In New Russia, Clergymen Visit Convicts : Religion: Priests making rounds in prisons are another phenomenon of political change. Donations from the West help support the program.

“Father Nikodim, come here! Come here!” cries a voice behind a padlocked iron door in a dungeon built in 1872 by Czar Alexander II.

“I’ll be there, my son!” roars Nikodim, chaplain of Sergiev-Posad transit prison about 50 miles north of Moscow, where about 600 convicts are housed pending transfer to prisons and labor camps across Russia. This city, formerly Zagorsk, was the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church until 1989, when its headquarters was moved to Moscow.

Escorted by Interior Ministry guards with German shepherd dogs, Nikodim makes his rounds inside the prison, built deep underground for warmth in the bitter winter.

Two years ago, Nikodim’s presence at the prison would have been unheard of in the officially atheistic Soviet Union. Since the collapse of communism and the dissolution of the empire, priests and ministers are increasingly visible throughout the new Commonwealth of Independent States.

In all 15 former republics, Orthodox and Roman Catholic priests, Protestant chaplains and Islamic mullahs are being allowed--even encouraged--to set up prison ministries. Local prison bosses still can bar clergymen, but Western human-rights groups say they know of only a few cases of this.

As usual at Sergiev-Posad, Nikodim is accompanied by Fathers Bonifat and Trifon, who live at the nearby Trinity Monastery.

Everywhere Nikodim goes in the dimly lighted labyrinth, the word is passed from cell to cell that he has arrived for another day of ministering to Russia’s outcasts.

On this day, British and American missionaries have braved a snowstorm to deliver Russian-language copies of the New Testament. A handful of men and women prisoners wait in the prison chapel for Mass. Others want to make confessions in their cells, which hold as many as four inmates in a space no larger than a walk-in closet.

Jocularly calling themselves the “Father, Son and Holy Ghost,” the three bearded Orthodox priests say they have blazed a trail of religious freedom that has caught on across Russia.

“We opened the first chapel in a Soviet prison less than two years ago,” boasts Nikodim, who enjoys an easy rapport with Capt. Alexander Solomonov, the prison administrator. “Solomonov may be a captain, but here I’m a general.”

With Solomonov’s encouragement, the three priests have turned a 35-man holding cell into a whitewashed chapel with an altar and more than 20 icons. They also make daily visits to this prison and a nearby women’s prison.

“The souls of most prisoners were so poisoned when we started work here,” Nikodim said, “but Father Trifon and Father Bonifat have a gift for turning a stone heart soft.”

Backed by Vadim Bakatin, head of the defanged KGB secret police, and sponsored by foreign missionary groups, Orthodox priests also are reaching beyond the prisons to help the families of inmates, and to establish halfway houses and farms for parolees.

Former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev is credited with loosening state controls on religion in 1990 and unleashing what some Western clerics have called a “spiritual rebirth” in officially godless countries.

Thousands of new or rehabilitated churches have opened. Priests have become politicians in the new legislatures of many republics, and foreign missionaries have been encouraged to preach the Gospel and lead humanitarian relief efforts this winter.

One of the most active foreign groups is Prison Fellowship International of Reston, Va. It has helped to pay for the work of Nikodim and his fellow priests at places such as Sergiev-Posad.

“We want to demonstrate that people who are in prison can change, that prisons don’t change people,” said Ron Nikkel, president of the evangelical, nondenominational organization, which works with prisoners and their families in about 40 countries.

The group provides medicine and doctors for prisons in Russia, training for prison chaplains and support for the legal-aid work of Natalya Vysotskaya.

Vysotskaya, a successful Moscow trial lawyer, started Russia’s first Christian legal-aid society, called Faith, Hope and Love. The charity provides counsel for indigent prisoners who are appealing their cases, lobbies Russian legislators to expand prisoners’ rights and runs seminars for prison administrators that have a decidedly religious message.

“Priests in prisons can help prevent brutality,” said Vysotskaya, who works with Nikodim and prison chaplains in Moscow and in Odessa, Ukraine.

“I tell prison administrators that God is the only real lawyer.”