Gleb Yakunin, unquenched spirit

...unquenched spirit JANICE BROUN O N THE FIRST OF November, fifty-year-old Father Gleb Yakunin, a Russian Orthodox priest, will have com- pleted half of his ten-year prison sentence, and should be due to be sent into internal exile...

...By doing this, he has done much to restore his church's credibility in the eyes of the faithful and of the many seekers who have, during the last two decades, been rediscovering God, and their roots, in their own national church...

...Members, however, have to keep their identity secret, and the flow of documentation has never been resumed...

...His book, The Practice of Solidarity: American Hat Finishers in the Nineteenth Century, has just been published by the University of lllinois Press...

...And for the bankers themselves, there was a crucial concern: bank profits lagged behind the earnings of other businesses...

...Father Gleb and physicist Lev Regelson stressed that the prime responsibility of the WCC was to fellow believers...

...The rest of the time he has had to take poorly paid church jobs such as cantor or night watchman...

...They branched out in ever-widening geographical areas...

...Just four years ago, the free marketeers who dominate Con/ gress passed a bill freeing banks of many of the restrictions put into place in the Progressive and New Deal eras...

...Regulation succeeded: for nearly fifty years, few banks failed, savers and borrowers were secure, and corporations could transact business without wor- rying about their media of exchange, their dollars and their checks...

...He emphasized that since Christians represent about a fifth of the population (certainly far more than the authorities are ever prepared to admit...

...It brought together, united in a com- mon aim, the more far-sighted members of previously hostile traditions --Orthodox, Catholics, Pentecostals, Adventists, Baptists...

...Father Gleb's close friend Alexander Men, who had helped Gleb after his own period of teenage rebellion to return to the church, is also threatened with arrest...

...No Russian Christian has done more to challenge the Soviet government over its relegation of believers to the status of second-class citizens...

...Germain (D-R.I...

...His quiet, devoted wife Iraida lived for years in constant fear of his arrest...

...In particular they criticized the uncanonical imposition on the church in 1961 of new regulations which transferred control of the parish from the priest to a lay committee which had to be approved by the local Soviet...

...Her work has been published in Commonweal, America, Christian Century, Worldview, Our Sunday Visitor, and other journals...

...And because he faithfully carded out his apostolate as a priest, comforting others in their sufferings, giving an inspiring example by his meekness and purity, thus bringing younger prisoners to faith in God, he was put in an unheated cell in solitary confinement, on a starvation diet, for four months...

...Apparently terrified at embarrassing the Soviet church delegation, the WCC has continued to show far more concern for the oppressed peoples of the Third World, whether Christian or not, than it has for Christians under Communism, so much so that during their Sixth Assembly at Vancouver last year, a group of concerned Christians --including leading Russian 6migrts --held a well attended parallel conference specifically on behalf of the persecuted...

...Many are secretly sympathetic, but they are so completely subordinate to state control that they have been powerless to help him...

...Although mass closures of churches ceased at the time of Khrushchev's fall, and the worst excesses of violence diCommonweal: 460 minished, the letters are still as valid today as when they were written...

...Only once have the authorities allowed him a concession...

...These words still stand as a silent reproach to the WCC today, and they were later backed by scrupulously accurate docu- mentation...

...one of the authors of the landmark legislation of 1980, is conducting committee hear- ings to determine whether deregulation has gone too far...

...They called it the "Yakunin heating...

...For almost a decade little was heard of Father Gleb...

...Nevertheless, there is always the need for one man to stand up and say out loud what ne/lfly everyone thinks...

...True to character, Father Gleb remained steadfast, quoting at his trial Christ's words,"A good shepherd will lay down his life for his sheep...

...The free marketeers deny the problem: as Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker told Congress in late July, Continental's errors were unique, and would not be repeated...

...The World Council of Churches (WCC), to which he pied so eloquently on behalf of persecuted believers, has failed him lamentably for fear that the whole Soviet delegation would be withdrawn...

...Martin Mayer The Bankers T HE Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's red-faced bailout of the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Co., the largest corporate rescue in U.S...

...He was force-fed with boiling hot liquids...

...Tragically, three of Father Gleb's closest colleagues, including that most lovable of parish priests, Father Dmitri Dudko, were broken and "confessed" to having worked against the state...

...Messages from fellow prisoners, however, indicate that his spirit is unquenched...

...Two-thirds of the Orthodox churches were closed, illegally, often brutally, depriving hundreds of thousands of believers of any possibility of regular worship...

...His family, too, has suffered...

...One even betrayed the precious contacts with the West of their Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers' Rights (CCDBR...

...The years 1979 and 1980 saw a vicious clampdown on leading religious dissidents including Father Gleb...

...Amidst all the Conflicting claims, com- peting ideologies, and complex changes in international fi- nance, what lessons should be drawn from the costly fiasco...

...The best known was that to the Fifth Assembly of the WCC at Nairobi in 1975...

...In 1978, as the work load became increasingly heavy, Father Gleb passed on responsibility for Catholics to five lively, enthusiastic Lithuanian priests, two of whom, Father Alfonsas Svarinskas and Father Sigitas Tamkevicius, were given ten-year sentences last year...

...The creation of this committee, originally Orthodox in member- ship and formed partly in reparation for Orthodox persecution of other denominations in Czarist Russia, was a step of great ecumenical significance...

...CHURCH & STATE IN THE SOVIET UNION Gleb Yakunin...

...How he would agree with Rusak's concluding words: "I believe in the Lord...

...His role has been a s~f-imposed and lonely one...

...I N 1976, at the request of his friend and Helsinki Accords monitor Yuri Orlov, Father Gleb and two friends launched the Committee foi: the Defense of Believers' Rights...

...Essentially, church life is still under the control of a Council for Religious Affairs, an atheist body whose purpose is to limit and if possible undermine church life...

...Iraida took him a Bible, printed officially by the Moscow Patriarchate...

...F EW PRIESTS could afford to do what Father Gleb has done...

...But there were drawbacks...

...They expanded their business overseas, where they could operate more freely...

...In addition, the CCDBR furnished 417 documents providing invaluable and frequently harrowing information, largely on the persecution of hitherto isolated groups and individuals for concerned Western Chris- tians...

...Father Alexander Pivarov, an out- standing priest who had chosen to work in a remote part-of Siberia, has been sentenced to three-and-a-half years for the crime of distributing privately-produced religious literature to his flock...

...Father Gleb was only able to serve as a parish priest --a JANICE A. BROUN is a free-lance writer currently doing research on the religions of Eastern Europe...

...Whether this will happen, or whether he will be resentenced to a further five years of labor camp under last fall's Draconian law which enables prison authorities to resentence prisoners indefinitely, without releas- ing them, depends largely on how much active, prayerful support Christians in the West are prepared to mount on his behalf...

...Congress created the Federal Reserve System in 1913 and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1933 to accom- plish one paramount task: to insure the stability of our nation's currency and financial system...

...DAVID BENSMAN is associate professor of labor studies at Rutgers University...

...It was the influx of converts into the Orthodox church which gave an impetus to religious dissent and provided Father Gleb with support when he decided to break his silence...

...After a hiatus following the arrest of Father Gleb and the CCDBR's secretary in 1979, the committee was re-established with an interdenominational membership and an active repre- sentative in the West, the exile Vadim Shcheglov...

...Many of Father Gleb's letters were aimed at his govern- ment...

...Bank services were poor...

...Small savers received low inter- est rates...

...There are so few of them around with the character, intel- lectuai grasp, and holiness to cope with the new influx of converts that their flocks entreat them to keep a low profile so as to avoid arrest...

...G LEB YAKUNIN was ordained in 1962, at the height of Khrushchev's outright campaign to destroy church life...

...Cus- tomers seeking loans found lending officers passive and ex- ceedingly conservative...

...As I mentioned, Father Gleb and Father Nikolai were sus- pended for this protest, and subsequently the latter left the priesthood...

...A chorus of critics well endowed with hindsight is urging reme- dial action...

...7 September 1984:461 This was on July 19, 1983, just before the WCC Assembly, when a priest visited him, heard his confession and gave him a Bible...

...Other letters, including a critical but constructive analysis of his church, challenged Orthodox clergy and believers to adopt the same boldness and initiative as that shown by members of the unregistered Protestant Evangelical churches, the chief victims of imprisonment, and also by Catholics, particularly Lithuanians, in ignoring crip- pling state-imposed restrictions at local levels...

...I vocation for which, with his unsparing kindness, dedication, and generosity, he was ideally suited --for a mere three years...

...The two letters which Father Gleb and a young fellow priest, Father Nikolai Eshli- man wrote in 1965 to President Podgorny and Patriarch Alexei are historic documents: the first public attempt ever at an analysis of church-state relations in the Soviet Union...

...His subsequent conduct in labor camps has more than vindicated his words, while the authorities have done all they can to break him...

...history, raises serious questions about the future of bank deregulation...

...Sometimes with others' support, sometimes alone, he pioneered a number of outstanding appeals...

...This unprecedented action was, as his friend Shcheglov explained sadly to Western correspondents, merely a prop- aganda ploy...

...He had no parish to lose and was without ecclesiastical control...

...They en- larged their deposit base by offering interest-beating checking accounts...

...Recent signs, however, show that even such priests are not immune...

...The prison authorities deliberately beat up prisoners before his eyes, knowing that he can't stop himself from interfering, thus laying himself open to charges which could deprive him of freedom till 1994...

...it is grossly unjust to subject them to constant discrimination...

...Although Father Gleb has only said what ordinary be- lievers know and feel, no bishop within his church has dared defend him...

...Confessing and suffering Christians are the glory of the church," they pointed out, ~'because in all the Christian family they stand closest to Jesus himself and imitate and directly follow our Divine Teacher's sacrifice on Golgotha...

...When prison officials removed it, Father Gleb went on an eighty-day hunger strike to demonstrate that there is nothing in Soviet laws to forbid a prisoner to have a Bible...

...Beginning in the 1950s, bankers explored routes of escape from their regulated haven...

...Informers have also been planted in his camp group to trap him...

...CONTINENTAL FOLLIES ! The government buys a bank DAVID BENSMAN "'Banking continues to be the home of the brainless American theory of political economy which demands lots and lots of competition in which nobody ever gets hurt...

...They created high-interest certificates of deposit, to attract more savings...

...I love my church, feel concern for its future, and wish to serve it --but not by a compromise of conscience, that price which is exacted from our church lead- ership and which I am being urged to pay...

...Technology lagged...

...They sought out customers more aggressively...

...Since then, with three children to support, she has been denied the right to receive any aid from Christians in the West...

...Now Rep...

...Now, at a time when his health has deteriorated alarmingly, the right to visit or even correspond with him has been taken from her...

...Throughout all this, what is so impressive about Father Gleb is his utter consistency and integrity, his fearlessness, his rejection of compromise, and his quiet determination always to speak out the truth, whatever it might cost him...

...No one has done more in bringing together persecuted Christians of different denominations and presenting their plight to the outside world...

...Some of his closest colleagues have fallen by the wayside...

...The latter, many of them students and mem- bers of the intelligentsia, were deterred by the compliant behavior of a seemingly subservient and compromised hierar- chy...

...I am in total agreement with the writer Anatoli Levitin, (a leading lay dissident of the sixties, and Father Gleb's uncle) that it is unnecessary for the church to board any ship when it can walk upon the waters...

...His very first action on behalf of religious liberty, in 1965, led to his suspension from priestly duties by his Patriarch Alexei, on instructions from the state...

...This period saw both the growth of the human rights movement and a resurgence of interest in religion...

...In Deacon Vladimir Rusak, who sent an appeal to the WCC in Van- couver, Father Gleb seems at last to have found a successor...

...No other priest in his church has spoken out so boldly in an attempt to defend it against the damaging encroachments of an actively hostile, atheist state...

...Priests are normally never allowed access to prisoners...

...They created holding companies to buy other banks and Commonweal: 462...

...Fernand St...

...And the Wall Street Journal editorialized that excessive regu- lation caused the bank to falter;, removing restrictions in the future will ensure that banks can weather their mistakes with- out Federal assistance...

...They pointed out how, despite the constitutional separation of church and state, the state interfered in, infiltrated, and dic- tated church affairs at every level...

...For nearly two years he and his family have been denied contact with each other...