IRD mourns the death on Christmas Day of Russian Orthodox priest and heroic dissident, Father Gleb Pavlovich Yakunin.
For his faith in Christ, Yakunin, a recipient of IRD’s Religious Freedom Award, was convicted of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” and sentenced to prison and forced exile. But it was not just the Soviet government that punished him. He was twice defrocked by the Russian Orthodox Church for speaking the truth about how the church had collaborated with the State, and how it had failed to speak up for the persecuted.
Yakunin, who was born in Moscow on March 4, 1934, was an icon of the fight for religious freedom and democracy in the Soviet Union. Although he lost his faith as a teenager, he found it again while in college, through the ministry of Father Alexander Men, the leader of the renewal movement in the Orthodox Church. But throughout his years of fighting for religious freedom Yakunin spoke for Christians of all denominations and for human rights in general.
A tribute to Yakunin appeared in The Daily Beast on December 28, 2014. The writer, Cathy Young, worries that “Russia has lost a liberal voice of conscience.” Young recalls how in 1965 Yakunin and another priest, Nikolai Eschliman, “sent an open letter to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexei, decrying not only the persecution of believers but de facto church collusion in this persecution.”
An important piece of samizdat (underground literature) regarding the relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviet State, the letter was supported by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was not supported by the Orthodox leadership, though. Yakunin and Eschliman were defrocked in May 1966, “until they repented their criticism of church leadership.”
In 1976 Yakunin founded the Christian Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Believers in the USSR. According to Religious Diversity and Human Rights, published in 1996, the committee was the Orthodox counterpart of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group. The book says that the committee’s “interdenominational concern with the rights of all believers, not just Orthodox, reflected the extent to which the Orthodox rights movement had been shaped by the general human rights movement.” The network of contacts that Yakunin established through the committee enabled him to collect over 400 documents detailing the human rights abuses of the Soviet Union and the KGB.
Because of the work of the committee and his other dissident activity, Yakunin was arrested in the summer of 1980. The biography of fellow Orthodox dissident, Alexander Ogorodnikov, Dissident for Life, tells that the trials of Yakunin and other dissidents who were arrested “in the run-up to the Olympics” took place the day after the Moscow Olympics closing ceremonies, August 3, 1980. On August 28, Yakunin was convicted under “the notorious Article 70, of ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.'” He was sentenced to 5 years’ strict regime camp and 5 years of internal exile.
Yakunin was imprisoned first at the fearful KGB Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, then in Perm Camp 35, deep in the Ural Mountains. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said in 1983 that Yakunin has been punished in this gulag by being held in a “freezing stone cubicle without bed, clothes or food.” And the late A. M. Rosenthal, former editor of the New York Times, visited Perm 35 a few years after Yakunin’s time there. He described it in a December 13, 1988 New York Times article:
Perm 35 is part of the chain of prisons, labor camps, insane asylums and frozen villages of exile where Soviet governments locked away those who opposed them in word or thought – sometimes for decades. No foreigner had been allowed into Perm 35 before….The camp…became a hated symbol of the whole Soviet network of political imprisonment and torture through hunger, cold and isolation.
Finally he was exiled “to a remote village in the Republic of Yakutia.” Yakunin was not only separated from his wife, Iraida, and their three children, Maria, Alexander and Anna, during his imprisonment, but also during his exile. Orthodox America‘s archives tell of how Yakunin sent word to his family that he was still alive. The region where he was sent had snow for two-thirds of the year, and that in January the temperatures fell as low as -50C to -60C degrees.
The article quotes the Keston News Service as saying, “To visit Fr. Gleb, his relatives (who live in Moscow) would have to travel some 5,000-5,500 kilometers. As there-is no direct rail link, they would have to fly to the republican capital (Yakutsk), and there hire a small plane to take them to the regional center nearest to the village of Irnikhsham. From the regional center they could, with luck, catch a bus (if there is one) or get a lift in a truck. Failing that, they might have no option but to walk the rest of the way.”
Yakunin’s exile was cut short in March 1987 by the Soviet peristroyka under Mikhail Gorbachev, allowing him to return to speaking out for the rights of the Russian people in general and persecuted Christians in particular. In 1990 Yakunin was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation. He was the deputy chairman of the Parliamentary Committee for the Freedom of Conscience and co-authored the law concerning “freedom of all denominations” that was used for the opening of churches and monasteries throughout the country.
IRD’s close relationship with Yakunin was largely due to IRD’s first director, Dr. Kent Hill. Yakunin figured prominently in Hill’s book The Puzzle of the Soviet Church: An Inside Look at Christianity and Glasnost.
Yakunin visited the IRD offices in March of 1992 during a visit to Washington, DC with his fellow Russian parliament member, Lev Ponomaryov. Ponomaryov, a physicist and human rights activist, led the parliamentary commission to investigate the KGB files. It was to release formerly secret documents of the Communist Party and the KGB for which Yakunin and Ponomaryov held a Capitol Press conference. The documents confirmed Yakunin’s long-made claims about the links between the KGB and the Russian Orthodox Church.
An IRD report of the press conference revealed:
Father Gleb knows the names of collaborators with the KGB, but does not want to name them publicly. It is his wish that the church deal with this matter internally, and that those who worked with the KGB will openly confess their sins. Father Gleb wants to see repentance in his church.
Rather than open confession and repentance, however, the church leadership dealt with the issue by once again defrocking Yakunin.
On October 6, 1992, just a few months before Yakunin was to be defrocked for the second time, IRD presented him with its Religious Freedom Award during a conference on the future of democracy in Russia and America. In giving him the award, IRD recognized his defense of religious freedom and advocacy for religious and political reform. Yakunin was praised “for speaking out on persecution under totalitarianism, including the collaboration between his own church and the KGB.”
In his acceptance speech, Yakunin expressed concern about the continuing lack of repentance in the Russian Orthodox Church. He also spoke of the church’s inability to break with the past. Both of these concerns have proven to be very valid in the ensuing years as the Russian Orthodox Church once again receives preferential treatment by its approval of the Putin regime.
Yakunin won a seat in the first post-Soviet legislature, the Duma, in 1993. He was excommunicated and anathematized in 1997 for “anti-church activities” and for the continued defiance of wearing priestly vestments despite his being defrocked several years earlier. He was also condemned for associating with a breakaway Ukrainian church, the Kiev Patriarchate, and then for creating another breakaway church, the Apostolic Orthodox Church.
In The Daily Beast tribute, Cathy Young explains, “In this new Russia where belonging to the church has become a badge of loyalty to the state, Yakunin remained as much of a rebel as he had been under the Soviet regime in which loyal citizenship required militant atheism.”
IRD is proud to have stood alongside Father Gleb Yakunin in those early years in which he spoke out against both State and church corruption, and fought for freedom. Rest in peace, warrior of the Lord, and rise in Glory to hear Christ’s “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
Comment by larildsen on December 31, 2014 at 8:44 am
In the 70s and 80s Western Christians were encouraged to write imprisoned Soviet Christians with the idea being that the government would treat them better knowing that people were aware of them. I wrote Father Yakunin and then had the privilege of meeting him on his trip to Washington. What an amazing experience to see God’s faithfulness!
Comment by faithmcdonnell on January 5, 2015 at 10:46 pm
Thank you so much for your faithfulness, larildsen. Yes, I remember those days well, and totally agree — there was nothing like seeing the answer to your prayers and letter writing in flesh and blood in front of your eyes — Father Gleb, Alexander Ogorodnikov, Deacon Vladimir Rusak, Irina Ratushinskaya….That was what helped me to understand my vocation to being an advocate for the persecuted!