Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

By 1980—to the consternation of the KGB—eleven volumes of documents totaling 1,189 pages of Russian text, obtained by the Christian Committee, had been published in the West. 47

The KGB eventually demolished the Christian Committee by its traditional techniques of destabilization, agent penetration and persecution. The Fifth Directorate concluded that the most vulnerable of the committee’s founders was Hierodeacon Varsanofy. With the assistance of GALKIN (an unidentified agent in the Orthodox Church), Varsanofy was assigned early in 1978 to a church in Vladimir region whose incumbent, VOLZHSKY, was a long-standing KGB agent. Finding it difficult to stay in touch with Yakunin and Kapitanchuk, Varsanofy resigned from the Christian Committee. According to Varsanofy’s file, VOLZHSKY introduced him to a sympathetic psychiatrist (also a KGB agent, codenamed BULKIN), who persuaded him that he was suffering from a nervous illness and should give up membership of the Christian Committee in order to reduce the stress he was under and prevent his illness from getting worse. The KGB claimed the credit for inducing Varsonofy “to abandon political activity and concentrate on research work in the field of theology, using materials from the Oblast archives.” While he was working in the archives, another KGB agent, codenamed SPIRANSKY, succeeded in winning his confidence and allegedly “deflected Varsanofy from his obsession of becoming the spokesman of believers in the Soviet Union”:

Finally he was persuaded to send a letter to Patriarch Pimen of All Russia and to senior personalities in the Russian Orthodox Church apologizing for the hurt that he had caused. 48

On September 28, 1978 the Centre secretly promulgated KGB order No. 00122 on “Measures to Strengthen Agent Operational Work in the Struggle with the Subversive Activity of Foreign Clerical Centres and Hostile Elements among Church People and Sectarians”: a lengthy document which reflected both the KGB’s addiction to conspiracy theory and its obsession with “ideological subversion” of all kinds. It also paid unwitting, if irritated, tribute to the courage of the persecuted believers and the vitality of their faith. Mitrokhin’s notes on order No. 00122 include the following:

Under the pretense of concern for the freedom of belief and the rights of believers in the USSR, imperialist intelligence services and foreign anti-Soviet centers were organizing ideological sabotage, aimed at undermining the moral and political unity of Soviet society and undermining the basis of the Socialist system; they sought to discredit the Soviet state and social order, incite religious organizations towards confrontations with the state and stimulate the emergence of an anti-Soviet underground among sectarians. With encouragement from abroad, hostile elements had launched active organizational and provocational activity aimed at forming illegal groups and organizations within the sectarian milieu, setting up printing presses and establishing contacts with foreign clerical centers.

Following the directives of the May 1975 conference of leading officials of KGB agencies [dealing with religious affairs], it had been possible to carry out measures to strengthen operational positions in international religious organizations, to expose and compromise their leaders, officials and emissaries of clerical centers. Experienced and reliable agents had been infiltrated into the leading circles of some sectarian formations and measures to identify, prevent and terminate the subversive activity of hostile elements among the clerical anti-Soviet underground had become more effective, the further strengthening of the positions of progressive religious figures had been ensured, as well as their active participation in the struggle for peace and other political measures.

Operational work, however, still did not meet present requirements of the present time. The operational situation in a number of sectors of KGB agency work remained tense. The work of disrupting and detaching believers, especially among young people, from the influence of hostile elements was being carried out feebly. Agent positions in the leading ranks of the dissident Baptists, the Catholic and Uniate priesthood, the Pentecostalists, the Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and among the irregular Moslem clerics, were weak.

The USSR KGB Collegium decided as follows:

1. To raise the level of agent operational work designed to struggle against the subversive activity conducted under the cover of religion by imperialist intelligence services, clerical centers abroad and hostile elements within the country. The basic task was to identify in good time, prevent and put an end to the subversive designs of the adversary to stimulate anti-Soviet activity in the sectarian environment, creating religious formations hostile to the Socialist system and drawing believers into their sphere of influence.

2. The FCD, the SCD and the Fifth Directorate of the KGB were to identify the foreign anti-Soviet clerical organizations which, evidence showed, were being used by the adversary’s special services and were to submit proposals for identifying and cutting off subversive channels, identifying and intercepting communication channels with hostile elements in the sectarian milieu…

3. The Fifth Directorate and the local KGB agencies were to take steps to put an end to hostile activity designed to undermine loyalty to the Soviet state and the social order by the largest religious organization in the USSR, namely the Orthodox Church; they were to prevent the penetration of individuals with hostile attitudes in the leading ranks of the Church; in 1978-80, they were to take steps to strengthen the operational positions [i.e. the number and quality of agents] within the structure of the Orthodox Church (in Metropolitan provinces, Eparchies, parishes, monasteries and educational establishments), and to compromise and remove reactionary and anti-Soviet elements… 49

The Christian Committee for the Defence of Believers’ Rights sought to protect itself against KGB penetration in part by remaining small, never having more than four members at any one time. 50In May 1979, however, it was joined by Father Vasili Fonchenkov, unaware that nine years earlier he had been recruited by the Fifth Directorate as agent DRUG (“Friend”). According to his file, “He was involved in the cultivation of specific individuals [in the Orthodox Church], carried out his assignments conscientiously and showed initiative.” Since 1972 Fonchenkov had been a lecturer at the Zagorsk theological academy as well as holding a position in the foreign relations department of the Moscow Patriarchate. In 1976-7 he had been the incumbent of the church of St. Sergi in East Berlin and editor of Stimme der Orthodoxie ( Voice of Orthodoxy ), the journal of the Patriarchate’s central European exarchate. 51His contacts with foreign churches may well have helped to recommend agent DRUG to his unwitting colleagues on the Christian Committee.

The KGB campaign against public dissent in the Orthodox Church reached its peak in 1979-80, with a wave of arrests of leading dissidents—chief among them Father Gleb Yakunin—who were later imprisoned or persuaded to recant. Probably to protect his cover, Fonchenkov was summoned for interrogation by the KGB and issued a statement saying that he was threatened with arrest, but was never charged. 52During a visit to West Germany in March 1980 Archbishop Pitirim of Volokolamsk (agent ABBAT) 53bizarrely declared that there had been “no wave of arrests.” 54The first major success of the KGB campaign was to persuade the charismatic Moscow priest Father Dmitri Dudko, whose offenses included calling for the canonization of Orthodox martyrs of the Soviet era, to make a public recantation on Soviet television in June 1980. Dudko’s resistance had been broken by a particularly skillful KGB interrogator, Vladimir Sergeyevich Sorokin, whom he had come to regard as “my own brother.” He said later that he had hoped that parts of his confession, such as his condemnation of “the sabre-rattling of the Carter administration,” would be recognized as words placed in his mouth by the KGB. His reputation, however, never fully recovered. 55