a lecture to us stood on the podium and said a few words. But then he burst into tears and sat down. He sat there for five minutes, then went back to the podium and started to speak. Once again he burst into tears and sat down, saying, “No, I am unable to give a lecture!” He was Professor Frenkel, an elderly Jew. At that time there was a very strong anti-Semitic campaign in the Soviet Union, and I fear that a not-very-good future awaited this Professor Frenkel. Yet he, an adult, was crying sincere tears, as were the girls in my group, whom I had also considered smart. 

Why did some people and not others fall under Soviet influence, do you think? Is today’s version as powerful? 

After Hitler was defeated, he committed suicide by taking poison. The parts of the SS that were most loyal to Hitler and Himmler had already surrendered. Yet older German schoolchildren—the Hitler Jugend—continued to resist, shooting from windows and the rooftops. Why were those lads so devoted to their Führer? Why did they go to their deaths resisting, in a completely hopeless situation in which Germany had already surrendered? When Field Marshall Keitel had already signed an act of unconditional surrender? I cannot explain it. For some reason propaganda and agitation—whether Nazi or Communist—influences people.

 A person who was assisting me on the altar [at the time of the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine] is a retired military colonel. He reproached me at length for my antiSoviet—in his words, anti-war—position. He lectured me for half an hour on the altar. I sat and listened and didn’t say a single word of objection. Then he went out into the main part of the church and gave the same half-hour lecture to the parishioners. Then he went home and telephoned me for another half hour to tell me that I am wrong. Later, his son was killed in Ukraine—he fought as a soldier there—and so he went to Khimki, on the outskirts of Moscow, to bury his son. For some reason, he was told about his son’s death only a month after it happened; perhaps they were unable to identify him. 

Today, following his son’s burial, this altar server remains the same patriot as he was 18 months ago when he gave me those lectures. I cannot explain this. I am still on good terms with him. I always send him my greetings if I am speaking to someone he knows, and he sends me his greetings. He is Ukrainian, incidentally—he is from Ukraine, and his brother still lives there. But he says “the Ukrainian nationalists must all be killed.” I cannot understand this. 

Are there any practical steps that might be taken to leave Soviet-dom? In an opinion piece for The Washington Post this week your friend Vladimir Kara-Murza suggested that various remedies—such as fully opening up state archives to public scrutiny and barring former Communist Party and KGB personnel from public office—were missed in the 1990s [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/11/russia-post-putin-democracywindow-nuremberg-lustration/]. Kara-Murza accepted the Dissident Human Rights Award from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in July with another statement written from prison, in which he regretted that such proposals had been rejected at the time as a “witchhunt.” Here, he quoted the dissident Vladimir B u k o v s k y [1942-2019]—“In that case, the witches will return and start hunting us”—before concluding: “As we know, they have. When evil is not publicly reckoned with or condemned, it always returns.” Do you agree?

First of all, I think that, during the Second World War, Churchill was right never to conduct—or even to think of conducting—negotiations with Hitler. I very much approve of the fact that the government of the state of Israel does not conduct negotiations with terrorists. I think that no negotiations are possible with Nazis or Communists, because neither Nazis nor Communists ever abided by any agreements, and they will never abide by them in future. This is simply because Communist agitation and propaganda are constant lies. President Roosevelt was very surprised, as far as I recall, that Stalin did not abide by the Yalta agreements. At Yalta they agreed one thing [Editor’s note: such as free elections in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria] but Stalin said and did something different as soon as they had all gone home. Like Hitlerites, Communists understand only one language—the language of force. Armed force. 

Second, Vladimir Kara-Murza and I have discussed this topic [possible remedies against continued Soviet influence that were not attempted in the 1990s] several times. He has a more optimistic evaluation than I do of our leaders, Gorbachev and Yeltsin. While they were liberal, they were still Communists in my understanding, in the same way as Khrushchev, Andropov, and Stalin—or Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin today. I do not make any distinction between different Communist leaders. It is just that one might be kinder, while another has a more cruel and ferocious personality. 

Around the time that Putin came to power in the spring of 2000, I wrote an article in the literary journal Znamya called, “There can be no reconciliation between ‘yes’ and ‘no’” [https://znamlit.ru/publication.php?id=1103]. There, I repeated some words of the émigré Russian philosopher Ivan Il’in [1883-1954]. He wrote that Bolshevism would definitely be defeated, and that afterwards there should be a national plebiscite in which many people must be deprived of active and even passive voting rights. They may not be elected, and they should not have the right to vote. Who would that be? Communist Party secretaries, members of the Politburo, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, thieves, criminals, brothel owners, and so on. At that time many people—including Vladimir Kara-Murza—did not agree with me; many democrats, such as Larisa Bogoraz [one of eight people who protested on Red Square when Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, d. 2004] and Sergei Kovalev [dissident who from 1974 served a seven-year jail term followed by three years’ internal exile for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” d. 2021.] We argued about this. They said I was proposing a witchhunt, and that all citizens must be equal and have the same rights. I said, “No, Yeltsin does not have the right to be President of the Russian Federation, nor does Gorbachev, simply because they are Communist leaders.” I am very glad that Vladimir Kara-Murza has now repeated these words! 

If you think about who were in the circles surrounding Gorbachev and Yeltsin, three out of four were Communists—people like Yuri Luzhkov [mayor of Moscow 1992-2010] or Yevgeny Primakov [Foreign Minister 1996-98]. These are people to whom I would never offer my hand, nor would I shake theirs. I named two, but I could name more: people who, I’m deeply convinced, are the same little Lenins, little Stalins, and little Gorbachevs of today who support and wage war.

Does the fact that the war against Ukraine is taking place mean that Ukraine has managed to escape this legacy of Soviet-dom?

 Of course. I was born on Lenin Street in Kiev [now Kyiv]. Now it is not Lenin Street. Today in Ukraine there is no Lenin Street, no Lenin Square, no statue of Lenin—and so on—anywhere. But in Soviet-dom [i.e. the Russian Federation], there are not only still thousands, but tens— perhaps hundreds—of thousands of them. 

While they both rose to prominence under the Soviet authorities, the last two Patriarchs of Moscow made differing statements when Putin ordered invasions of neighboring states. Patriarch Aleksy II called for dialogue with Georgia in August 2008, with an appeal “to those who have gone blind with hatred: Stop! Do not let more blood be shed!” In September 2022, shortly after Putin announced military mobilization, Patriarch Kirill spoke about the war in Ukraine. He said in a sermon that anyone moved by a sense of duty to serve in the military and who died as a consequence was making a sacrifice, and that therefore, “we believe that this sacrifice washes away all sins which that person has committed.” Why were these responses so different, do you think? 

There’s no need for quotations. You could give any quotation of the past 80 years; since September 1943. In September 1943 Stalin “revived” the Russian Orthodox Church, as they say. For 80 years our patriarchs and bishops have said what they were told to say by the Kremlin or the Lubyanka [headquarters of the KGB, now of the FSB, a successor agency]. They are not independent people. However, I entreat your readers not to confuse us priests with the Church. We are crooks and deceivers. For many years we “struggled for peace,” while saying that America was the aggressor. I am very ashamed that many American, German, French, and other clerics came to visit Moscow and “struggled for peace,” as they called it, alongside our bishops. I recall there was one Very Reverend Bruce Rigdon from Chicago. I read a report of his visit to the Soviet Union in which he described how we had freedom of conscience, religious freedom! 

I recall also that at the very beginning of the so-called revolution in 1917 there was John Reed, an American Communist, who wrote the book The Ten Days That Shook The World. This was Communist agitation and propaganda. Paul Robeson, the famous American singer, and [American writer] Theodore Dreiser also praised the Soviet Union constantly. The writer Lion Feuchtwanger came to the Soviet Union [from Germany], chatted with Stalin in the Kremlin, and wrote a book called Moskau 1937. It exists in German, English, and Russian; it is a false, propagandistic book. So there were both clever and stupid people in America too. This cannot be helped. 

But you do not see any reason not to be part of the institution you say Stalin formed—you were ordained in the Moscow Patriarchate. Sometimes, even in the Soviet Union, priests decided to transfer to alternative bodies, such as the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad [the émigré Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia or ROCOR]. 

If you speak to priests of the Russian Church in Washington they will tell you that it was proposed to me several times that I transfer to the Church Abroad and not be in the Moscow Patriarchate. Each time I answered that, to me, this is a child’s game. You cannot transfer, for there is nowhere to transfer to— the Church is one. 

Even if I am not in agreement, I am a very disciplined person. When Archbishop Mikhail of Vologda banned me from serving as a priest 35 years ago, I did not serve for a year and a half. I kept saying that this was an incorrect, mistaken suspension…

 It happened because you organized a church camp without authorization? 

Yes, but it wasn’t anti-church activity. I said openly to Archbishop Mikhail: “You are not an independent person. You go on trips to meetings abroad—to Germany, Austria. Therefore, when the KGB orders you to ban me, you carry out the orders of the KGB.” For the 18 months during which I was banned from serving as a priest, I kept repeating the same thing to him, both orally and in writing: “I am not angry with you, I understand that this is not your fault. You were ordered to do this. I am obeying this unjust, wrong punishment because you are a bishop, and I am a priest. I serve only as you delegate. You took away my rights, and so I obey.” 

[Editor’s note: Fr. Georgi commented at greater length on the Soviet legacy within the Moscow Patriarchate in the East-West Church and Ministry Report, vol. 10 (2002).

Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the almost immediate reaction of Metropolitan Onuphry, the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church then subordinate to the Moscow Patriarch, was to appeal to Putin with a request to stop the war. Does this speak to the health of the Ukrainian Church?

Let’s recall the Gospel. There Jesus said, “I will build my Church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” [Matthew 16:18]. He didn’t say, “I will build my churches.” He built one Church, and I do not believe that there is a Ukrainian Church, a Bulgarian Church, an American Church, on this globe. There is one Church—we have one Jesus Christ. There is one Gospel, and as for all these human divisions into Ukrainian, Belarusian, and so on… I cannot take them seriously. I do not follow closely relations between Ukrainian bishops and our bishops in Soviet-dom, but I think they should be brothers. They pray to the same Lord God; they read the same Gospel. The only correct position, I believe, is that we are all brothers and sisters—I know and understand no other Christianity. 

It is rather stubborn of me, but from my first day as a priest 43— soon to be 44—years ago, I have kept saying the same old thing: the Church is one, but we priests are various. To me, American priests and bishops are my brothers. I once met the Pope of Rome, John Paul II—Karol Wojtyła—and to me he is senior bishop and first hierarch of the Church; I am unable to relate to Catholics in any other way. In the USA I have a friend called George Roller who is a brother in Christ to me, and I think he feels the same towards me, although he is some sort of Protestant. I don’t even ask—for me it’s enough that he is a Christian.