ARCHPRIEST UNDER THE STEAMROLLER
Russia is returning to the times of the repressive policy of state atheism
by Alexander Soldatov
"Before the World Cup, our law enforcement agencies are conducting comprehensive work with the population." In this way, Gatchina Archpriest Aleksei Lebedev summarized the results of a special operation that was conducted early in the morning of 9 June by personnel of the MVD and FSB in his apartment and also in the apartments of his parents and his wife's parents.
The operation was staged effectively: operatives were accompanied by squads of OMON troops in full battle gear. Father Aleksei does not belong to the Moscow patriarchate but to the "alternative" Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church (Rossiiskaia Pravoslavnaia Avtonomnaia Tserkov—RPATs). That is how he explains the scope with which the "investigative actions" were conducted.
From the 47-year-old archpriest were taken the hard drive from his computer and telephones, and his younger son, 20-year-old Fedor, was arrested and taken to the 78th precinct of the St. Petersburg police. Contact with his older son, 23-year-old Ivan, who serves in the army, was lost on the day before the searches. The formal reason for the investigative actions, if one believes the law enforcers, was suspicion of hooliganism by the sons, but actually the FSB personnel did not question Fr Aleksei about this.
"They asked about my contacts with cossacks, trips abroad, attitude toward the Russian Orthodox Church, and church affiliation," the archpriest says.
After spending almost a day at the police station, Fedor was allowed to return home on a signed promise not to depart. He was charged with the crime specified in article 213 of the CC RF ("hooliganism"). According to the investigation, Fedor participated in some conflict on Nevsky Prospect in August of last year. At the police station, FSB personnel openly "worked" with Fedor, and they even showed their identification. "They talked about patriotism and about how good people should help one another," the father relayed his son's story.
Meanwhile, the older son, Ivan, also was found. He is a military musician who suddenly was transferred to St. Petersburg from a military unit in Moscow. The circumstances of his transfer also raise a lot of questions.
"At the headquarters of the Military Space Forces in Moscow (it was the military unit in the headquarters where he served)," Fr Aleksei describes, "a request arrived for transferring the musician from the orchestra to a unit in St. Petersburg. Reason: creation of an orchestra and its deployment there. An officer arrived in Moscow from the St. Petersburg military unit to accompany the serviceman. He was transported in a service vehicle with drivers in civilian clothes. A soldier was transported to the new unit in the same vehicle. He was met by the commander of the unit who asked why he had been transferred, and he was very surprised that it was to the 'orchestra.' He said that there is spontaneous amateur performance in the club and there is no orchestra."
Comparing this story with the searches and the arrest of the younger son, Fr Aleksei "was yet more confirmed in the opinion that all the recent events were connected with the transfer of a certain officer of the FSB, who stated that he could pull a string and expose an 'extremist' or a 'terrorist' cell."
While the search was going on at Fr Aleksei's, another operational group, also accompanied by fully armed OMON troops, moved on the private home of the 77-year-old parents of the archpriest and took up a position for a maneuver. The OMON group was first discovered by Fr Aleksei's mother, who went out early in the morning to milk the goats. After entering the house, the law enforcers dispersed throughout the premises.
One of them, grabbing a pistol, burst into a room where the archpriest's father was sleeping and, poking the weapon into the blanket, began to shout: "Grandpa, get dressed!"
But the veteran rendered moral resistance and even stated a desire for a fair popular resistance to such "law enforcers." While the operatives were restraining the old man, an FSB agent was interrogating the archpriest's mother about his work, activity, and trips.
They arrived at the home of Fr Aleksei's wife's parents without OMON troops—just operatives in civilian clothes. Nothing was found as the result of a long search, but their attention focused on two things: a Tolg icon of the Mother of God in a big black icon case and a souvenir silicone cylinder in a cupboard. The icon was tapped in a search for a secret chamber and the cylinder was thought to be a container for explosives. They were extremely disappointed when they did not find either.
The archpriest of the RPATs is sure that what happened was an attempt "to induce cooperation" through pressure on children and parents--old tested devices known from back in recruitment instructions of the OGPU.
A journalist by profession and former columnist of "Gudka," Fr Aleksei has served since the early 2000s as the rector of a St. Petersburg parish of the RPATs. His church is located on the first floor of a two-story house of the Center of Orthodox Enlightenment on Gocharnaya Street, not far from the Moscow railroad station. In 2014, the "schismatic" center was liquidated on the basis of a lawsuit by the prosecutor's office, and the government sealed the house and it is still standing without any signs of life. But Fr Aleksei is not empty-handed. On a private plot in Gatchina he built a wooden church and began registering the parish.
Despite the fact that this parish is a part of a centralized religious organization—the RPATs—which is registered and officially recognized by the government, the rector and parishioners have been refused registration eight times now. At first, as things go, they found incorrectly placed commas in the charter documents, and then an unspecified time for the conclusion of the founding meeting.
Finally they decided to send the documents for a state religious studies expert analysis in the Ministry of Justice, although by law such a procedure is used only for newly registered centralized religious organizations or for local organizations that are not members of centralized organizations. From the point of view of the law, the fact of membership of a parish in an already registered centralized organization serves as sufficient guarantee of reliability.
All of the targets of searches in Gatchina on 9 June are members of the parish headed by Fr Aleksei, and the legal address of the parish is the home of the archpriest's parents. The parishioners are determined to fight for their registration, without which it is now not at all possible to conduct religious activity in Russia. They have sent a statement to the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation (SKRF) about the crime of officials of the Ministry of Justice who are artificially dragging out the registration of the parish and depriving citizens of their legal right to freedom of religious confession. Evidently this resolution also irritates the zealots of the "only canonical" church of the Moscow patriarchate in civilian clothes.
Several days before the events described above, operatives of the SK and FSB arrived for searches in another Orthodox parish in Leningrad oblast that does not belong to the Moscow patriarchate, the church of the Protection of the Mother of God in the village of Dudachkino, where Father Alexander Sukhov (monastic name, Joseph) serves as rector. He belongs to one of the branches of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia that does not recognize the union of the major portion of the hierarchy of the ROCOR with the Moscow patriarchate in 2007.
A criminal case based on article 282 of the CCRF ("Extremism") has been opened against the priest and the official website of the SKRF calls his church in complete "church-talk" an "uncanonical pseudo-Orthodox association of a destructive cult."
The steamroller of repressions for religious convictions in contemporary Russia proceeds not only with regard to "sectarian extremists" of the Jehovah's Witnesses type (which are banned in Russia). Orthodox believers are being increasingly subjected to repressions, who choose to question the integrity and exclusiveness of the Moscow patriarchate. In Kaliningrad, Hegumen Nikolai Mamaev, a cleric of the ROCOR(V-V), has been held in pretrial confinement almost a year now. In the spring of 2016, right at Easter, court bailiffs demolished the monastery complex of the True Orthodox Church near Penza, undeterred by all its crosses, golden cupolas, and bells. The same RPATs has been subjected to systematic persecution, from whom in 2009 all eleven of its restored historic churches in Suzdal, where the center of this church is located, were taken away, plus relics of saints in 2015, and for two years now searches for "extremist literature" are conducted regularly in churches and monasteries. By and large, Russia has returned to the times of the repressive policy of state atheism, only state atheism is now called "the spiritual bonds" and it sometimes acts in the name of "the four traditional religions." (tr. by PDS, posted 6 August 2018)
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