Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

In September 1990 Kryuchkov acknowledged in an “Order of the Chairman of the KGB” that there had been a serious decline in the effectiveness of active measures—and in the FCD’s faith in them:

There are very limited opportunities for residencies’ access to the mass media in the countries of the West, the progress of acquiring new operational sites is progressing slowly, and there is an absence of the necessary cooperation with the other sections of the Soviet KGB and other Soviet ministries and agencies.

Like other members of the KGB old guard, Kryuchkov refused to accept that the end of the Cold War implied any decline in the importance of active measures either in western Europe or elsewhere. 182That view still appears to be well-represented in the senior ranks of the SVR today.

Though paying lip-service to freedom of religion, the Soviet state was the first to attempt to eradicate the concept of God. Marx had famously denounced religion as “the opium of the people,” but also spoke with some compassion of its role as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world.” Lenin’s denunciation of religion, however, was uncompromisingly venomous:

Every religious idea, every idea of God, every flirting with the idea of God, is unutterable vileness,… vileness of the most dangerous kind, “contagion” of the most abominable kind. Millions of filthy deeds, acts of violence and physical contagions are far less dangerous than the subtle, spiritual idea of a God decked out in the smartest “ideological” costumes. 1

During the 1930s most priests were condemned to a gulag from which few returned. Most churches, with their religious symbols removed or defaced but their onion domes usually left more or less intact, were turned into barns, cinemas and garages, or given over to other secular purposes. After two decades of brutal persecution which had left only a few hundred churches open for worship, the Russian Orthodox Church was unexpectedly revived as a public institution by Stalin’s need for its support during the Great Patriotic War. In 1943, after a gap of seventeen years, the Moscow Patriarchate, the Church’s administrative center, was formally reestablished. 2During the remainder of the decade, Orthodox Christians reclaimed and lovingly restored several thousand of their churches. 3

The Church, however, paid a heavy price for its restoration. The Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church (later the Council for Religious Affairs) worked in close cooperation with the NKVD and its successors to ensure the subservience of Church to State. 4Both Patriarch Aleksi I and Metropolitan Nikolai of Krutitsky and Kolomna, second in the Orthodox hierarchy, joined the World Peace Council, the Soviet front organization founded in 1949, and were highly valued by the KGB as agents of influence. 5Aleksi declared in 1955:

The Russian Orthodox Church supports the totally peaceful foreign policy of our government, not because the Church allegedly lacks freedom, but because Soviet policy is just and corresponds to the Christian ideals which the Church preaches. 6

The Orthodox Church also took a prominent part in the founding of another front organization, the Christian Peace Conference (CPC), established in 1958 with its headquarters in Prague, in a further attempt to mobilize worldwide Christian support for the “peace policies” of the Soviet Union. At the second conference of the CPC in 1960 delegates from the rest of the world, mostly innocent of its orchestration by Moscow, outnumbered those from the Soviet Bloc. 7

In 1961, with the KGB’s blessing, the Orthodox Church joined the World Council of Churches (WCC). At that very moment Khrushchev was in the midst of a ferocious anti-religious campaign which closed down many of the reopened churches, monasteries and seminaries and disbanded half the Orthodox parishes. The KGB was simultaneously seeking to strengthen its grip on the churches which remained. According to a secret KGB directive of 1961:

Up to 600 individuals are studying in the two ecclesiastical academies of the Moscow Patriarchate and the five ecclesiastical seminaries. These must be exploited in the interests of the KGB. We must infiltrate our people among the students of these ecclesiastical training establishments so that they will subsequently influence the state of affairs within the Russian Orthodox Church and exert influence on the believers. 8

The head of the Second Chief Directorate, General Oleg Mikhailovich Gribanov, reported in 1962 that over the previous two years the KGB had infiltrated “reliable agents” into the leading positions of the Moscow Patriarchate, the Catholic dioceses, the Armenian Gregorian Church and other religious groups. These, he predicted, would make it possible to remove remaining “reactionary Church and sectarian authorities” from their posts. 9

Since the Russian Orthodox delegates to the WCC were carefully selected by the KGB and the Council for Religious Affairs, it is scarcely surprising that they denied—often indignantly—all reports of the persecution of their Church by the Soviet state. According to a KGB report of August 1969:

Agents ALTAR, SVYATOSLAV, ADAMANT, MAGISTER, ROSHCHIN and ZEMNOGORSKY went to England to take part in the work of the WCC central committee. Agents managed to avert hostile activities [public criticism of Soviet religious persecution]… 10

The most important of the agents at the WCC central committee meeting in Canterbury was the leader of the Russian Orthodox delegation, Metropolitan Nikodim (agent ADAMANT), 11whose meteoric rise through the Church hierarchy was in itself unmistakable evidence of KGB approval. In 1960, at the age of only thirty-one, Nikodim had become the youngest bishop in Christendom. A year later he was put in charge of the Moscow Patriarchate’s foreign relations department, and in 1964 was appointed Metropolitan of Leningrad. Nikodim took the lead in ensuring that there was no reference in the WCC central committee’s message to member churches either to the invasion of Czechoslovakia or to religious persecution in the Soviet Bloc. According to a report in the Church Times:

Agreement on the text of the message was not without drama… The main critic on the Thursday [August 21] when the fifth draft came up for discussion was the Metropolitan of Leningrad, Archbishop Ni[k]odim.

…The Russian leader then dropped a bombshell[:] “…If certain amendments are not taken into account which are essential to us, we shall have to reject this letter in holy synod and not send it to our Churches. I am sorry to speak in such sharp terms.”

…On Friday morning [after redrafting] there was more sweetness and light, and with the Russian leader obviously mollified, the final draft went through rapidly.

The main initiative agreed by the WCC central committee was a call to member churches to become “as fully engaged as possible in the struggle to eradicate racism in whatever form it appears.” 12While welcoming the campaign against racism, the Church Times deplored the failure of the WCC to address “grave breaches of human rights” or to offer help to the oppressed: “Czechoslovakia springs to mind as an obvious instance.” 13

The KGB reported that, at the Canterbury conference, its agents had also succeeded “in placing agent KUZNETSOV in a high WCC post.” Agent KUZNETSOV was Alexei Sergeyevich Buyevsky, lay secretary of the Moscow Patriarchate’s foreign relations department headed by Nikodim. Since joining the department in 1946, Buyevsky had accompanied all the major Russian Orthodox delegations abroad and had met the most important visitors from foreign churches to Moscow. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he played an active role in the work of the WCC central committee, helping to draft policy statements on international affairs. 14