Дьявольский план разрушения церкви
Testimony of Boris Perchatkin from the book by Konstantin Preobrazhensky: “The KGB Comes with Us”
The KGB uses its agents among Protestants to infiltrate Western countries on a far larger scale than among the Orthodox. After all, the West is largely Protestant,” Boris Perchatkin continued. “But while much is now known about the intelligence work of the Moscow Patriarchate, the KGB’s work through Protestants remains secret to this day. Here are a few examples of the KGB’s stunning operations.
We Pentecostals, by taking part in the dissident movement, knowingly or not became participants in the ideological war against the USSR on the side of the West. For in striving for freedom and emigration on religious grounds, we showed the whole world that there is no freedom in the USSR. We were sent to the GULAG, but we were not given religious freedom and were not allowed to emigrate, because by releasing us the Soviet authorities would thereby have acknowledged that the freedom they advertised was a lie, since no one flees from freedom. We helped the West to “strip” the USSR, and we won the war against the Evil Empire on our front, because in 1988 the Communists decided that keeping us any longer was more trouble than it was worth. And they permitted religious emigration, thereby recognizing that there is no freedom in the USSR.
That was a victory for us and for the West. And together with emigration came a relative freedom as well. But it was right then that we all relaxed and, in emigration, fell into a trap set by the KGB. The fate of the emigration began to unfold according to a scenario that could be called: “The Secret Disciples.”
This scenario was brilliantly simple and devastatingly treacherous. Living in the USSR, we never knew the number of people in the underground, persecuted churches—neither Pentecostals nor Baptists. (It is now known that there were about three hundred thousand of them.) But the KGB knew this well, because all unregistered churches were on record and each one had an informer.
Before 1980, we had passed to the West ten thousand names of Pentecostals and Baptists who had openly declared their intention to leave the USSR for religious reasons. (Those lists are still kept in the U.S. Congress.) And we knew of another twenty thousand sympathizers. That is ten percent of all religious illegals–anti-Soviet activists. But as a result of repression against us by the authorities (from 1979 to 1986, 1,688 Pentecostals and over 200 Baptists were convicted) and by the church leadership (hundreds were excommunicated on the orders of Victor Belykh), this number had been reduced by at least a third by 1988, and in some regions by half. Since the doors opened and up to the present day, as many as four hundred thousand Protestants have ended up in the United States with refugee status. Where did such a number of the persecuted come from? Here is where and why.
The churches that decided to take the easy path and registered with the organs of Soviet power (i.e., agreed to be managed by the KGB and to obey the godless legislation on cults) were almost twice our number. The KGB calculated the approximate scale of our exodus and understood that those whom the Chekists had discriminated against and persecuted, and then released into emigration, would consolidate once they arrived in the United States. (They did not allow us to do this in the USSR.) Knowing the mentality of our compatriots, the Chekists were fully aware that with such human and financial resources we would organize a spiritual Protestant expansion into the territory of the USSR and would also mount a powerful human rights effort in the territory of our former homeland. We would reconstruct our history. We would document the facts of genocide against us. We would do what had not yet been done: bring the KGB, its successor the FSB, and their boss—the Communist Party—to an international court, as a warning to others. And that was something they could see only in a nightmare. Yes, a community of people with a goal can do a great deal!
While we were breaking through the Iron Curtain, we had no idea of the scale of the potential emigration. But the Communists did know, and what did they think when they let us go? Correct—release us, but bring us under control, so that life wouldn’t seem easy for people like me, so that they could neutralize and corrupt the emigration, lead it into a spiritual dead end, paralyze all constructive activity and human rights work, and so on and so forth.
But how to bring it under control? Right! “Hijack” it, head up the emigration. The KGB prepared in advance for a massive infiltration of agents into America, in order to lead and control the Protestant refugees.
Elder Vasily told me that in 1987, while he was still living in Ukraine, he was summoned to the KGB and offered emigration to the United States.
“How am I supposed to go?” he asked. “And why are you offering me this? You don’t offer anything just like that.”
“Of course, we don’t offer anything just like that,” the Chekists agreed, “but you know that Christ had secret disciples, right?”
“I know!” agreed Elder Vasily.
“So you will be our secret disciple!” the Chekists laughed.
“And what would a secret disciple have to do for you?”
“Soon many of your fellow believers will be going to America! And you are young, promising, we like you, people will follow you. You’ll start a church in America. Once things get going, establish a brotherhood. If necessary, we’ll help you!” the KGB officers explained.
“And what do you call all this—what you’ve just proposed to me?” Elder Vasily clarified.
“We’re offering you the chance to start a church—is that bad?” the Chekists frowned. “Besides, just imagine: you gather around you, say, five hundred people, and each one tosses one hundred dollars a month into your wallet—tell me, is that bad? In America a pastor is honored, well-paid, and no dusty work…”
From this, it’s clear that for work in the U.S., in addition to existing agents, they recruited and trained fresh—untainted—secret disciples of the KGB. Elder Vasily refused to become a KGB secret disciple, and his exit abroad was blocked until the collapse of the USSR in 1991. From the very moment religious emigration began, “secret disciples” of the KGB started infiltrating America.
The first thing they did was to seize, aggressively and briskly, the leadership role in churches and to organize churches under their control. I knew many of them from their previous Chekist “exploits” and was amazed at their insolence.
It never occurred to me that they would show up here after those “exploits.” The Soviets took advantage of the fact that in our appeals and statements to the West we did not differentiate Protestants into those who collaborated with the Soviet authorities, such as the Soviet-patriotic Protestants of the Autonomous Registration and the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (AUCECB), and our own—the underground churches that opposed the Soviet authorities.
After all, we could not even imagine that the Soviet-patriotic Protestants, accomplices in our persecution, would force their way into the USA and pass themselves off as sufferers. This blunder was immediately exploited by the KGB.
As soon as we broke through the Iron Curtain, pastor-chekists began encouraging their members to emigrate, and then, skillfully dissolving among their trusted rank-and-file duped comrades, quickly filled the emigration quota. The goal was to subsequently open Slavic churches in the USA on the basis of loyal people and to take arriving genuine refugees under control.
On the other hand, in the unregistered churches (for which we were seeking permission to leave), many pastors and some bishops (such as Viktor Belykh, Nikolai Tachinsky, Nikolai Kotyakov, and others) and simply agents (like Slavik Radchuk) began actively obstructing those who were truly persecuted and hindering their departure. You may ask, how is that possible? Here are a few examples. In the fall of 1989 in Volgograd, Bishop Viktor Belykh, whose two daughters were already in the USA as refugees (!), explained in church that those who had left had gotten into trouble, were living off the garbage dump, would be glad to return, but had been stripped of citizenship, concluding that emigration was from Satan.
And people believed, reasoning: this isn’t Soviet propaganda, it’s the bishop speaking! At the same time, Nikolai Tachinsky traveled around the churches in the North Caucasus, preaching that emigration was a sin, and called Viktor Belykh for help: to fight the spirit of emigration. Yet his own documents were being processed at the American embassy. When hostilities began in the Caucasus, he abandoned the people he had deceived and fled.
Now Nikolai Tachinsky heads an independent brotherhood in the USA! A slick move, indeed. The head of the so-called “Slavic Federation,” Adam Bondaruk, at the height of persecution, betrayed the brotherhood and entered the registration, began persecuting those who sought religious freedom and emigration. Adam Bondaruk proclaimed that there was complete freedom in the USSR and that it should be used. But unexpectedly, in early 1988, to everyone’s astonishment, he began encouraging his flock to emigrate. But why emigrate if there is already complete freedom in the USSR?! And after his entire flock emigrated to the USA and created a base for him there, Adam Bondaruk himself then showed up in America as a refugee and began heading those he had previously persecuted.
Another “refugee” arrived in America: the so-called Bishop Nikolai Kotyakov. (You should see this “bishop”!) Before that, he had been to the USA and Europe more than once. (And this is a refugee!?) Nevertheless, he had the audacity to call America “the spawn of hell” and “the harlot of Babylon.” “He who resists Soviet power resists God!” threatened Kotyakov. In 2000, not yet knowing who Kotyakov was, I reproached him for ordaining the cop, Slavik Radchuk.
I was shocked by his reaction.
- Don’t touch Radchuk! he ordered me, “and if you talk about this to anyone else or even confirm anyone else’s testimony that he worked for the KGB, we’ll smash you against the wall! You won’t prove it – the train has left, and nobody here needs it. Understand? One call to Pyotr Saenko, and you’re ‘done’! Got it, you damn dissident?!”
Acting in this way synchronously with the AUCECB and under the KGB’s direction, they allowed pastor-chekists to seize the initiative from us, unsuspecting ones, and take control of Protestant Slavic immigration. And then they themselves, who had hindered immigration and spread anti-American propaganda, also ended up in America as refugees.
(It is now clear that this was a clearly planned and executed operation.)
Who conducted this is not hard to guess: the same ones who, in 1943, on Stalin’s orders and under Beria’s leadership, created the Moscow Patriarchate, and in 1944 – the AUCECB, and placed both religious organizations at the service of the godless authorities. And they served it, scraping and bowing: “What else is your pleasure, sir?” Directly or indirectly, they helped send to the Gulag more than one thousand believers.
You ask: how could they serve? Here’s how. The AUCECB participated in international religious events all over the world. For example, its first general secretary, Karev, traveled abroad 56 times, starting in the forties. What did he do in Western countries? After all, he traveled even in Stalin’s times, when even atheist Soviet citizens were not allowed abroad, when religious activity could send you to the Gulag for twenty-five years at a time! Karev wrote a book in which he compared Lenin to Christ and concluded that Lenin was superior.
The entire AUCECB leadership traveled abroad, since the leadership of the registered church was equated to the level of a Party functionary. What did they do in Western countries? They serviced the ideological machine of the godless authorities. In the West, the AUCECB blocked actions in our defense and discredited us in every possible way. (And not only that.)
The main thing: it identified those who sympathized with us and, conversely, those who sympathized with the communists, in order to work with both later depending on the circumstances and KGB instructions. For instance, they charmed the Assemblies of God so much that it closed its eyes and ears to the reality in the Empire of evil.
I will give just one example of the AUCECB’s destructive activity. In 1979, we, the unregistered Pentecostals, decided to send a letter to the Twelfth World Pentecostal Conference, opening in Canada under the chairmanship of Thomas Zimmermann, head of the Assemblies of God. In it we told about our persecution.
Six hundred Pentecostals found the courage to sign their names to the letter. Collecting signatures was an exceptionally difficult undertaking. It required secretly traveling across the entire Soviet Union, meeting in secret with believers who knew that by signing such a document they were putting themselves at mortal risk. We all understood: if Thomas Zimmerman, as the head of the Assemblies of God, and through him the Twelfth World Pentecostal Conference, did not support us, we would be doomed to the Gulag and our families to fresh suffering.
But an official AUCECB delegation arrived at the conference and declared that there was no persecution of Pentecostals in the USSR: “What persecution? We ourselves are Pentecostals, and here we are—we came to Canada! No one forbade us!” The Americans asked the AUCECB delegation: “How can that be? Don’t people in your country land in prison for their faith?”
The AUCECB people put forward this argument: “Yes, Pentecostals and Baptists are in prison in our country. But don’t your American believers also end up in prisons?” “Yes, they do—if they’ve committed a crime,” the Americans agreed.
“Well, that’s exactly how it is with us!” the AUCECB officials exclaimed triumphantly.
The Twelfth World Pentecostal Conference not only refused to consider our letter at the insistence of the Soviet pastor-Chekists, but also handed it over to them!
(Author’s note. The West displays the same insane naivety and astonishing gullibility toward the Chekists even in our own day! K.P.)
Of course, the letter immediately ended up in the KGB. Repression began. Thirty people whose signatures headed the list were thrown into prison; the others were also punished in various ways. Some were summoned to the KGB for “preventive talks,” others were fired from their jobs.
I was arrested at that time and later spent five years in a camp. I remember how the KGB investigator waved that letter in front of me, triumphantly shouting: “You see, your brothers abroad turned you in to us themselves! Nobody over there needs you!”
While we were in prison, the AUCECB hid us from the West behind a smokescreen. Such fine AUCECB fellows as Shatrov, Bychkov, Orlov, Karev, Bilas and others would travel abroad, deliver beautiful sermons, smile sweetly, lie selflessly about freedom of conscience in the USSR, and slander the prisoners and the churches! In this way they made our already bitter lot even harsher. Yet it was difficult to find a Protestant family in which no one had suffered.
And… people abroad believed them, because they wanted to believe—it was more convenient! And profitable too—they would be invited to the USSR, chauffeured around churches where Judases served as pastors. Everywhere there were banquets, attention, honors and… gifts, gifts! And when they came home they were heroes, again touring churches, this time their own: conferences, conventions, offerings, banquets. Then, as proof that there was freedom in the Union, the Assemblies of God would host the AUCECB people and those Pentecostals who had “autonomously registered” with the Soviet authorities. Then a reciprocal visit would follow… And so, in peace and harmony, they lived to see the death of the Evil Empire.
In November 1988 I was invited to speak at the Billy Graham Center before representatives of Pentecostal associations at a conference organized by the State Department. There I appealed to fellow believers to support and help sponsor the Pentecostal emigrants from the USSR who had gathered in Rome. Shortly afterwards, I was invited to the main office of the Assemblies of God, where after a brief conversation Joseph Flower, head of the international department of the Assemblies of God, told me: “We do not want to spoil our good relations with the AUCECB and the Soviet government over you! Therefore, as a fellowship, we refuse to support you. Look for support somewhere else—America is big!” I nearly fell off my chair. What place did God have here? This was politics and religious business. Who were we waiting for to support us while we were rotting and dying in concentration camps?
And yet our fate was still far from certain! August 1991 still lay ahead. It was not yet clear how the military coup organized by the GKChP might end! – noted Boris Perchatkin.
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