Alexander Ginzburg: Only one year – 1976
Alexander Ginzburg
Only One Year – 1976
Dissidents and Freedom of Conscience
It was the sixtieth year of Soviet power, the tenth year of the human rights movement, counting from the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel. Both writers are already free and still alive, but the rights of Soviet society are absent now as they were then. The cover of the main dissident journal launched in 1968 – Chronicle of Current Events – sees changing slogans: first “The Year of Human Rights in the Soviet Union,” then “The Year of Human Rights in the Soviet Union Continues,” “The Movement in Defense of Human Rights in the Soviet Union Continues,” “The Stand in Defense of Human Rights in the Soviet Union Continues,” and finally “The Struggle for Human Rights Continues.”
The sixtieth-tenth year is memorable for the entry into life of the phrase “freedom of conscience,” following the previously proclaimed “freedom of conviction” (Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – the epigraph to all issues of the Chronicle).
It cannot be said that samizdat had been entirely devoid of church themes by this time. As early as 1965, a letter from priests N. Eshliman and G. Yakunin to the Patriarch about state interference in Church affairs appeared; the same topic was explored in 1973 by Academician I. Shafarevich. Catholics in Lithuania, Baptists in Ukraine, Adventists in the Caucasus, and Pentecostals in the Far East issued their own bulletins. The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ magazine Watchtower, published in the USA and copied in the USSR, also flickered through samizdat. In 1974–75, The Gulag Archipelago traveled across the country with its stories of believers in camps – from Solovki almost to our own day. But samizdat in 1976, both in volume and breadth of coverage, is nearly equal to all that came before.
Let us begin with the Chronicle.
In issue 39, a modest one and a half pages are devoted to the position of the Church – “Persecution of Believers.”
Parishioners of Fr. Dmitry Dudko protested his dismissal from the suburban Nikitsky Church in Moscow. They sent petitions to the chairman of the district executive committee, the Council for Religious Affairs’ authorized representative, the Metropolitan of Krutitsy, and the Patriarch.
Moscow intellectuals – Vadim Borisov, Z. Krakhmalnikova, F. Svetov, I. Khokhlushkin, I. Shafarevich – appealed to the heads of Christian Churches and to the World Council of Churches.
On February 9, 536 Baptists from the Kharkov region interceded for their imprisoned fellow believer Boris Zdorovets.
Baptists from Gorky, Lyubov and Alexander Voloshuk, write to Brezhnev and Podgorny that at school teachers and pupils mock their second-grader son for being a believer.
In Novomoskovsk, Dnepropetrovsk region, the police seized five members of a registered congregation on the street; they were held overnight at the police station.
The fifteenth year ends since the Apostolic Administrator of the Vilnius diocese, Bishop Julijonas Steponavičius, was removed from office.
The next issue of the Chronicle on the persecution of believers contains only materials from the Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church, but it concludes with a retelling of an article from the magazine Rabotnitsa – about believing schoolchildren. The final quotation: “To obtain a profession and circumvent conflict with the communist, scientific worldview, they have to be duplicitous. Duplicity becomes their distinguishing feature. Usually they study well, even excellently, but knowledge does not turn into conviction: having absorbed the facts, they reject the worldview conclusions.”
And then the thunder roared
Actually, the appearance of a “new public association” – the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group to Monitor the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords in the USSR (colloquially, the Helsinki Group) was reported in Chronicle issue 4, but in the next issue the relevant section was not titled “Persecution of Believers” but “Religion in the USSR,” and it differed qualitatively. The new group (the idea of Andrei Amalrik, leader – Professor Yuri Orlov, a total of 11 persons listed by name) not only published (in samizdat, naturally) information received, but also conducted independent research in accordance with the “third basket” – the part concerning human rights and freedoms – signed in August 1975 by the heads of 35 participating states of the agreements “On Security and Cooperation in Europe.”
Now the OSCE has become one of the effective international mechanisms, but 24 years ago a group of 11 Moscow intellectuals was the first helpless swallow, only loudly crying about spring.
The group was announced on May 12, and already at the end of May two of its members managed to attend a lecture by Deputy Chairman of the Council for Religious Affairs Furov for staff of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. From this lecture, officially confirmed (and previously – top secret) figures became known for the first time. Of the 77,676 pre-revolutionary Orthodox churches, only 7,500 remain in the USSR, almost half of them in Western Ukraine. Of the 4,200 Catholic temples in the Baltics – fewer than 1,000. Of the 24,000 mosques – also 1,000, with only 300 registered, the rest “half-existing.” Of 5,000 synagogues – 200 remain (92 registered), with 50 rabbis in the country. Lutheran prayer houses (number not indicated) are supplied with pastors at 50%. “1,200 sectarian unions (out of 4,000) exist illegally, and the majority have an anti-Soviet orientation: these are schismatic Baptists, Adventists, Innokentievites, Murashkovites, True Orthodox Christians.”
A commentary on Furov’s lecture became a letter from Fr. Gleb Yakunin and Lev Regelson to the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, Philip Potter, devoted to Soviet legislation on religion, which began in 1929 and has since been repeatedly tightened.
The logical conclusion from the letter of Yakunin and Regelson is as follows: if the legislation on cults were applied in full, religious life in the country would be impossible. However, the existing restrictions are enough to speak of the absence of religious freedom in the USSR.
Practical examples – the fate of the Orthodox activist Alexander Argentov, who by the age of 25 had passed through several psychiatric hospitals, and the searches and interrogations of participants in the Christian seminar of Alexander Ogorodnikov.
The Baptist situation is a story unto itself. By this time they had outstripped the others not only in the number of convicted but also in their organization and missionary activity. Banned missionary work, banned charity, underground publishing. They printed not only the Bible, theological works, and hymnals but also several journals, among them the striking “Bulletin of the Council of Prisoners’ Relatives.” Here is the list of Baptists convicted in 1975—88 people. Eleven for refusing military service, 33 for “slander defaming the state system,” the remaining half under “purely religious” articles—142 and 227. Among them, Georgi Vins, secretary of the Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Baptists; a few years later—in April 1979—he would be taken to New York and exchanged for Soviet spies.
A Memoir Digression
The author met G. Vins on the way to that exchange, on the Moscow–New York flight. And with his mother—Lidia Mikhailovna, the founder of the Council of Prisoners’ Relatives—and with his son Peter, the Helsinki Group was acquainted almost from its very beginning: they regularly travelled to us from Kiev. Through the Group, with and without them, dozens of Baptists passed.
We also had an even earlier acquaintance with one of the best-known Pentecostal leaders—Bishop Ivan Fedotov. Fate brought us together during a psychiatric evaluation at the notorious Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry in 1960. Not long before that, the young Pentecostal had been the champion of the Baltic Fleet in classical wrestling. We each spent about a month in the institute, were declared pathologically normal, and went off to serve our first camp terms. The author got two years, and Fedorov got ten right away. In 1976 he was serving his second term—three years—in Penza.
Another camp story: Stepan Demyanchuk belonged to the Zhitomir Pentecostal community. During the war he worked as an interpreter for the Germans, left with them, and settled in Belgium. A Soviet representative persuaded him to return to his homeland, promising forgiveness. In the USSR Demyanchuk was sentenced to death; after two months on death row, the sentence was commuted to 15 years. In prison Demyanchuk became a believer, and later, under the religious articles, received five years of exile.
At the beginning of 1976 pressure on the community intensified. “Soviet Zhitomirshchina” published an article, “The God Behind Whom a Murderer Hides.” The paper claimed that Demyanchuk had taken part in shootings. At a large public meeting, speakers demanded vengeance not only on Demyanchuk but also on the other Pentecostals. A new criminal case was opened against Demyanchuk—for war crimes. The community was ordered to register; they were given three months to think it over.
Children Answer for Their Parents
The Helsinki Group’s first serious investigation into problems of freedom of conscience was completed by the summer of 1976 with Document 5—“Repressions Against Religious Families.” Recall that each document of the Group was sent to the heads of 35 countries that signed the Helsinki Accords and presented at press conferences to foreign journalists accredited in Moscow. Of course there were serious doubts about whether the texts were reaching the embassies at all, let alone going beyond them, but the Group had taken on this burden. The journalists never transmitted the full texts to their newspapers, but, according to their own understanding, gave brief summaries, thus at least keeping the dissident work from perishing.
The topic of the investigation was not chosen by chance, for our adversary—the ideological policy of the USSR—envisioned the global envelopment of children and youth in so-called communist education.
This principle was supported by the corresponding articles of the Code on the Family and Marriage. Parents were to “raise their children in the spirit of the moral code of the builder of communism” (Art. 52). “Parents, or one of them, may be deprived of parental rights if it is established that they,” for example, “exert a harmful influence on their children by their amoral, anti-social behavior” (Art. 59). Under another article (64), the court may decide “to remove the child without deprivation of parental rights.”
This practice was used in most cases against “sectarians”—Baptists, Pentecostals. From dozens of cases only a few are selected. The People’s Court of the village of Stara Vyzhva, Volyn Region, ordered that the three children of Baptist Maria Sukhrunovich be taken from her and transferred to their atheist father.
Pentecostals Nina and Nikolai Muravlev, who have seven children, were deprived of parental rights. The children were not removed; the decision stands.
Adventist Maria Vlasyuk from the village of Iliatka, Khmelnitsky Region, mother of two children. The court ordered that her daughter be taken from her without deprivation of parental rights.
Quoted are court sentences and rulings, lists of their victims, witness testimony. Altogether about a hundred names are given in the document.
The Group’s conclusion: repressions against religious families, including the removal of children, are in full contradiction to the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe signed by the Soviet government, particularly point VII of Article 1 of the Final Act, according to which “the participating States will recognize and respect the freedom of the individual to profess, alone or in community with others, religion or belief, acting in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience.”
Even after this document was issued, the Group received new information about arrests and other repressions against Baptists. In particular, Pyotr Serebrennikov, 76, village of Ivanovka, Azerbaijan SSR, sentenced to five years with confiscation of property; Maria Leontyeva, 64, arrested in the same place; Anastasia Yermolova, mother of seven children, also there. These arrests took place over several days in July 1976.
New Jews
The problems of the village of Ilyinka in Voronezh Oblast were long dealt with by Anatoly Shcharansky, a founding member of the Helsinki Group, who later served a prison term of about 9 years, and very recently served as a minister in several Israeli governments. Ilyinka is a Jewish village in the very heart of rural Russia. One might doubt the ethnic Jewish origin of its inhabitants, but they managed, by some miracle, to preserve the Jewish religion and way of life over the centuries. In 1974, several families from Ilyinka managed to leave for Israel. However, local authorities then declared that they would not permit residents of Ilyinka to leave, because they did not consider them Jews. The invitations from Israel for 90 families lay in the desk of the kolkhoz chairman, and from time to time he would show them to the collective farmers: “Don’t even hope to receive them; you have nothing to do in Israel.” The situation in Ilyinka was resolved happily only 15 years later, when many of those involved were no longer alive.
The Biggest Document
The Pentecostal emigration movement began back in the mid-sixties in the Far East. Its founders passed through political camps, where their friendship with Moscow dissidents was forged. They came to the Helsinki Group as whole families, almost certain that from Moscow their path would lead straight to the longed‑for free places.
The Group collected and published, simultaneously with Document 11 “On the Right to Emigrate on Religious Grounds,” a huge 500‑page collection “Come Out of Her, My People,” which contained biographies of several hundred participants in the movement. The collection was republished in English by the Helsinki Commission of the U.S. Congress. It served as a reminder that religious dissidents who fled state persecution made a significant contribution to the development of such Helsinki Conference participating states as the United States and Canada.
Their Own Cause
The year ended for the Group on December 30. On that day we introduced to journalists in Moscow the Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights – Fr. Gleb Yakunin, Boris Khaybulin (Hierodeacon Varsonofy), and Viktor Kapitanchuk, and a new story began.
Already in January there were the first arrests in the Helsinki Group, but it held on until 1980.
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