Вопросы Борису Перчаткину
How Protestants from the USSR Emigrated to the USA
Boris, please, a few words about your family and how you came to God.
Our family is quite unique. Actually, we are from the nobility. My grandfather came to faith after the revolution; he was a Baptist presbyter. He was shot in 1936, and the family was sent into exile in Komsomolsk-on-Amur. Then the war. By the end of the war, my uncle had become a division commander. My father was an officer; he died in the war. Then my mother remarried, again to an officer. In 1954, there was an uprising in Germany. My stepfather was sent there to serve. But he was accused of having connections with the Germans, charged with terrorist activities, and sentenced to death. Everyone immediately renounced him, including my uncle. Stalinist times. Later the death sentence was commuted to twenty-five years, but he never returned. That pushed my mother toward faith.
I first went to a meeting in 1962. It was a youth meeting. I looked at these guys and girls singing, saying things, and I expected that as soon as the meeting ended, they’d go out, light up cigarettes, and start swearing. That didn’t happen, but I still thought it would show up. However, my expectations weren’t met. That’s what interested me the most. It was the strongest evangelization. I saw a stark contrast between the street and the church. At that time, I was also planning to enter university. My aunt taught there, and my uncle was the head of a department. But they disappointed me, saying that if I had started going to church, there was little chance I’d graduate, and even if I did, I still wouldn’t work in my field.
Having become a Christian, you became guilty before the Soviet authorities for your convictions. How did your relationship with them develop?
There were about fifty of us who were active, fighting the Soviet authorities for granting freedom to believers. Forty-three were imprisoned, of whom only five survived; the rest perished in the camps. I was arrested several times, but I escaped from custody; I was desperate. But in 1980, they finally got me.
What charges were brought against you?
Dissemination in written form of knowingly false fabrications defaming the state and social system. Another article – agitation, and then – treason against the Motherland. The investigation was led by Colonel Istomin, very well known at that time.
What were the methods of investigation?
I spent two hundred hours in “glasses.” That’s a closed, dark space where a person is placed and forgotten for ten to twenty hours. When it’s opened, the person just falls out. Several times they tortured me with chemicals. They’d bring me to a basement, strip me naked, and smear me with chemicals. The mixture included acetone, kerosene, bleach, and some fourth component. The effect of this seemingly harmless substance, which looked like sour cream, was this: the first sensation was like being doused with ice water. After about thirty seconds, the body began to burn. I still can’t describe this state; it’s not just a burn. Then the action of that fourth element would kick in, penetrating inside, and it felt as if your body was being torn apart from within. No one could endure more than four or five minutes. Everyone signed. I met one person who signed that in one day, in different places, he had committed two murders and forty-two robberies! They could adjust the concentration of the mixture at the investigator’s request. When they applied it to me the third time, they said that with such a concentration, anyone would confess to being Adolf Hitler. That was the KGB’s investigation. They said that in the police, investigators were talented, but with them, investigators were geniuses. So they beat out of you whatever they needed. I didn’t sign anything. They looked at my pupils and were afraid to keep that solution on me any longer, so I wouldn’t go insane. The pain remains quite intense for another three days and only completely goes away after a month.
But the most serious torture was different. The KGB building stood on a large avenue. On the second floor were the investigation rooms. So the investigator would call me to the window and say: “How long haven’t you eaten? Three days? Look, across the street there’s a café. In ten minutes you’ll be in that café eating normal food. Why torture yourself, torture your family? Do you see your wife walking, bringing you a package? She traveled from Nakhodka all night, and we won’t accept her package. She’s with a child, and you haven’t seen this child; he was born while you were away. Why torment her? You’re fighting for some freedom? Who needs this freedom? Your own brothers are laughing at you! Head off to your America, just sign.”
What did they ask you to sign?
They needed me to sign this: which Americans I had connections with, what I passed on, what they were interested in. They needed me to betray the Americans, to create a precedent, so they could then cry to the whole world about interference in internal affairs. That was torture for me. I thought maybe nobody really needed it. I had all sorts of thoughts.
What was your total sentence?
Five years. Perestroika saved me. During one visit, I managed to tell my wife that they were torturing me with chemicals. She immediately passed this to the American embassy. An uproar started, and it was broadcast on Voice of America. I couldn’t understand what was happening because the courts kept postponing and rescheduling from one date to another. Then I got an honest lawyer. He was honest because he knew he had little time left due to an incurable disease. So he wanted to atone for his guilt with my case, because he had done much evil. He explained to me that because of me, there was a big uproar abroad, and here they didn’t know what to do with me. In the end, they said to me: “Well, at least confess to something, and we’ll let you go.” I again said “no,” they gave me two years and sent me to the Urals. I served two years, and six months later I was arrested again for six phone calls to the United States. At that time, a decree on preventive detention had been issued. That means you are arrested even before you’ve done anything, for prevention. Many fell under that decree. So these calls were put forward as charges against me.
What was the content of these telephone conversations?
I reported who else was imprisoned, the conditions in the prison, and asked to send invitations for those who wanted to emigrate to America. I served four months in a death row cell. The inmates there were very diverse; I was the only believer among them. After those four months, I was sent to Kolyma for three years.
How did you cope psychologically during all this time?
I had six children. The eldest was nine years old when I was first arrested, and my youngest daughter was born after I was already gone. Then came the betrayals of friends who testified against me. Out of fifty witnesses, four testified against me—people I would never have suspected, people from the church. I only later learned that two of them had been recruited. But there was no turning back for me. I knew that if I showed any weakness, sooner or later they would finish me off. What strengthened me was the thought that God does not give more than one can bear. If He gave me this burden, it meant I had to endure it.
How did your wife go through this path?
She helped me a lot and bore everything courageously. My home front was secure. The officers always worked comprehensively. If they imprisoned someone, they also tried to destroy the family at the same time.
So while you were serving your sentence, they were working on your wife in parallel?
They were actively working on her. During my second prison term, they prepared a surprise for me. I had about three or four months left to serve. I wasn’t receiving any letters at all then; they had completely deprived me of correspondence, so I had no idea what was happening at home. The camp commander summoned me and said: «Here is a letter from your wife. I’ll read it to you now, but not all of it, just fragments.» And he read: «I don’t know what’s going on with you; I’m not receiving letters from you, but I write to you regularly. You are being released on the 27th, and a trial is set for the 20th. They will try me and my mother. I don’t know what will happen to the children; maybe they’ll be taken to an orphanage, maybe given to relatives, but one thing I know: when you come back, our family will be gone.» And with that mood I finished my sentence.
And that’s how it turned out?
Perestroika helped a little. The judge said: «We are a humane Soviet court. We will leave one of you with the children—after all, we’re not beasts! And we will imprison the other. Choose yourselves who will stay with the children.» My mother and my wife began to discuss it among themselves, deciding the matter. Then the judge said: «Alright, you haven’t decided, but we have decided ourselves.» My mother was sentenced to two years of ordinary regime, and my wife to two years of corrective labor with a deduction of twenty percent from her wages. And such a «humane» decision was made, as they said, in connection with the Year of the Mother and Child. They immediately put handcuffs on my mother and she went by stages. But she served only a little time; perestroika went into full swing and she was amnestied.
You are a man who paved the way for emigration. How did you manage to lift the Iron Curtain?
We chose the path of emigration not as a goal, but as a weapon. By means of this battering ram we wanted to change something. It took on a mass character, and in total thirty thousand believers had applied for emigration by 1980. I was engaged in gathering information, meeting with foreign correspondents, giving interviews. In 1987, I received a proposal to write a report for the U.S. Congress on the state of religion in the USSR. I did write the report, but I was placed under house arrest and could not deliver it. Nevertheless, it still made its way there. After that, I received an invitation to meet with the U.S. Secretary of State to discuss the issue of religious emigration. Then I met with the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and with the Deputy Secretary of State for Religious Affairs.
In May 1988, President Reagan came to Moscow for a meeting with Gorbachev. He wanted first to meet with those who had suffered for freedom. Forty people were selected — Jews, dissidents, Orthodox, Catholics, and others. From the Protestants, only I was invited. For two hours I spoke with Nancy Reagan and explained the situation to her. I said that if we fulfill the Gospel, we automatically become criminals before Soviet law. On the other hand, if we fulfill Soviet laws, we automatically become criminals before the Gospel. There is no alternative. Therefore, we chose a third way — emigration. After this conversation, Nancy organized my trip to the U.S. so that I could read my first report then; that was in August 1988. She explained to me that in America there was Jewish emigration, political emigration, but there was no status for religious emigration. Therefore, it was necessary for the U.S. Congress to pass a law, which ultimately came out in October 1988 and which we use to this day. Thus, we covered that path and obtained emigration status on religious grounds. One American document recorded: «The biography of Perchatkin played a key role in drawing the attention of the American government and people to the Pentecostals seeking asylum in the USA.»
Why did your biography in particular interest the President of the United States?
Probably, I was more consistent in this work. The main factor, I think, was that for some reason I did not feel fear. I was focused on describing the situation, seeking out legislative anti-religious acts, because we needed something to justify the expediency of emigration. If they could not give us freedom, then they had to give us at least emigration. I established serious contacts, met with congressmen, senators, diplomats. They trusted me, and their trust had to be earned. Why did they invite only me from the Protestants to the meeting with Reagan? Simply because I had been working in this direction all the time and had become very well known. That meeting changed the course of events; shortly after it, I was already reading my report in the U.S. Congress.
So you combined that first speech in Congress with your personal emigration?
Yes, they quickly processed all my papers. On May 30 I was at the meeting with Reagan, and on August 5 I was reading my report in Congress, already being an immigrant. I bypassed Rome — the place where all the first emigrants gathered.
What did you start doing after arriving in America?
No one knew how long the doors for emigration would remain open. Initially, invitations were sold for $300, but when they realized we had mass orders, they started selling them for $100. There was no money. And for almost two years, I traveled around American churches to raise money for these invitations. Thousands of people were sitting in Rome, waiting for sponsors. And tens of thousands were sitting back in the Union, waiting for an invitation. For both groups, sponsors needed to be found. In one church, a family approached me. The husband had lost his job, the wife was pregnant. They handed me a check for $136, which they had prepared to pay the electricity bill. He said it was their last money, but they decided to donate it so that at least one family could come. As for the large church associations, such as the Assemblies of God, for example, they refused to help us.
Do you think there are many potential refugees left in Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union?
I think so. Especially since the situation is now starting to escalate. The work needs to also be directed toward those who are under persecution but do not have direct relatives in the US. In their favor, there is a law that allows obtaining refugee status without relatives if persecution is present. All of this can be proven, but it must be done within professional work.
What are your visits to Congress about these days?
I gather information about what is happening in the former Soviet Union. Either conflicts with the authorities, or interfaith conflicts—for example, in Russia, with the Orthodox; in Asia, with Islamists, where in both cases the state supports them. And I highlight these issues. Why does refugee status exist? Persecution exists—status exists. No persecution—no status. The quota depends on the nature of the persecution and its volume. Why is the quota being cut now? It was 60,000, then, falling, reached the mark of 13,000. Every year the quota is slashed. Why is it being slashed? Because there is less and less information about persecution. Among the Jews, six organizations are working in this direction. They have ninety-six information-gathering agencies in the former Soviet Union, and we have none. They have eight representative offices in each republic, and we have none. Every month they produce a report on the situation of Jews in the former Union. And we do it once a year. That’s why their quota is not cut. We need to have agencies and representative offices to collect and systematize information. All occurring conflicts need to be linked to politics to show the scale, but we are unable to do that.
What is lacking for this work? What do you need?
Almost everything is lacking. I have no staff workers. A network of agencies is needed to quickly learn about and verify information. I have a lot of information that I do not put into circulation because it is unverified. Why do they take me into account in the government? Because they know that all the information is reliable. By and large, four people work with me, mostly on a volunteer basis. We need to pay for trips to Washington DC, which most often come out of our own pockets. Sometimes, though, there are sponsors. To more or less function normally, a monthly budget of $10–12 thousand is needed. Among the Jews, the budget is $6 million a year. They distribute information in synagogues, they are supported. Every Jew who comes to America considers it their duty to send at least $20 to the organization.
About 350,000 Slavs have left on religious grounds, but since they are already here, and their relatives are here, they see no point in financial support for this work. Along with the financial problems, I also had personal problems. In 1997, my son died, and I completely abandoned it all at that time. For a couple of years, I had a break in this work, and only in 1999 did I resume everything. Before, there were professional correspondents who provided ready information. Some of them I lost during that break. I had to start all this work over again. But I have still not been able to restore the agency. Previously, we paid $150 for office rent in Moscow; now it costs $1,000. Previously, we paid correspondents in Russia $300, more professional ones $500; now no one wants to work for $1,500. So our activity today is tantamount to inactivity. The volume of information is sharply increasing, but we have no capacity to make use of it.
But still, even with our meager resources, we try to do something. We were able to achieve that Congress and the Senate voted to warn Russia and, in particular, President Putin about the inadmissibility of persecuting Protestant groups. That is a big thing, but it is not everything. In Russia now they are watching how ready the Christian community is to resist the advance of Orthodoxy, paganism, and so on. When I attend meetings of the Commission on Religious Affairs, there is almost always a representative of the Russian embassy there. They are watching closely.
To what extent are Slavic American churches open to helping?
When I call there, I hear answers like this: “We will inquire of the Lord; maybe it is not needed; those who wanted to leave, have left, and those who stayed, are themselves to blame…” and so on. When I was in prison, I never imagined that our current immigration would ever take on such a face. Our immigration now is hardly interested in anything, in particular, history too. How do we differ from the Jews? In that Jews know their history well. And our people prefer to remain ignorant.
Sometime around 1999, a pastor of a large church called me and said, “You’re doing a good work; we’ll help you.” He said, “Let me gather the pastors, and you come and explain the situation. Then,” he said, “we’ll announce that each church should allocate $300–500 a month for you, and that will make a decent budget.” I came and told them. That pastor got up and said, “You see, the man is doing a real work – we need to help.” They wanted to discuss the details after I left. I left. In the evening, another pastor called and asked, “Well, Boris, did you enjoy the brotherly gathering?” “Yes, I didn’t expect it,” I said. “Shall I tell you what happened next?” And he told me that when I left with my assistant, the pastor who had invited me got up and said, “Well, did you see the eagles here? Look at that – dissidents! Prisoners! So, brothers, as far as possible, don’t let them into the churches and, as far as possible, don’t give them money. And let them go around the churches. They’ll be looked at like beggars.”
That’s a mafia! And should I tell you what level this mafia operates at? In 2000, I decided to bring all of them to Washington, DC, and I arranged a little tour in Congress so they could see what it’s like. When we all came out of the State Department, television cameras were trained on us. They immediately said, “They want to film us. Now they’ll do interviews!” I said, “No, some delegation is probably about to arrive, so they’re set up.” They kept insisting that everything was set up for us. But it turned out that right after us the Dalai Lama from Tibet was coming, and the media were ready to meet him. And then what? After returning home, one of the pastors tells his church: “Brothers and sisters, I was in the government. And when we came out of Washington, DC (this pastor, Perchatkin, calls the State Department ‘Washington, DC’), we ran into a llama, and correspondents started filming us.” What the people understood was that they had come out of Washington, DC, ended up on some farm, and there was a llama. Only they didn’t understand why correspondents were there. That’s the kind of people leading the churches!
When we were in Congress, everyone who was there for the first time was given the badges that congressmen wear. As soon as our pastors left the office, they started opening those little boxes with the badges. All you had to do was press a little button, and the box would open. Instead, they began breaking the boxes, and fragments fell on the floor. Staff members are walking behind them, pointing to the floor and saying you can’t do that here. Meanwhile, our bishops stride down the corridor of the Congress building, impatiently breaking boxes and pinning badges to their chests. Can you imagine who is leading the bulk of the people?!
Is not such leadership the product of the subtle activity of the Soviet authorities?
I’ll tell you what one KGB officer told me. In 1977, with God’s help, I managed to outmaneuver KGB Captain Klimov, who headed the recruitment department. He said that when he went to work for the KGB, he thought he’d be working with the mafia and bandits. But when he got into the 5th Directorate, he began to notice that something was off. He admitted that when dealing with believers, he sympathized with them and saw somewhat different statistics from those of worldly people. What he did: he disclosed all the agents from within our circles. The 5th Directorate had eight career officers and another five service personnel. They recruited “prophets,” planted their own people in churches who made their contribution, for instance, to get someone expelled from the church. But all that was just trifles.
Captain Klimov told me about the main goals set before them: “The main thing for us was to turn you into Soviet believers. In the 1950s–60s, we didn’t let you study. We gave you such character references that with them you could only be accepted in the zone. Then we changed tactics, and in the 1970s you started preaching that studying is a sin. That was our doing! Your own pastors, your own ideologues wouldn’t let you study now, not us. We told you: learning is light, but among you it was preached that knowledge puffs up, while love builds up. And what’s the result? You have neither love nor knowledge – just the kind we need!”
He gave another example: “The Adventists have a very strong publishing organ. They print something, distribute it across the country, we catch them, imprison them. Then they somehow print again, and we imprison them again. So what? In that literature they wage a struggle against the Pope, who will never see them and never hear them. That’s also our work – so that their own people look at these underground workers as fools.” And there was a vast multitude of such examples.
At one time, we took the full brunt of it, and they stopped bothering the pastors, stopped putting them in prison. But then those same pastors started persecuting us, excommunicating us, hounding us. One pastor forced people to go to the executive committee and write letters of repentance, saying, “Forgive me, Mr. Communist, I fell under the influence of extremists, dissidents.” That pastor told me personally that we should serve God and not engage in politics. But when it came to America, he was among the first. And all the others like him are here. In late 1988 and early 1989, that whole pack of them was let out to America. They had one task: to organize churches, gather people around themselves, form a brotherhood, and take control of immigration.
So, going back to what we were talking about earlier, I’d like to reach the ordinary person, bypassing the existing leadership. But you can reach him only through the press. Though the press is also completely sewn up by this mafia. And the more senile it is, the better for them. So the only well-worn path I have at my disposal right now is to turn to Russian churches that are still accessible for this, but there are few of those. I once had a dialogue with a pastor. I called him, asked permission to come and sell my book “Fiery Paths,” where I describe my whole journey in detail; it’s with those funds that I can do any kind of work at all. He answers me: “Don’t you go sticking any labels on yourself. Prisoners, they say! It was God who did it all! And you’re sticking it on yourselves! Does it take much brains to end up in prison? No brains needed for that! But to stay out of prison, you needed wisdom from God!”
Do you highlight specific examples of what is happening in the countries of the former Soviet Union in the reports you present to Congress?
Absolutely. We talk about individual persecution and the persecution of the church as a whole.
Could you share some examples?
Here, I was sent a fax from Yakutia. Parents were stripped of their parental rights and had their children taken away because they were raising them in a religious spirit. They ask me to manage all the paperwork for returning the children to the parents. Two of their children have already died in children’s homes. One eight-year-old girl had been disabled since birth; she needed care, and they still took her away and said that the parents’ religious activity had brought the girl to that condition, but they would cure her and she would start running. A month later she died. Another girl was taken at the age of six months; they didn’t even let them finish nursing her. She also died. All their children were sent off to different children’s homes, so that not even two of them would be together; and the children have been without their parents for seven years now.
There’s a lot written in this fax. Here, for example: two men were sent to lay a road across a frozen river. They were given a heavy bulldozer, and while they were working, they broke through the ice. Fifty degrees below zero. They tried to get out, but one couldn’t; he froze. The second made it to the village. Gangrene set in, his fingers were amputated. But the worst part was that they tied him to logs and drove him around the village all day, telling his wife: “Leave the community, and we’ll give you back your husband.” I spoke with his wife personally. And all this is happening nowadays!
The pastor of that church has been sitting in a tuberculosis zone for seven and a half years now. He ended up there for refusing to undergo a medical examination. He was simply afraid that under the guise of a medical exam they might give him an injection—just as they once wanted to inject me with syphilis. He was told that his whereabouts must be in complete isolation from society. It was with such a designation that he spent several years in the tuberculosis zone. Moreover, because he refuses to undergo the medical commission, they deprived him of a place to sleep there. He doesn’t even have a place to sleep; he’s like a bum in the camp!
In this fax, over several pages, they describe all the horrors. They were set on fire, robbed, teenagers beat pregnant women. They made films about them, saying they sacrifice people, i.e., they stir up the local population against them. All of this is what is happening in our time. And we only found out about it after six years. And to help these people today and cover their legal costs, more than one hundred thousand dollars is needed.
Have there been any cases where people couldn’t obtain refugee status, and your involvement brought a positive result?
Of course, there have been such cases. I appear at immigration courts as an expert, and to date I have been involved in about forty cases, more than thirty of which were won. Congress recognizes me as an expert on religious matters, and the judge takes that into account. During interviews at the embassy, I could go into any office. Beforehand, I would brief the people who were about to be interviewed a little; I explained to them how to behave, what to say, what not to say, because there were many incidents. Here’s one example. I gathered people to prepare them, and one woman tells me: “I don’t need this; God Himself teaches me.” Well, since God was teaching her, I didn’t go into the room where she was being interviewed. And that evening she comes up to me and says: “Help me, they denied me. I don’t know why; I behaved just as God told me to.” I went up to the person who took the interview and asked why she was denied. He told me: “Why is she putting on a concert here?” He said she walked in and immediately shouted: “Hallelujah!” I ask her: “What is your name?” She answers: “Hallelujah!” “What faith do you belong to?” She: “Hallelujah!” “Well, and I said ‘amen’ to that.”
Could it be said that the aim of your activity is to find information confirming the existence of persecution, so that refugee status on religious grounds can be upheld?
Not only that. We make the existence of persecution public. And we do it at the highest level, in order to discourage further persecution. And it follows naturally that if there is persecution, then refugee status makes sense.
Interview by Marina Mironova
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