Paul Goble
Staunton,
December 26 – Since Stalin restored the Russian Orthodox Church during World
War II, it has been widely known and accepted both by most believers and nearly
all experts on that church that the KGB recruited members of the hierarchy and made
their elevation in the church possible in order to ensure ideological control
of the population.
That
unfortunate trend has even been the subject of a classic novel, Lavr
Divromlikov’s The Traitor in which
the security organs recruit a priest, murder his wife so that he can rise into
the hierarchy, and leave him at the end uncertain as to whether he is serving
God or state or himself.
Nonetheless,
every time information comes out confirming this sad reality of Soviet times,
it becomes a scandal, as has happened in recent days with the release of the
KGB files left in Latvia after the fall of Soviet power, with journalists and
commentators treating this as “a revelation” rather than simply a confirmation
of what has long been known.
One
of the reasons the information from Latvia has attracted so much attention is
that it concerns not church hierarchs who served church and state a generation
or more ago but rather men who are in senior positions in the structures of the
Moscow Patriarchate in Latvia now, something especially critical as the Orthodox
Church in Ukraine moves toward autocephaly.
But
this coverage has generally failed to note two important things: On the one
hand, secret police penetration of the Russian Orthodox Church did not end in
1991 and has become far more intense since Vladimir Putin came to power. And on
the other – and in a measure of the corruption of the state and church now – it
is as much or more about property than about belief.
That
has now been corrected in an important new article by church historian
Aleksandr Soldatov (graniru.org/opinion/m.274449.html). He points out
that Metropolitan Aleksandr, the current head in Latvia of the semi-autonomous
Latvian Church of the Moscow Patriarchate was recruited by the KGB in 1982 and
then had a dizzying career upwards.
That is a typical pattern, Soldatov
suggests, but he points to something often neglected: Secret police links with the
hierarchs didn’t end with the Soviet Union. Instead, they continued with the FSB,
which with Aleksandr and most others becoming less about ideology alone than
about control and disbursement of property and money.
Using commercial structures, the FSB
continued to work with the metropolitan and in fact was able to make the
Latvian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate into “a kind of oasis of the
Soviet Union” in which property passed from the church to others (kompromat.lv/item.php?docid=readn&id=9111).
As Soldatov notes, the FSB still
cares about controlling what the hierarchs think and preach, but it now
appears, especially in the Putin era, that its chief concern is gaining access
to the control and distribution of the enormous wealth of the church or using
it as a cover for financial machinations, a concern that further corrupts the
church.
After the Soviet Union collapsed,
several efforts were made to expose the KGB’s role in the ROC MP, but most were
stymied by official delays. Then, after 2000 when Putin assumed power, these
efforts were mostly stopped altogether with the heroization of the KGB and
other security agencies.
The religious specialist notes in
conclusion that “there is no clear answer as to whether the cooperation of the
hierarchy with the special services of an atheist state was justified. And that
is yet another piece of evidence that the Moscow Patriarchate is condemned to share
the fate of the Chekist regime when its historical time runs out.”
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