Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

DURING THE LATER 1980s the Moscow Patriarchate seemed to be trying neither to fall behind nor to overtake the speed at which the official programs of glasnost and perestroika were developing. In 1991, a year after succeeding Pimen as Patriarch, Aleksi II, finally dissociated himself and the Russian Orthodox Church from the “declaration of loyalty” to the Soviet system issued by Metropolitan Sergi in 1927. When an interviewer reminded him that, a quarter of a century earlier, the Council for Religious Affairs had classed him as one of those bishops most loyal to the state, the Patriarch asked for forgiveness and understanding of his attitude at the time. As the Soviet Union began to disintegrate in the final months of 1991, Aleksi II declared that “Russia has suffered a severe illness in the form of Communism.” 108

The Russian Orthodox Church, however, continued to be haunted by its past history of KGB penetration. After the failure of the August coup in 1991, the Russian government’s Committee on Freedom of Conscience, which included Father Gleb Yakunin, was given access to a section of the KGB archives which showed that some members of the Orthodox hierarchy had been KGB agents. After Yakunin published a selection of the documents, the archives were closed once more; he was accused of having betrayed state secrets to the United States and threatened with a private prosecution. 109Father Gleb remained defiant. He wrote to the Patriarch in January 1994:

If the Church is not cleansed of the taint of the spy and informer, it cannot be reborn. Unfortunately, only one archbishop—Archbishop Khrizostom of Lithuania—has had the courage publicly to acknowledge that in the past he worked as an agent, and has revealed his codename: RESTAVRATOR. No other Church hierarch has followed his example, however.

The most prominent agents of the past include DROZDOV—the only one of the churchmen to be officially honored with an award by the KGB of the USSR, in 1988, for oustanding intelligence services—ADAMANT, OSTROVSKY, MIKHAILOV, TOPAZ and ABBAT. It is obvious that none of these or the less exalted agents are preparing to repent. On the contrary, they deliver themselves of pastoral maxims on the allegedly neutral character of informing on the Church, and articles have appeared in the Church press justifying the role of the informer as essential for the survival of the Church in an anti-religious state.

The codenames I discovered in the archives of the KGB belong to the top hierarchs of the Moscow Patriarchate. 110

The letter to Aleksi II was unprecedented in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church—for, as the Patriarch must surely have been aware, DROZDOV, the most important of the KGB agents discovered by Father Gleb in the KGB archives, was in fact himself.

For forty years all challenges to the Communist one-party states established in eastern Europe in the wake of the Second World War were successfully contained. Opponents of the regimes usually felt too powerless to organize any visible opposition to them. On the rare occasions when the survival of the one-party state seemed in question—in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968—it was swiftly and brutally shored up with an overwhelming show of force. The Polish challenge to the Soviet system, however, eventually succeeded where the Hungarian Uprising and the Prague Spring failed. Though contained for a decade, it was never mastered and eventually began the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc.

The Polish crisis began in a wholly novel and unforeseen way—not, as in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, with the emergence of revisionist governments, but with the election of October 16, 1978 of Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, Archbishop of Kraków, as Pope John Paul II. No Soviet leader was tempted any longer to repeat Stalin’s scornful question at the end of the Second World War, “How many divisions has the Pope?” The undermining of the empire built by Stalin after Yalta was begun not by the military might of the West but by the moral authority of the first Polish Pope, which rapidly eclipsed that of the PUWP (the Polish Communist Party).

Boris Aristov, the Soviet ambassador in Warsaw, reported to the Politburo that the Polish authorities regarded the new Pope as “a virulent anti-Communist.” 1The Centre agreed. Since 1971 Wojtyła had been the target of PROGRESS operations designed to monitor his allegedly subversive role in undermining the authority of the Polish one-party state. 2The day after Wojtyła’s election, the head of the KGB mission in Warsaw, Vadim Pavlov, sent Moscow an assessment of him by the SB, the KGB’s Polish equivalent:

Wojtyła holds extreme anti-Communist views. Without openly opposing the Socialist system, he has criticized the way in which the state agencies of the Polish People’s Republic have functioned, making the following accusations:

• that the basic human rights of Polish citizens are restricted;

• that there is unacceptable exploitation of the workers, whom “the Catholic Church must protect against the workers’ government”;

• that the activities of the Catholic Church are restricted and Catholics treated as second-class citizens;

• that an extensive campaign is being conducted to convert society to atheism and impose an alien ideology on the people;

• that the Catholic Church is denied its proper cultural role, thereby depriving Polish culture of its national treasures.

In Wojtyła’s view, the concept of the one-party state “meant depriving the people of its sovereignty.” “Collectivization,” he believed, “led to the destruction of the individual and of his personality.” The fact that he dared to say what most Polish Catholics thought seemed to both the KGB and the SB evidence of his commitment to ideological subversion.

The SB report forwarded to the Centre reveals that as early as 1973-4 the Polish Procurator-general had considered prosecuting Wojtyła for his sermons. Three of his homilies—in Warsaw on May 5, 1973, in the Kraków steelmaking suburb of Nowa Huta on May 12, 1973 and in Kraków on November 24, 1974—were judged in breach of article 194 of the Criminal Code, which provided for terms of imprisonment of from one to ten years for seditious statements during religious services. According to an SB informant, Wojtyła had declared during one of his sermons, “The Church has the right to criticize all manifestations and aspects of the activity of the authorities if they are unacceptable to the people.” 3Wojtyła, however, was protected by his eminence. Though the UB (predecessor of the SB) had interned the Polish primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszýnski, for three years in the 1950s, by the 1970s the Gierek regime no longer dared to arrest a cardinal.The SB thus lapsed into a tone of largely impotent outrage as it denounced Wojtyła’s “moral support to the initiatives of anti-socialist elements.”

In June 1976 Gierek repeated the mistake which had led to Gomułka’s downfall six years earlier and ordered a sudden increase in food prices. After a wave of protest strikes and riots, the price rises were withdrawn. On September 30 Wojtyła set up a fund to assist the families of those in the Kraków archdiocese who had been imprisoned for taking part in the protests or injured in clashes with the riot police. 4He also took an active interest in the formation after the strike wave of KOR, the Workers Defence Committee, which sought to create an alliance of workers and dissident intellectuals. According to SB surveillance reports, during the autumn of 1976 Wojtyła had a series of meetings with KOR’s founders in the apartment of the writer Bohdan Cywiński, later a prominent Solidarity activist. 5The SB also reported that he met individually KOR militants from a great variety of backgrounds: among them the dissident Communist Jacek Kurón, the wartime resistance fighter Jan Józef Lipski, the ex-Maoist Antoni Macierewicz and the writer Jerzy Andrzejewski. 6