How They Keep the Faith Behind the Iron Curtain

They came together, Christians and Jews, to state the plight of the religious faithful living behind the Iron Curtain. They told of incarcerations in mental hospitals, of disappearances, of destruction of houses of worship, of open-end sentences in labor camps.

Moderator Alan Mittleman of the sponsoring National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry noted that the hearing last week at Loyola Marymount University took place on Holocaust Remembrance Day, an appropriate occasion, he said, on which to be reminded of the threat posed by totalitarian societies.

It also took place during a time of heightened optimism for a thaw between the United States and the Soviet Union and its new leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

But if any of the participants in this hearing on religious freedom, titled “Culture and Community: The Struggle for Religious Liberty in the U.S.S.R.,” had been harboring hopes for detente, those were dashed quickly by speaker Yuri Yarim-Agaev, a Soviet physicist exiled in 1980 for dissident activities and now working in the Bay Area.

“Nothing has changed in the area of human rights,” Yarim-Agaev said. “Nothing has improved since Gorbachev came to power.” He spoke of “new waves of repression” against Muslims and Jews, of clampdowns on communication with foreigners, of “direct torture on political prisoners.”

The hearing, held in cooperation with the American Jewish Committee, Los Angeles Chapter, and the Los Angeles Interreligious Coalition on Soviet Jewry, was to gather testimony for submission next month in Ottawa to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The commission, mandated by the Helsinki Accords in 1975, monitors compliance by the Soviet Union and other participating nations with the agreements they signed on human rights and freedoms.

Presenters at Loyola Marymount included, in addition to Yarim-Agaev, Kent R. Hill, associate professor of history at Seattle Pacific University and a participant in emigration arrangements for the “Siberian Seven,” Pentecostals who spent almost five years in de facto asylum in the American Embassy in Moscow before being permitted to emigrate to the West in mid-1983; Edward Robin of Los Angeles, vice chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry; Ginte Damusis, associate director, Lithuanian Catholic Religious Aid, Brooklyn, N.Y., and Olga Stacevich, the Russian-born editor of The Samizdat Bulletin, San Mateo.

Hill touched off a provocative debate when he said the National Council of Churches has done a disservice to Christians in the Soviet Union by “buying the Soviet line” as handed them by official Soviet church leaders, that things will only get worse if protests are made, whereas the truth, Hill said, is that speaking out protects the dissidents.

Remarks Spark Anger

His remarks angered the Rev. Eugene Boutilier, executive director of the Southern California Ecumenical Council and a member of the panel of questioners. Boutilier said, “I do not agree at all” if the inference is that the council does not consider religious oppression a serious concern, and, he added, “it’s slanderous to say so.”

Later, in an interview, both men explained their positions. “He missed my point,” Hill said, which was that “the National Council of Churches has failed to support effectively Christians behind the Iron Curtain. They’ve allowed their relationship with registered church leaders to silence them. They mistakenly believe that they would hurt Russian Christians if they spoke up on their behalf.”

Hill said that while some of the registered Soviet leaders are “dedicated Christians who’ve made a tactical decision to accommodate” and others “are, in fact, working for the KGB,” both speak in the same voice. One of the former, Hill said, had told him, “You don’t do us any favor when you don’t ask hard questions.”

Boutilier said he did not question that “there are severe, awful, restrictive anti-religious activities” in the Soviet Union, but, he said, “you have to find folks with whom to work and listen to them. . . . I’m convinced an important, valid strategy is to develop a working relationship with the existing above-ground religious institutions, help them get concessions, help them grow and survive.”

But, Boutilier said, “When (Hill) accuses the whole ecumenical leadership worldwide of being Communist dupes. . . .”

What is needed, he said, is to “walk a tight line,” putting the pressure on without embarrassing anyone--neither collaborating completely nor risking the chance that the church could be “wiped out.”

During the three-hour hearing, part of moderator Mittleman’s goal of “increased sensitivity (as Christians and Jews) to each others’ concerns” appeared to be achieved.

The plight of Jews in the Soviet Union was described by Robin, who explained their unique position in light of “the national characterization the Soviets place upon Jews”--including identifying them as Jews on internal passports--and of the Soviets’ refusal to recognize Hebrew as the Jewish language.

He cited other factors that make them unique among religious groups: the existence of Israel as the bedrock of the Jewish emigration movement and the resulting national-international connection and “historic anti-Semitism” predating the revolution.

Despite increasing pressures on Soviet Jews, Robin said, he found there “a tremendous renaissance of Jewish life and culture,” focused on activities such as clandestine Hebrew classes and keeping of kosher kitchens, because group activity is “severely circumscribed.”

No official statistics are available, Robin said, but educated estimates place the number of synagogues in the Soviet Union today at 74, compared to more than 1,000 in 1926, two years after Joseph Stalin came to power. That, he noted, is only one for every 30,000 to 35,000 Jews, but, he added, “We know that some private congregations have sprung up.” There is only one seminary for rabbis behind the Iron Curtain, in Budapest.

Since 1983, Robin said, “emigration (of Jews) is at a virtual standstill.” Fewer than 1,000 emigrated to Israel in 1984, whereas in 1979, the year of greatest emigration, there were 51,000. In 1985, there have been 77 emigrations.

Attacks on Jews

Robin spoke of “accelerating” attacks on Jews in an effort “to eradicate their culture and religious activities and identity . . . the most serious harassment since the existence of Soviet Jews as a movement became known in the early 1960s.”

“I think our main job in America is to keep people here sober-minded about the Soviet Union” during a time when there is the temptation to view Gorbachev’s presidency as the opening of an era of improved relationships, Yarim-Agaev said. “The change in Soviet leadership is not important,” he said, nor is the “change in rhetoric,” nor are “important international documents signed by the Soviet Union.”

As a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group, which was disbanded in 1982 after most of its members, including Anatoly Scharansky, were either exiled or imprisoned, Yarim-Agaev helped collect information on such things as restrictions on religious, cultural and educational activities, numbers of prisoners of conscience and psychiatric abuses of prisoners.

“In all those areas,” he said, “the situation in the Soviet Union is worsening.”

As a “symbolic gesture,” he said, the Gorbachev regime might permit emigration of several thousand Jews and “even release several famous dissidents.”

Yarim-Agaev said the Soviets are not only in economic trouble but are “really quite sensitive to Western public opinion.” In view of that, he asked, why settle for the release of three or four dissidents when, if the United States is patient, the Soviets “would release much more people.”

A member of the questioning panel asked, “What do the Soviets gain by keeping people in?”

Yarim-Agaev smiled and said, “Members of the Politburo would emigrate if they could get permission.”

Required to Register

The status of Protestants in the Soviet Union--most of whom are either Pentecostals or Baptists--was told by Kent Hill. He noted that, ironically, the Soviet constitution specifically permits both religious worship and the right to spread anti-religious propaganda. Protestants, like Catholics, are required to register and those who comply “may be discriminated against in terms of jobs,” Hill said, “but they’re not going to be rounded up and put in prison.’

It is among those who refuse to register, often because they are adamant about their children having a Christian upbringing and in the Soviet Union “you not allowed to bring your children to church,” that “you find the prison sentences, you find the people who might wind up in prison hospitals.”

His experience, Hill said, is that despite hearings such as this one, no one is listening. “There’s a kind of paralysis caused, I think, by fear,” Hill said, “a fear of nuclear war. We do not want to see something that, if we were to speak out against (it), might increase the prospects of nuclear war.”

He leveled criticism at Protestants who, upon hearing of a Christian in trouble behind the Iron Curtain, ask, “Is it a Pentecostal? A Baptist? A Russian Orthodox?” When, he asked, “did you hear a Jew here ask if a victim was Orthodox or Conservative?”

The last five years have seen stepped-up persecution of Christians, Hill said, and today there are 400 known Christian prisoners in the Soviet Union. Some, he said, face “perpetual imprisonment” in labor camps because of laws that have been changed to allow re-sentencing; now, an offense such as “praying at an improper time” may bring an additional three years in prison.

‘A Fine Cup of Tea’

Hill, a student of modern Russian history, said Gorbachev “will pour a very fine cup of tea” when he visits the United States but because of his urbanity and sophistication is, in his opinion, “the most dangerous leader we have had to deal with in the West in perhaps 20 years.” He spoke of “an almost sinister connection” between Soviet grandstand plays abroad and internal actions, suggesting, “when you think things are getting better . . . take another look.”

“Catholicism has been afforded one of the least favored positions on the sliding scale” of religious discrimination in the Soviet Union, said Ginte Damusis. She attributed it to Catholics’ “continuing resistance” in the matter of religious instruction to children and “above all, ties to the Vatican.”

Lithuanian Catholics constitute the huge majority of Roman Catholics in the Soviet Union and, Damusis estimated, 75% of the 3.5 million people of Lithuania are “practicing Catholics” 45 years after Lithuania’s annexation by the U.S.S.R.

Information on persecution of these faithful filters into the United States through copies of the Chronicle, a contraband publication of which 65 copies reached this country this month. Its pages tell of persecution and defiance, of acts of valor and acts of brutality.

There are the cases of the prisoner-priests, Father Sigitas Tamkevicius and Father Alfonsas Svarinskas, each sentenced to a total of 10 years in labor camp and in exile for their “crimes.” Damusis noted that, in Father Tamkevicius’ case, these included “organizing a Christmas party for parish youth.”

It was “hardly accidental,” she added, that both priests had been Helsinki monitors. The Catholic Committee for the Defense of Believers’ Rights was forced underground after their arrests in 1983, the first arrests in 12 years.

Another priest, Father Jonas-Kastytis Matulionis, was imprisoned for three years for organizing a procession to a parish cemetery to honor the dead. And, in 1981, “in full view of eyewitnesses,” Damusis said, Father Bronius Laurinavicius, also a member of the Helsinki group and a vocal critic of the regime, was pushed to his death under an oncoming truck.

Less Violent Forms

Persecution of religious dissidents may take less violent forms, Damusis said, such as forcible conscription into the military for “re-education” or disqualification from college entrance exams.

At the seminaries, she said, “Annual admissions are deliberately kept below the number of those who die and retire each year.”

The election of a Polish Pope, John Paul II, cannot be discounted, said Damusis, in assessing the growth of the Catholic dissent movement in Lithuania. There was outrage when the Pope was denied permission to travel to Lithuania for the jubilee of the nation’s patron, St. Casimir.

Damusis quoted Father Svarinskas: “We don’t have a few dissidents. We have a few collaborators.”

Sister Ann Gillen, executive director of the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry, asked the status of nuns in Lithuania. “All religious orders were banned,” Damusis said, when Lithuania was annexed, but “there are close to 2,500 underground nuns today . . . they apparently work at secular jobs during the day” and, in their free time, evangelize, conduct catechism classes and work for the underground press.

One, Sister Nijole Sadunaite, served six years in labor camp after being caught typing an issue of the Chronicle. For two years she has been in hiding in the Soviet Union, writing her memoirs, soon to be published here in English.

With it all, Damusis said, faith survives--”We’ve actually received letters from people who’ve traveled 40 miles on foot to go to Mass on Sunday.”

“Faith is still very strong in Russia,” agreed Olga Stacevich who since 1973 has been collecting, translating and distributing, without compensation, extracts from the Free Press in the U.S.S.R. for publication as the Samizdat (Russian for “self-publishing”) Bulletin. The underground Free Press, with material ranging from poetry to trial proceedings, is smuggled out of the Soviet Union by dissidents, at great risk. Stacevich, a naturalized citizen, was born in Vladivostok, four months before her parents fled the Bolshevik regime.

Can’t Buy a Bible

In her native Russia, she said, “Most of the finest and oldest (Russian Orthodox) churches have been converted into museums or warehouses,” even though existing churches cannot accommodate worshipers. It is “impossible,” she said, to purchase a Bible and “hostility toward religion” is taught in schools.

In what she termed “a final onslaught on monasticism as a spiritual force,” she spoke of arrests and searches of pilgrims visiting the monasteries, of conscription of younger monks and of older monks being “forcibly removed” to mental hospitals. “There are less than 1,500 religious left in the monasteries,” she said, “and most of them are aging.”

She told of one nun committed to a hospital for the criminally insane indefinitely for the crime of embroidering the 91st Psalm on belts.

Those hearing the testimony included City Council members Marvin Braude and Joy Picus, Rabbi Paul Dubin, executive director, Board of Rabbis of Southern California; Supervisor Ed Edelman, the Rev. Harold G. Hultgren of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, Father James N. Loughran, president of Loyola Marymount University, and the Rev. Truman Northrup, retired executive director of Pacific Southwest Conference, Church of the Brethren.

Commending the presenters for their “expert and unhysterical” testimony, moderator Mittleman, executive director of the Interreligious Task Force, said the next step would be to see that the transcript of the event, the task force’s first formal hearing since 1977, finds its way “into the hands of human rights experts” throughout the world.