ROC – a spy church

October 4, 2010 · Adam Bondaruk, Baptists, Victor Belykh, AUCECB, Persecution, Interview, KGB, Books, Unregistered Pentecostals, Nikolay Kotyakov, On Emigration, United Church of Evangelical Christians, Vestibule, Petr Saenko, Pentecostals, Religious Mafia, Slavik Radchuk, Contemporary Persecution, Security Services

…the top of the Patriarchate were members of the CPSU, and this fact has been kept secret to this day. They say the first communist was Patriarch Pimen, a senior officer in the Red Army who joined the party at the front. And there could be no believing officers there, not even non-party ones. Moreover, they were all obliged to fight religion. This means that the future patriarch renounced the faith.

Konstantin Preobrazhensky

Spy Church

Article written a few months before the final fall of the ROCOR into the “clean hands” (and “hot heart with a cool head”) of the Moscow Patriarchate – editor’s note.

1. Alexy II’s Confession

It is interesting why our episcopate so stubbornly refuses to repent of agent cooperation with the KGB? After all, Metropolitan Chrysostom did it, and nothing happened to him, nobody fired him. So why do the rest keep silent? Earlier I thought it was from fear of further revelations. Confess your work for the KGB, and it will surface that there was also membership in the CPSU. How would the Church Abroad react?

Yes, the top of the Patriarchate were members of the CPSU, and this fact has been kept secret to this day. They say the first communist was Patriarch Pimen, a senior officer in the Red Army who joined the party at the front. And there could be no believing officers there, not even non-party ones. Moreover, they were all obliged to fight religion. This means that the future patriarch renounced the faith.

High-ranking CPSU Central Committee officials, who revealed this secret to me at the time as an intelligence officer, used to practice a somewhat crude joke. Catching a man in bishop’s vestments at a Kremlin reception or a peace conference, they would slap him on the shoulder and loudly inquire: “Tell me, father, in which pocket of your cassock do you carry your party card?” The bishop smiled awkwardly but did not object: after all, only his own people were around!..

And yet they keep silent for another reason. The famous KGB general Oleg Kalugin recently told me about it. In 1990, he became a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and was the first to begin exposing agents in cassocks.

The Patriarchate was seriously alarmed. They feared not individual exposures, but the revelation of the main secret: that the Patriarchate was deliberately created by Stalin to be a communicating vessel with the Lubyanka, like other Soviet institutions. It would never occur to anyone to identify KGB agents in our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where everyone is an agent. But if one admits the same for the Patriarchate, then what is its holiness?

Soon General Kalugin was invited to a private lunch with the patriarch, where Alexy II said:

– Well, why do you keep harping on this topic? Yes, we cooperated with the organs, myself included. But that was a struggle for peace, for disarmament! What’s wrong with that?..

To pass off informing for the KGB as a struggle for peace – no one had ever thought of that! And we didn’t even have such a line of work as a struggle for peace. These words are propaganda nonsense. On the contrary, we fought for war! As a result of our activities, military conflicts broke out one after another – in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola. This led to an incredible swelling of the military-industrial complex, of which intelligence was a part. The country could not bear this burden, and the USSR collapsed.

Alexy II made it clear that he did not consider his informing for the KGB to be something shameful and had absolutely no intention of repenting of it. On the contrary, he is proud of it, just as Putin is now proud of his work for the KGB in the Soviet years. The absence of such repentance bridges the gap to continued cooperation of the Patriarchate with the KGB in our days. And why is the well-born nobleman Ridiger so devoted to Soviet power? What bound them firmly together?

In the now distant year of 1996, journalistic fate brought me to a communist rally in Novocherkassk. The presidential elections were underway, and the head of the CPRF, Zyuganov, was a serious rival to Yeltsin. He came for support to this Cossack region, where his predecessors in the twenties had carried out “decossackization” and mass executions. But now pro-communist sentiments are strong there.

Also speaking at the rally was an elderly priest of the local cathedral, Father Vladimir. He also called for voting for Zyuganov, which caused great astonishment among foreign journalists. But Father Vladimir firmly stated:

– In order for us to study at the Theological Seminary, we were withdrawn from the front! We are still grateful to the Communist Party for this! And therefore we perceived study at the seminary as a front-line assignment. We have called ourselves non-party communists all our lives!

And what department had the right to withdraw people from the front, especially in a critical year of the war when even the sick and infirm were being drafted into the army? Only the NKVD. And to whom could it give this unheard-of privilege, saving from death? Only to reliable and proven agents.

Stalin created the Patriarchate by the hands of the Lubyanka! This department became its mother. The genetic link to the KGB is as much a hereditary feature of the Moscow Patriarchate as the link to the White Movement is for the Church Abroad.

2. The Lubyanka Ordination

The Patriarchate’s informing to the KGB is a serious argument against union with the Church Abroad: what if it continues to this day? Who can vouch that it no longer exists?

Supporters of unification try in every way to minimize this informing and reduce it to isolated cases: supposedly, only some priests became KGB agents against an overall independent life of the Church. Here in the West, this bait is swallowed easily.

The rector of St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Washington, Archpriest Victor Potapov, thus argues in the August issue of the magazine “Parish Life”:

“Within the fence of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, heated disputes are taking place about its future paths and about reunification with the Moscow Patriarchate. In this connection, one hears sharp attacks against individual bishops and church figures. Objections sometimes boil down to the fact that one cannot unite with the church in Russia because there some clergymen are corrupt and collaborated with the KGB and did not repent of it. Can the shortcomings of individual people darken the holiness of the Church?”

Not separate at all, dear Father Viktor! The separate ones are precisely those who escaped recruitment. But absolutely all bishops and the overwhelming majority of priests collaborated with the KGB. For the Church was considered a hostile environment, and it had to be controlled through agents. Even the very mechanism of consecrating bishops allowed only agents there.

Bishops were part of the nomenclature of the CPSU Central Committee, and therefore each was approved by the Ideological Department. And which agency sent documents there for important personnel appointments? Correct, the KGB. The information about a future bishop was prepared by the Fifth Directorate, which carried out general oversight of the Church, and by intelligence, if he had been abroad at least once. Each such report ended with one phrase: “Has been cooperating since year such-and-such.”

That phrase was the most important thing for the CPSU Central Committee! It testified that the future bishop was not only loyal to the Soviet regime but also hung on its hook: after all, there were always compromising materials on every agent! And this meant that no dissident antics could be expected from such a bishop. The validity of this rule is confirmed even today: all bishops sacredly keep their vow of silence.

As for the candidate’s ecclesiastical merits, the Ideological Department not only was not interested in them but was even hostile to them. The fewer the merits, the better. After that, the Central Committee authorized the consecration. But can it really be considered a consecration?..

However, the matter did not end with the consecration. After it, one had to obtain registration as a bishop with the Council for Religious Affairs. This was granted after a confidential conversation with its chairman, Kuroyedov, a KGB lieutenant general.

He liked to come to lunch at the generals’ mess on Lubyanka. Upon entering, he would show everyone his pass to the Kremlin dining room and say:

– See? I can have lunch with Brezhnev himself! But I prefer to do it with my own guys!

The generals responded with a welcoming roar and pulled out chairs, each inviting Kuroyedov to his table. His dining companion was often my father, the deputy head of the KGB Border Troops. In the evenings he would recount to me amazing stories from church life, which at that time was completely closed. And all the bishops “blessed” by Kuroyedov still occupy their positions and even try to annex the Church Abroad.

All of them still remain in the agent network. They would have been expelled from it for being compromised in case of public repentance, but there was none. This means that their files still lie in the safes of Lubyanka. And not in the archive, but in operational offices.

Our hierarchs not only informed on each other to the KGB but also engaged in espionage. First and foremost among Russian emigrants. Even metropolitans did not disdain it. For example, Metropolitan Irenaeus of Vienna and Austria recruited American military intelligence officer George Trofimov in 1969, who is now serving a life sentence in the United States.

For about thirty years, the KGB residency in Israel was housed in the Ecclesiastical Mission of the Moscow Patriarchate. For there were no other Soviet institutions in that country after the break in diplomatic relations in the mid-sixties. Intelligence officers worked as priests and laypeople on the staff of the Mission, and the “real” clergy were agents in contact with them. The Mission secretary, KGB Major Dubov, defected to the West in the late eighties, and the Patriarchate did everything to avoid publicity.

3. A Church of Special Purpose

The Patriarchate’s collaboration with the KGB, alas, has not remained in the past, as many in the West believe, but is even growing under Putin. The reason is the new type of social order that Putin has managed to create in Russia: a state of secret services. The FSB is in charge of domestic policy and propaganda, and the SVR of foreign policy. All other agencies are subordinate to them. When participating in today’s Russian political life, it is simply impossible to avoid contacts with intelligence and counterintelligence. The Patriarchate readily uses its Soviet experience in these contacts.

For example, Putin’s flirtations with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il are kept in terrible secrecy so that the Americans do not find out, but the Patriarchate is privy to them and takes a most active part.

In Pyongyang, the construction of a patriarchal church of the Holy Trinity is nearing completion, although religion is prohibited in that country and faith is considered a political crime. But Kim Jong Il made an exception for his Russian friend. The construction is being carried out mainly with Russian money, but Kim Jong Il also graciously allocated about a million dollars from the budget of his impoverished country. This gave him the right to be called the “Builder of this temple.”

– Let us pray to the Lord for the builder of this temple! – the Russian deacon will henceforth proclaim at every service. To make the North Korean dictator an object of religious veneration – no foreign president had ever managed to do this! The appearance of a Russian church in the capital of the DPRK, the first stone of which was laid in June 2003, is a sign of great personal friendship between Kim Jong Il and Putin, in defiance of the Americans.

Kim was so kind that on this occasion he even founded a new state institution – the Orthodox Committee of the DPRK, although there has not been a single Orthodox believer in that country for more than half a century.

A delegation of this bogus Committee recently traveled to Moscow. At the Patriarchate, it visited only one department besides the external church relations department. Which one do you think? The Department for Cooperation with the Armed Forces and Law Enforcement Agencies! I wonder what it needed there? It seems that Kim Jong Il considers the Patriarchate a paramilitary organization designed for special tasks.

The appearance of a Russian church in Pyongyang creates for both leaders a channel of secret contacts, inaccessible to international control. After all, no one will know what messages silent priests in black cassocks will bring to Pyongyang.

This channel is particularly valuable because the Americans can officially ask about all the others. For example, Bush might say to Putin at a meeting:

– Tell me, friend Vladimir, aren’t you carrying on behind-the-scenes affairs with Kim Jong Il?..

And Putin will be forced to explain himself, because all this is verified by intelligence means. And to the question about church contacts, Putin could rightfully answer like this:

– That’s none of your business, buddy! Faith is a sacred matter!..

And Bush will have nothing to cover himself with, because his government indeed does not interfere in church affairs.

And at the Moscow Theological Academy, four students from North Korea are now studying. I wonder where they came from? After all, if they were real believers, they would have been imprisoned. The answer suggests itself – only from the Ministry of State Security. Kim Jong Il is creating an Orthodox church on the Stalinist model, with the hands of chekists.

But all officers of friendly intelligence services accredited in Russia are under the unobtrusive patronage of the Foreign Intelligence Service. They are invited to rest homes, closed meetings, banquets. I wonder, when leaving the Lavra for Moscow, do the North Korean seminarians say to their spiritual father: «Bless me, father, for the trip to the SVR Reception House in Kolpachny Lane»?

The Patriarchate also «showed up» in the spy scandal caused by the murder of former Chechen leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev by Russian intelligence officers in Qatar. In February of this year, they blew up the car that Yandarbiyev was getting into after leaving the mosque, after which they were arrested.

One of them turned out to be the local GRU resident. Diplomatic immunity prevented him from staying in prison, and he was released. But the other two remained there for a long time. They immediately confessed to belonging to the GRU, becoming living proof that Russia engages in international terrorism. The very thing it so fervently calls on others to fight. Putin was furious. He made titanic efforts to rescue the hapless terrorists, but all was in vain.

And then a stream of Russian representatives rushed to them. A multitude of officials under various pretexts tried to break into the cell, but the Qatari authorities, for security reasons, let no one in. And they were right: after all, killers are supposed to be liquidated! For that, it’s enough to spray a tiny ampoule of colorless substance hidden under a fingernail in the cell. And – no man, no problem, as Comrade Stalin used to say.

In desperation, Moscow decided to use its most reliable assistant for delicate assignments – the Patriarchate. Bishop Feofan of Stavropol and Vladikavkaz rushed to the cell. Supposedly, the officers languishing there are such deeply religious people that they’d rather listen to a bishop’s homily than eat. And specifically Feofan, known for his contacts with intelligence. Before that, he had served for many years in the Department for External Church Relations, where he was the closest aide to Metropolitan Kirill, who appears in chekist reports as agent «Mikhailov».

The Qataris didn’t let him in either. Perhaps they knew that the Patriarchate is used in espionage. And the faith of our intelligence officers raises serious doubts! After all, Yandarbiyev’s young son was also in the car they blew up. A believing Christian would hardly decide to kill an innocent child. Even the SR terrorists who blew up the Governor-General of Moscow, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, in 1905, at first several times refused the attempt when they saw he was traveling with children. But our bungling terrorists had previously gone through Chechnya, where the GRU tortures and kills people. Since it was they who were appointed as the perpetrators, it’s reasonable to assume they did all this with their own hands. In what happened to them, one can rather see the punishing hand of God. And Bishop Feofan would do better to enter the prisons of thousands of people unjustly convicted in Russia!

The Moscow Patriarchate is astonishingly merciful to killers carrying out presidential orders. Recently, Alexy II awarded the Order of St. Prince Vladimir Equal-to-the-Apostles to Colonel Alexander Pavlichenko of the Belarusian special services, a notorious organizer of «death squads.» They eliminate political opponents of President Lukashenko. The Patriarchal Exarch in Belarus, Metropolitan Filaret, personally petitioned for the award, citing the fact that a church was built in the garrison under Pavlichenko’s jurisdiction. Such a pretext clearly did not correspond to the high status of the order.

Novaya Gazeta reported this in an article titled «Church of Special Purpose» in August of this year. «The awarding of the Order of St. Prince Vladimir Equal-to-the-Apostles to Dmitry Pavlichenko defies any logical explanation. Because for churches built on the territories of military units and even prisons, one doesn’t need to go to Belarus – there are more than enough of those in Russia itself. But for some reason, those who build churches all over Russia are not awarded orders. Or perhaps the patriarch and the metropolitan decided that he who dispatches people to God with his own hand deserves a high church award?» – writes the newspaper.

«No one in Europe doubts the involvement of Pavlichenko, as well as Sheiman and Sivakov, former Security Council Secretary and Minister of Internal Affairs, in the organization and execution of murders,» continues the newspaper, «That is why the Greek authorities refused to allow Sivakov, who now holds the post of Minister of Sports and was supposed to lead the Olympic delegation, into Athens. The European Union made a special statement on this matter. And exactly three days later, the Russian Orthodox Church awards Pavlichenko with the order. Coincidence? Or is it still ‘our answer to Chamberlain’?!»

Svetlana Zavadskaya, wife of ORT cameraman Dmitry Zavadsky, who was abducted on July 7, 2000, said: «It is very sad that the Russian Orthodox Church awards the second most important order in Russia to Dmitry Pavlichenko, who is known in the civilized world as a person suspected of involvement in abductions and murders. As a believer, this deeply offends me. The Orthodox Church in Russia and Belarus is so politicized that, apparently, for now it will be better for me to communicate with God without intermediaries.»

And among us, in the Russian emigration, on the contrary, many dream of merging with the Moscow Patriarchate. For what?

4. «Blesses» Colonel Gumenyuk

Priests in epaulettes are not uncommon in the Moscow Patriarchate. I met one of them on the very first day of my work at KGB intelligence headquarters in Yasenevo in 1977.

I remember being struck by the vast corridors, almost a kilometer long, through which hundreds of men in civilian suits and ties bustled purposefully. Their jackets were neatly buttoned, their hair parted in the middle, and their entire sleek appearance was meant to attest to the highest loyalty. But then an officer with a large red beard marched past me. What kind of provocative appearance was this, so unacceptable for a communist Chekist?!

“Don’t worry, he grew the beard on the order of the intelligence chief!” my friend in the personnel department explained with a laugh. “That field officer is currently interning in the foreign department of the Patriarchate, and soon he’s leaving on an overseas assignment!”

My friend didn’t say exactly where, observing the KGB’s rule of conspiracy, but he did tell me about his acquaintance, a professor from the Red Banner KGB Institute (now the Academy of Foreign Intelligence), in whose home wardrobe a cassock hung next to a colonel’s uniform. When Patriarch Pimen traveled abroad, the professor-colonel would put on the cassock and join his entourage.

In those same years, the young head of foreign counterintelligence, General Oleg Kalugin, arrived to inspect the KGB residency in East Berlin. One day, Colonel Ivan Nazarovich Gumenyuk approached him and invited him to drop by the Russian cathedral that evening.

“I’ll be serving there,” Colonel Gumenyuk explained.

He did it so professionally that parishioners coming up to him for a blessing were convinced they were kissing the hand of Father Ioann, not Colonel Gumenyuk.

“Well, you’re just like a real one!” General Kalugin told him admiringly the next morning at the residency.

Such “just like real” priests were part of the staff of Moscow Patriarchate churches around the world, but in friendly Arab countries they made up practically the entire clergy. The local Muslim counterintelligence services turned a blind eye because the Chekist priests worked against the West. So if a priest you know served in the Middle East, that means he also served in the KGB.

The fates of these men did not always turn out happily. The Lord subjected them to severe trials. Some had children who began to believe in God, which was considered unacceptable in a Chekist’s family; others themselves came to know the existence of God. Their Chekist colleagues instantly sniffed this out and put a cross on their careers. I recounted the lot of these would-be priests from the intelligence service in detail in my book “KGB in Japan” (Moscow, “Tsentrpoligraf”, 2000).

And now, where are those Chekist priests? Do they remain among the clergy of the Moscow Patriarchate?

In the West it is commonly assumed that they have evaporated. But why? Has there been a lustration of Chekists in any Russian institution? Alas, it was crushed by the powerful communist lobby. Even more so, there was no lustration in the Moscow Patriarchate, today’s chief eulogist of the Soviet past.

I know of only one such attempt. It took place in the newspaper “Izvestia” right after the failure of the August 1991 coup. Igor Golembiovsky, the editor-in-chief at the time, summoned to his office all the Chekists working as journalists at the paper and proposed that they resign either from “Izvestia” or from the KGB. He was no longer willing to tolerate such dual employment.

Golembiovsky was not forgiven this liberty, and in Putin’s Russia he is persecuted. Alexy II, by contrast, is at the zenith of glory. From which one may conclude that he did not expel Chekists from his ranks.

It seems that the American authorities are also beginning to understand that the annexation of the Russian Church Abroad to the Chekist Moscow poses a direct threat to US national security.

After all, many Russian-Americans serve in government agencies and have security clearances. They are not at all thrilled by the prospect of confessing to a Colonel Gumenyuk. Some churches of the Russian Church Abroad are located near American secret facilities where their parishioners work. If Gumenyuk were to show up there too, the specter of an American prison for cooperation with Russian intelligence would loom before them.

Still, the greatest value for the intelligence service lies not in émigrés, but in native Westerners who have embraced Orthodoxy—Americans, Britons, Frenchmen. Their intelligence opportunities are broader. Unaware of the hidden rocks of Russian life, trusting in the Western way, and with boundless faith in the priest, they will become easy prey for the SVR, its luscious dessert.

In America, greater respect is accorded to clergy than in Russia. The mere suggestion that a priest could turn out to be a spy is perceived as blasphemy. That is the old-regime prejudice here. Even the special services must overcome a certain psychological resistance before they can open a file on a priest as a foreign intelligence officer. The principle of the separation of Church and state is observed, and surveillance of a spy priest may be interpreted as state interference in Church affairs.

This arrangement suits the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service perfectly. Its cassock-clad officer feels far more comfortable in the United States than his colleague who wears a diplomat’s tailcoat or a businessman’s suit.

Perhaps Western leaders expressed their displeasure to Putin over the mass deployment of Gumenyuks being prepared to descend upon them, and this was one of the reasons for the quite strange recent message from Metropolitan Laurus to the clergy of the Australian and New Zealand Diocese of ROCOR(L), in which, as some believe, he backtracked.

The core of the Australian clergy rebelled against the immediate union with the Moscow Patriarchate. It proved a tough nut to crack, for it comes from the part of the Russian emigration in China that refused to return to the Soviet Union after World War II. Staunch anti-communists, these people opted for a new emigration led by Saint John of Shanghai.

Moreover, Australia is famous for its strict counterintelligence regime. The KGB residency there was always blocked by the police, and Soviet intelligence officers could not operate freely. They did not like traveling to Australia, despite its luxurious lifestyle, because they could not achieve recruitment results there that would lead to career advancement. Therefore, the Russian emigration in Australia turned out to be significantly less affected by the corrupting influence of the KGB than in the USA or Western Europe.

Metropolitan Laurus hastened to reassure the Australians. He assured them that administratively, the Russian Church Abroad would retain independence. However, it does not completely break with the Moscow Patriarchate, leaving joint services, which, incidentally, are already taking place. One could dispute the theological permissibility of this, if the takeover of the Russian Church Abroad were a purely religious undertaking rather than an operational KGB operation.

And for the KGB agents, administrative subordination or sharing the Chalice makes no difference. They do not particularly delve into such details. What matters to them is to get a hook; the rest is a matter of technique.

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