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RUSSIA

Russian Patriarch and KGB
Connection confirmed

In response to a denial by a senior official of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church that Patriarch Aleksei II had collaborated with the KGB during the Soviet era, Keston News Service reviewed all the available documentary evidence from the various archives of the KGB, and concluded that long-standing allegations that the Patriarch and other senior bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church collaborated with the KGB are based on fact.

The Moscow Patriarchate’s official spokesman Father Vsevolod Chaplin issued the denial in an interview with the Russian news agency Interfax on September 20 while responding to an article that appeared earlier that day in the London newspaper The Times (which was mainly about corruption within today’s Orthodox Church, not about the Patriarch’s past ties to the KGB.)

Allegations Aleksei had collaborated with the KGB were “absolutely unsubstantiated,” Father Vsevolod claimed. “There is no data indicating that Patriarch Aleksei II was an associate of the special services, and no classified documents bear his signature.” He added, “I do not think that direct dialogue between the current patriarch and the KGB took place.” He conceded only that “all bishops had to communicate with the Council for Religious Affairs, which forwarded all its materials to the KGB.”

Interfax declared that Father Vsevolod “found it difficult to respond” to questions about the source of reports about Patriarch Aleksei’s KGB codename “Drozdov,” but accused Father Gleb Yakunin—who left the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate some years ago—as “one of the authors of these libels.” Father Vsevolod believed that those accusing the Patriarch of having collaborated with the KGB were those determined to weaken the position of Christianity in general and the Russian Orthodox Church in particular.

Despite Father Vsevolod’s vigorous denials, KGB material that Keston saw in Tallinn revealed that Aleksei was recruited by the Estonian KGB on February 28, 1958, just days after his 29th birthday. The report makes clear that the KGB viewed Aleksei, then still a priest, as a high-flier. It had already earmarked him as a future bishop of the Russian Orthodox diocese of Tallinn and Estonia. He was appointed to this post less than three years later.

Although referring to him only as “Drozdov”—it was very unusual in internal KGB documents for any person, whether agent or victim, to be referred to by name before the late 1980s)—it is clear that Aleksei Ridiger, born in Tallinn on February 23, 1929, is the subject. No other priest of the Estonian diocese matches the information in the document. The choice of the codename “Drozdov” is also a clue; Aleksei graduated from Leningrad Theological Academy in 1953 with a thesis on the 19th-century Metropolitan of Moscow Filaret Drozdov.

Other documents from the central KGB archives in Moscow—now held by one of the KGB’s successors, the FSB—reveal some of the tasks Aleksei was assigned as an agent. These documents —which were produced by the 4th department of the KGB Fifth Directorate, the department that controlled religious affairs, were seen by a number of researchers after the archives were briefly opened in the wake of the failed August 1991 coup, but access was then closed again after the Russian Orthodox leadership protested the extent of the revelations. Unfortunately, researchers did not reveal the full contents of each report, confining themselves to brief and tantalizing extracts from the titles and text of the reports.

A 1983 report from the central KGB archives, for example, reveals that when the monks of the Pochayev monastery in western Ukraine were complaining about harsh treatment by the KGB, including the beating death of a monk, and by the local abbot, Yakov Panchuk, in 1981-2, Aleksei was one of the two Russian Orthodox leaders sent down there to conduct “educational work” among the monks.

In February 1988, exactly thirty years after his recruitment as an agent, Aleksei was given an award by the KGB in recognition of his long service for them.

All senior clerical appointments in the Soviet era were made by the KGB and mediated through the government’s Council for Religious Affairs (the public face of the 4th department of the KGB Fifth Directorate)—and many junior appointments besides. Aleksei’s collaboration was nothing exceptional—almost all senior leaders of all officially-recognized religious faiths—including Catholics, Baptists, Adventists, Muslims, and Buddhists—were recruited KGB agents. Indeed, the annual report that describes Aleksei’s recruitment also covers numerous other agents, some of them in the Estonian Lutheran Church.

Jesuits re-registered
1997 law put status of religious order in doubt

The Russian branch of one of the Catholic Church’s largest religious orders, the Jesuits, has finally achieved its goal of re-registration under Russia’s amended 1997 law on religion.

First registered in September 1992 under the terms of the 1990 religion law, the Russian Independent Region of the Society of Jesus was re-registered on September 12 of this year.

The Jesuits working in Russia have long been fighting for the right to re-register their order while being able to continue to operate in conformity with the provisions of the Church’s canon law and their own organizational structure.

On April 1, 1999, the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Justice refused the Independent Russian Region the re-registration required by the 1997 amendments to the religion law. According to this law, the Russian branch of the Society of Jesus, as a centralized religious organization, should have been made up of three local organizations, each one of which should have been set up by 10 Russian citizens, whereas the organization was formed by the provincial under a decree from the Rome-based General of the Society of Jesus on June 21, 1992. Therefore, Russian Jesuits were only offered the right to establish a “representative office‚” which would not be permitted to engage in “cult or other religious activity.”

Unlike the many religious organizations that responded to the requirements of the new law by changing the way their organizations were run—even if the changes were apparent only on paper—the Jesuits refused to do so. They appealed to the Russian Constitutional Court for protection of their rights, which are secured by the Russian Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as article 5 of the religion law, which declares that a religious organization may establish itself and conduct its activity in line with its own hierarchical structure. On April 13, 2000, the Constitutional Court ruled that “the constitutional rights and freedoms of the plaintiff have not been infringed‚” but decreed that the Jesuits should be re-registered and should be allowed to retain all of their regulations.

However, the Russian Jesuits’ problems with re-registration did not end here. The Moscow-based lawyer Galina Krylova, who represented the Jesuits in the Constitutional Court and at the Ministry of Justice, said that even then officials twice refused to consider the re-registration application, citing the fact that the Jesuit provincial, and the person responsible for the appeal to the Constitutional Court, Father Stanislaw Opiela, did not have a permit for residence in the Russian Federation. So Father Jerzy Karpinski, who did have a residence permit, took over his position, and on September 14 the Russian Jesuits received documents confirming their re-registration.

On September 15, Viktor Korolev, the head of the department for registration of religious organizations at the Ministry of Justice, commented laconically on the decision, saying, “They presented their documents in line with current legislation, and we were able to re-register them.”

Father Opiela declared that he was very happy his order had been re-registered in line with Russian legislation and with the provisions of canon law. “I know what forces were brought to bear to ensure that we would not be re-registered,” he said, “and I am very happy that the law has triumphed.”