Konstantin Preobrazhensky. Chekist Pastors

January 25, 2014 · 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

Putin changed Russia’s intelligence concept. Now its intelligence service places the main emphasis in recruitment work not on left-wing, pro-communist Western intellectuals, as before, but on Russian emigrants. The Kremlin subordinates the entire Slavic emigration from the former USSR, turning it into an instrument of pressure on the West, much as foreign communists were in Soviet times.

For this purpose, Putin created a new unit in the Foreign Intelligence Service—the “EM” (emigration) directorate. It incorporated the 4th Department of the “K” directorate (foreign counterintelligence), which had been working against hostile Russian emigration, and the 19th Department of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (political intelligence), which had worked on friendly emigration…

Yes, such a unit exists in the KGB! Wake up, members of the numerous emigrant friendship societies with Russia! The Chekists are working among you just as cynically and brazenly as among your ideological opponents who criticize the Putin regime. Ardent love for the motherland does not save you from recruitment by the KGB, which promises you a host of dangers!

The main directions of Russian intelligence activity, according to old Chekist tradition, are called “lines.” Now a new line has appeared—the “EM” line—alongside “PR” (political intelligence), “X” (scientific-technical), “N” (illegal), and “KR” (foreign counterintelligence). This means that every SVR resident in every Russian embassy now has a new deputy overseeing the “EM” line, under whom there is a group of intelligence officers working exclusively with emigrants from the USSR.

In May 2007, the KGB successfully completed a grandiose operation that had been ongoing for 70 years: a part of the Russian Church Abroad was absorbed by the Moscow Patriarchate, seized by Putin’s KGB empire. A powerful intelligence bridgehead has now been established in the United States and other Western countries. Putin knows very well that counterintelligence in the US is not allowed to target clergy, and he cynically exploits American religious freedom and people’s faith for espionage against the West.

I wrote about this in my book “KGB in Russian Emigration,” published in 2007 by the New York-based Liberty Publishing House, which caused quite a stir. While working on it, I was surprised to learn that the Protestant emigration in the US is even more thoroughly saturated with agents than the Orthodox, but for some reason no one knows about this.

Some Protestant pastors here directly tell their flocks: they say, the KGB only operates among the Orthodox, and we have nothing of the sort. But why? Could it be that the KGB, which was eradicating religion, made a pleasant exception for Protestants?

“What a pity that our commission was unable to see the secret KGB documents about its work among them!” lamented Father Gleb Yakunin.

In 1992, he (Father Gleb Yakunin—ed.) became a member of the Commission of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation to Investigate the Causes and Circumstances of the GKChP (the August 1991 coup attempt). This helped him gain access to the secret documents of the 4th Department of the 5th Directorate of the KGB, which dealt with the Orthodox Church. Its materials from 1917 to 1988 were studied, after which Patriarch Alexy II sounded the alarm and began demanding that Yeltsin shut down the dangerous commission. To the credit of the first president of the Russian Federation, it must be said that he did not heed the demands of agent “Drozdov” (Alexy II) and cited the intransigence of the “radical democrats” in his entourage.

Then Alexy II rushed to Ruslan Khasbulatov, who headed the Supreme Soviet, and he heeded the patriarch’s requests and shut down the commission.

“We only managed to learn about one agent from among the Baptists, a certain Orlov, who collaborated simultaneously with both the KGB and the GRU, military intelligence,” Father Gleb said with a grin. The Protestants were the responsibility of another department within the 5th Directorate of the KGB, but they all operated in the same way because they were subordinate to one man, General Filipp Bobkov. For example, a common practice was the infiltration of all religious organizations not only with agents but also with KGB officers. After all, an agent is a civilian who, willingly or unwillingly, sells out his comrades to the KGB, and he is not fully trusted. Therefore, an agent must be constantly checked.

But a KGB officer has already passed all checks, he is one hundred percent reliable, and most importantly, he is interested in the success of his career.

Of course, the most officer-priests were assigned to the Moscow Patriarchate. There, being completely alien to religious life, they constantly found themselves in various absurd situations, which they later cheerfully recounted to their friends at intelligence headquarters. Among them was I, who used these stories in my books.

Muslims were no exception. In the early 1980s, two intelligence officers from Uzbekistan made a pilgrimage to Mecca, where no one recognized them. For this, Brezhnev later kissed them both.

But not every KGB officer’s infiltration into a hostile religious environment ended so festively. In the mid-1970s, an officer from one of the provincial city KGB departments managed to penetrate a sect of the Skoptsy (self-castrates). He had begun to gain their trust, and during one conversation they suggested he sit on a little bench. The Chekist gratefully did so, preparing for a cunning conversation, but the bench snapped in two, knives flashed, and in the blink of an eye the intelligence officer himself became a castrate. They say that afterward he pulled out his pistol and started shooting back, but as if that would help!

He no longer had the right to remain in military service and had to be discharged as a disabled person. A believer would see in this the just punishment of the Lord. Chekists across the country told each other this story, laughing.

“But why is the KGB fighting the Skoptsy? Do they harm the state security interests of our motherland?” an unsophisticated reader might ask.

Alas, for the Chekists these interests are by no means the main thing. They protect them halfheartedly, reluctantly, and ineptly. The KGB acts only in its own narrow departmental interests, caring about its own prestige, influence, and wealth. To this end, the Chekists shamelessly employ their special powers and rights, granted to them for ensuring the security of citizens. The KGB is largely a parasitic and unnecessary organization leading Russia into a dead end.

It is logical to assume that KGB officers are also among Protestant pastors. There they run their agents, maintaining contact with Moscow.

When I studied at the Minsk KGB school in the second half of the eighties, instructors told us about an unusual problem faced by the party committees of many plants and factories. Their best workers, as a rule, turned out to be Baptists or other Protestants. But they cannot be awarded the title of “Shock Worker of Communist Labor”! So the party committees rack their brains and turn to the KGB for advice.

They also said that Protestants are hard to recruit on a material basis, that is, they do not take the money the KGB offers them. And they are not afraid to say:

— I have no need for money. I have enough for my daily bread, and that’s fine!..

But on the whole, little is known about this work. Probably because Protestants were on the fringes of Soviet life, mostly living in the provinces.

And even less is known about the methods of Putin’s intelligence among Protestant emigrants in America. I found no publications on this subject, and therefore I turned to the well-known Protestant human rights activist Boris Perchatkin, who emigrated to the United States. He is the author of two books and is writing a third: “The Secret Disciples”, drawing on his many years of experience and observation. Excerpts from his book will be provided below, in the answers.

He is familiar with the KGB’s methods of working among Protestants not from hearsay: in the USSR he spent five years in prison, and was twice tried for his faith and human rights work. His wife, Zinaida, was also tried twice. Even Boris Perchatkin’s mother was tried three times—in 1954, 1983, and even in 1985, when she was already 58 years old, but her age did not stop the KGB from sentencing her to two years of ordinary regime.

Boris Perchatkin’s account contained so many facts new to me that I present it in full, only inserting my own comments here and there as a professional intelligence officer. I began the interview with a question.

Konstantin Preobrazhensky: In 2006, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution calling on the Russian Federation to ensure religious freedoms for all citizens without exception (Resolution on Religious Freedom in Russia No. 190), thereby stating that there is no religious freedom in Russia. Did you notice any activity by Putin’s agents before the adoption of this resolution, any attempts to oppose it?

Boris Perchatkin: Of course I did! Here is a clear example of such opposition. When the resolution was being discussed in the congressional committees, it needed support. It was assumed that religious emigrants from the Russian Federation would send letters to their congressmen urging them to vote for it. “After all, they fled from something and are now receiving refugee status!” This practice is widespread in America. So the Congressional staff drafted a sample text of such a letter, and I faxed it to many churches. All that remained was for people to sign and send it to their congressman and senator. So what happened? Not a single such letter was sent! I was informed of this from Congress. Not one out of thousands! Then I turned to the Jewish human rights organization “Union of Councils for Soviet Jews.” They sent the letter to their recipients, and Jews supported us, as had happened before, in Soviet times.

This means that the Chekist pastors threw the letter from Congress into the trash can, so as not to cause moral damage to Putin’s Russia. Yet for any presbyter and believer it would have been so natural to sign such a letter: many of them were also persecuted at home!

It should be noted that the majority of this flock are not from Russia, but emigrants from Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova. For them, Russia is now a foreign country. But the impression is created as if their pastors are directed from Moscow, from Lubyanka. (Author’s note. Indeed, valuable agents from the national republics were subordinated to the KGB central apparatus. Of course, duplicates of the agents’ personal files were also kept in the local KGB offices, but shortly before the August 1991 coup many of them were managed to be transferred to Moscow or destroyed. After Putin put the main emphasis in intelligence against the West on emigrants from the former USSR, work with these agents in the USA was intensified. K. Preobrazhensky)

By blocking the signing of letters in support of the Congressional resolution in 2006, the Chekist pastors passed a successful test of their reliability before Putin. And the Slavic diaspora received another “minus” in the eyes of the American government. Yes, the resolution was adopted under the pressure of irrefutable facts and with the support of the Jewish community, but the masses of believers did not support it. Afterward, the Chekist pastors did their best to hide the truth about this resolution from them.

The KGB uses its agents among Protestants to infiltrate Western countries on a much larger scale than among the Orthodox. After all, the West is largely Protestant,“ continued Boris Perchatkin. “But while the intelligence work of the Moscow Patriarchate is now widely known, the KGB’s work through Protestants remains a secret to this day. Here are a few examples of a stunning KGB operation.

We Pentecostals, participating in the dissident movement, willingly or unwillingly became participants in the ideological war against the USSR on the side of the West. Because, by striving for freedom and emigration on religious grounds, we showed the whole world that there is no freedom in the USSR. They sent us to the Gulag but did not give us freedom of faith and did not allow emigration, because by releasing us, the Soviet authorities would have thereby admitted that their advertised freedom was a lie, for no one flees from freedom. We helped the West “undress” the USSR, and we won the war against the Evil Empire on our own 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 admitting that there is no freedom in the USSR. That was a victory for us and the West. And together with emigration came relative freedom. But here we all relaxed and, in emigration, fell into a trap set by the KGB. The fate of emigration began to unfold according to a scenario that can be called: “The Secret Disciples.”

This scenario was ingeniously simple and wickedly cunning. Living in the USSR, we never knew the number of people in the underground, persecuted churches – neither the Pentecostals nor the Baptists. (It has now become known that there were about three hundred thousand of them.) But the KGB knew this well, since all unregistered churches were on their books, and each one had an informer.

By 1980, we had transmitted to the West ten thousand names of Pentecostals and Baptists who had openly declared their intention to leave the USSR on religious grounds. (These lists are still kept in the U.S. Congress.) And we also knew of twenty thousand sympathizers. That is ten percent of all religious underground anti-Soviet activists. But as a result of repression against us by the authorities (from 1979 to 1986, 1,688 Pentecostals were convicted and over 200 Baptists) and by the church leadership (hundreds were excommunicated on the orders of Viktor Belykh), this number shrank by at least a third by 1988, and in some regions by half. Since the doors opened, right up to the present day, up to four hundred thousand Protestants have ended up in the United States under refugee status. Where did such a number of the persecuted come from?

Here’s where and why. Those churches that decided to take the easy path and registered with the Soviet authorities (i.e., agreed to be run by the KGB and comply with the godless law on cults) outnumbered us nearly two to one. The KGB calculated the approximate scale of our exodus and understood that those whom the Chekists discriminated against and persecuted, and then released for emigration, would consolidate upon arrival in the USA. (They would not let us do this in the USSR.) Knowing the mentality of our compatriots, the Chekists were well aware that, with such human and financial resources, we would organize a spiritual Protestant expansion into the territory of the USSR, and also powerful human-rights advocacy on the territory of our former homeland. We would reconstruct our history. We would prove the facts of genocide against us. We would do what has not been done so far: haul the KGB, its successor the FSB, and their godfather – the Communist Party – before an international court, as a lesson to others. That could only haunt them in a nightmare. Yes, a community of people with a purpose can do a great deal!

When we were breaking through the Iron Curtain, we had no idea of the potential scale of emigration. But the Communists knew, and what were they thinking when they let us go? Exactly – to let us out, but to bring us under control, so that people like me would not find life easy, to neutralize and corrupt the emigration, to lead it into a spiritual dead end, to paralyze any positive activity and human-rights work, and so on and so forth. But how to bring it under control?

Exactly! To “mount” it, to head up the emigration. The KGB had prepared in advance for a mass infiltration of agents into America, in order to head up and take control of the Protestant refugees.

Presbyter Vasily told me that in 1987, when he was still living in Ukraine, he was summoned to the KGB and offered the chance to emigrate to the USA.

“How would I go?” he asked. “And why are you offering me this? You never offer anything for nothing.”

“Of course we don’t offer anything for nothing,” the Chekists agreed, “but you know that Christ had secret disciples?”

“I do!” Presbyter Vasily agreed.

“So you’ll be our secret disciple!” the Chekists laughed.

“And what would this secret disciple have to do for you?”

“Soon many of your fellow believers will go to America! And you are young, promising, we like you, people will follow you. You’ll start a church in America. When the work gets going, establish a brotherhood. If necessary, we’ll help you!” the KGB officers explained.

“And what’s all this called – what you’ve just proposed?” presbyter Vasily clarified.

“We are offering you to start a church, is that a bad thing?” the Chekists frowned. “And besides, just imagine: you’ll gather around yourself about five hundred people, and each will throw a hundred dollars a month into your wallet – isn’t that bad? In America, being a pastor is honorable, lucrative, and you don’t break a sweat…”

This shows that for work in the USA, alongside the existing agent network, they were recruiting and training fresh – untainted – secret disciples of the KGB. Presbyter Vasily refused to become a KGB secret disciple, and his exit from the country was blocked until the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

From the moment religious emigration began, KGB “secret disciples” started seeping into America. The first thing they did was an energetic, I would say aggressive, seizure of leadership roles in churches and church organizations under their control. I knew many of them from their past Chekist “exploits” and was stunned by their audacity. 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 divide Protestants into those who collaborated with the Soviet regime, 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 were in opposition to Soviet power. After all, we could not have imagined that Soviet-patriotic Protestants, accomplices in our persecution, would burst into the USA and pass themselves off as sufferers (!!!). The KGB immediately exploited this blunder. As soon as we broached the Iron Curtain, pastor-Chekists began encouraging their members to emigrate, and then, smoothly dissolving among their reliable rank-and-file duped comrades, quickly filled the emigration quota. The goal was subsequently to open Slavic churches in the USA based on loyal people and to bring the genuine refugees arriving in the USA under control.

On the other hand, in the unregistered churches (for which we had been seeking exit permits), many pastors and some bishops (names removed, and others) and simply agent elements (like … ) began actively impeding those who were truly persecuted and obstructing their departure.

You may ask, how is that possible? Here are a few examples.

In the autumn of 1989 in Volgograd, the presiding bishop Viktor Ivanovich 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 their citizenship, concluding that emigration was from Satan. And people believed, reasoning like this: “This isn’t Soviet propaganda; it’s Bishop Belykh talking!”

At the same time, Nikolai Tachinsky was traveling around churches in the North Caucasus, preaching that emigration was a sin, and he called V. in for reinforcement: to fight the spirit of emigration. Yet his own documents were being processed at the American embassy. When hostilities broke out in the Caucasus, he abandoned the people he had deceived and fled. And now Nikolai Tochinsky heads an independent brotherhood in the USA!? Slick, isn’t it. The leader of the so-called “Slavic Federation,” Adam Bondaruk, betrayed the brotherhood at the height of persecution and went into registration, began persecuting those who were striving for religious freedom and emigration. Adam Bondaruk proclaimed that there was complete freedom in the USSR and that it should be taken advantage of. But unexpectedly, at the beginning of 1988, to everyone’s astonishment, he started encouraging his flock to emigrate. But why emigrate if there is already complete freedom in the USSR?! And after his entire flock had moved to the USA and built a base there for him, Adam Bondaruk himself showed up in America as a refugee and started leading the very people he had once persecuted..

Another “refugee” arrived in America: the so-called Bishop Nikolai Kotyakov. (You should see this “bishop”!) Prior to 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 a “fiend of hell” and a “whore of Babylon.” “He who resists the Soviet government resists God!” threatened Kotyakov. In the year 2000, not yet knowing who Kotyakov was, I reproached him for ordaining a cop, Slavik Radchuk. I was shocked by his reaction.

“Don’t touch (name)!” he ordered me. “And if you speak to anyone else about this or even confirm someone else’s testimony that he worked for the KGB, we’ll smear you against the wall! You can’t prove it—the train has left, and nobody here needs that. Got it? One call to Pyotr Saenko (a bishop from Tacoma ordained by the faggot bishop Nikolai Kotyakov), and you’re ‘finished’! Dig that, you damn dissident?!”

Acting in this way synchronously with the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (VSEKhB) and under the KGB’s direction, they gave the chekist pastors the chance to snatch the initiative from us, who suspected nothing, and to bring the Protestant Slavic immigration under control. And then those very ones who had obstructed immigration and spread anti-American propaganda also ended up in America as refugees. (Now it’s obvious that this was a carefully planned and executed operation.) It’s not hard to guess who orchestrated it: the same people who, in 1943, at Stalin’s behest and under Beria’s leadership, created the Moscow Patriarchate, and in 1944, the VSEKhB, and put both religious organizations at the service of the godless regime. And they served it, obsequiously shuffling their feet: “What more can we do for you, sir-ree?” Directly or indirectly, they helped send more than a few thousand believers to the GULAG.

You may ask: how could they serve? Here’s how. The VSEKhB took part 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 had been traveling abroad since Stalin’s time, when even atheist Soviet citizens were not let out of the country, when religious activity could get you sent to the GULAG sometimes for twenty-five years! Karev wrote a book in which he compared Lenin to Christ and concluded that Lenin was superior.

All the leaders of the VSEKhB were allowed to travel abroad, since the leadership of a registered church was treated as being on the level of a party functionary. So what did they do in Western countries?

They serviced the ideological machine of the godless regime. In the West, the VSEKhB blocked actions in our defense and discredited us in every possible way. (And not only that.) Most importantly, it identified those sympathizing with us and, conversely, those sympathizing with the communists, so that they could then work with both, depending on circumstances and KGB instructions. For example, they charmed the “Assemblies of God” to such an extent that it closed its eyes and ears to the reality of the Evil Empire.

I will give just one example of the VSEKhB’s destructive activity.

In 1979, we, the unregistered Pentecostals, decided to address a letter to the Twelfth World Pentecostal Conference, which was opening in Canada under the chairmanship of Thomas Zimmermann, the leader of the Assemblies of God. In it we described our persecution.

Six hundred Pentecostals found the courage to sign the letter. Collecting the signatures was an exceedingly difficult task. It required traveling secretly across the entire Soviet Union, secretly meeting with believers who were aware that they were exposing themselves to mortal danger by signing such a document. We all understood: if Thomas Zimmermann, as the leader of the Assemblies of God—and in his person the Twelfth World Pentecostal Conference—did not support us, we would be doomed to the GULAG, and our families to new sufferings.

But an official delegation from the VSEKhB arrived at the conference and declared that there was no persecution of Pentecostals in the USSR: “What persecution? We, too, are Pentecostals, and here we are—we’ve come to Canada! Nobody forbade us!”

The VSEKhB delegation was asked by Americans: “But what about the people in your country who are imprisoned for their faith?”

The VSEKhB-ites put forward this argument: “Yes, Pentecostals are sitting in prison, Baptists are sitting in prison. But your American believers also end up in jails.”

“Yes, they sit in prison, if they have committed a crime,” the Americans agreed.

“Well, that’s exactly the same with us!” the VSEKhB-ites triumphantly exclaimed.

Not only did the Twelfth International Pentecostal Conference refuse to consider our letter at the insistence of the Soviet chekist pastors—they handed it over to them!

(Author’s note. Such insane naivety and astonishing gullibility toward the chekists is displayed by the West even today! K.P.)

Of course, the letter immediately ended up in the KGB. Repressions began. Thirty people whose signatures were at the top of the list were thrown into prison; others were also retaliated against in various ways. Some were summoned to the KGB for a ‘preventive talk,’ others were fired from their jobs.

I was arrested then and later spent five years in a camp. I remember how a KGB investigator brandished that letter in front of me, triumphantly exclaiming, «See, your brothers abroad have handed you over themselves! Nobody over there needs you!»

And while we were sitting in prison, the AUCECB covered us up from the West with a smoke screen. Such good AUCECB guys as Sh., Bilas, O., K., B., and others, and others — they traveled abroad, delivered beautiful sermons, smiled sweetly, selflessly lied about freedom of conscience in the USSR, and slandered the prisoners and the churches! By doing so, they aggravated our heavy lot. And yet it was hard to find a Protestant family in which no one had suffered.

And… abroad they were believed, because people wanted to believe—it was more convenient! And profitable—you’d get invited to the USSR, taken around to churches where Judases serve as pastors. Everywhere—feasts, attention, honor, and… gifts, gifts! And when they came home—they were heroes, again around the churches, but their own this time: conferences, congresses, donations, feasts. Then the ‘Assembly,’ as proof that there was freedom in the Union, would host the AUCECB members and those Pentecostals who had ‘autonomously registered’ with the Soviet authorities. Then a reciprocal move would follow… So, in peace and harmony, they lived until the demise of the Empire of Evil.

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 called on fellow believers to provide support and help sponsor the Pentecostal emigrants from the USSR who had gathered in Rome. Soon after that, I was invited to the headquarters of the Assemblies of God, where after a short conversation, Joseph Flower, head of the international department of the Assemblies of God, told me: «We do not want to spoil good relations with the AUCECB and the Soviet government because of you! Therefore, as an association, we refuse to support you. Look for support elsewhere—America is a big country!» I nearly fell off my chair. What God is here! This is politics and religious business. From whom did we expect support while we were languishing and dying in concentration camps?

And yet our fate was still very much uncertain! Ahead lay August 1991. It was still unknown how the military coup, organized by the State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP), might end! — remarked Boris Perchatkin.

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