COLUMN ONE : New Faith and Furor in Russia : A headstrong priest has reawakened a moribund Orthodox parish outside Moscow. But the success of Epiphany Cathedral is clouded by rebellion, greed and a sex scandal.

It is below zero outdoors and so chilly in the cathedral that the 300 worshipers stand bundled in overcoats. With each prayer, chanted in Old Slavonic, their breaths fog the air like puffs of incense.

Yet the place has a resplendent aura of warmth. On every wall, ceiling and arch, saints gaze from icons and angels flutter from frescoes. Hundreds of candles burn at shrines in all corners.

On this Sunday, a dozen priests, deacons and altar boys celebrate a four-hour Mass. Under one soaring dome, they baptize a child and two young adults, hear 60 confessions, offer Communion, crown three couples in a joint wedding ceremony and pray at the caskets of two women who died old.

This is Epiphany Cathedral, and these are the believers who raised it from ruin five years ago. Their Orthodox Christian parish in this industrial city 35 miles east of Moscow exemplifies the religious revival that has been sweeping Russia since the dying days of the Soviet Union. Thousands here and millions across Russia have been baptized, including former Communist Party faithful, claiming a religious identity that the Soviet system forced them to deny.

The story of Epiphany is the story of one Orthodox community’s rebirth and torment. It tells as much about the struggle in today’s Russia over the new wealth and influence of churches as about the faith that draws people to them.

At Epiphany, an energetic priest named Adrian Starina has built a school for 350 students, a rest home for as many elderly, a clinic and a 40-acre farm that feeds 500 needy people a day--all funded by worshipers.

The mayor credits the church, whose soup kitchen is busier than the city’s three combined, with “easing social tensions to no small degree.”

The police say church activity may be one reason Noginsk’s crime rate fell last year for the first time since 1986.

But Epiphany Cathedral also shows a dark side of Russia’s reawakening.

As a treasure trove of art and the seat of a thriving parish, it is a coveted prize. A battle for control is under way, deepening splits that already bedevil the Russian Orthodox Church and its 50 million faithful.

At the center of the storm is Father Adrian, the cathedral’s restorer and the parish’s driving force. Known for his boundless civic energy and short temper, the priest quickly became part of the local post-Communist Establishment. The city’s chief industrialist, the mayor and hundreds of parishioners back him.

Arrayed against Father Adrian are the church hierarchy in Moscow, deserters from his flock, an ultranationalist hate group and one of Noginsk’s two newspapers.

The 2-year-old conflict--still unresolved--has featured a high-speed car chase, scuffles and all-night vigils on the cathedral steps, a mysterious fire, a condemned fresco and a stolen icon, two court cases and one unsubstantiated charge that Father Adrian raped an 18-year-old altar boy.

“Orthodox Christians are ardent believers, and when this conflict arose everybody became electrified and irritable,” said Deputy Police Chief Nikolai V. Varlamov, who tries to keep the antagonists from each other’s throats. “I’m surprised to see believers behaving the way they behave. Even I, an atheist, am ashamed.”

Noginsk is a jumble of log cabins, Soviet-slab apartment blocks and half-idled factories that pollute the Klyazma River. Its 250,000 people live by a 285-acre dump, the biggest in Europe, where Moscow trucks most of its garbage.

Civic boosters prefer to call Noginsk home of the first monument to V. I. Lenin. Five years ago, there were three Orthodox churches here. Today there are 23.

Epiphany Cathedral was built in the 19th Century and closed by Soviet authorities in 1938. It was reportedly the site of executions by Josef Stalin’s firing squads. A textile mill moved there in 1956, but the place was an abandoned ruin in 1988 when the state began returning former churches to the Orthodox clergy.

Now, the bells of 6,000 or more Orthodox churches have been tolling across Russia since 1988, more than double the number that were open then.

So impressive is the rebirth that President Boris N. Yeltsin and other public figures regard it as a civic duty to attend Orthodox services on Easter and Christmas.

But in other ways, Orthodox Christianity is losing ground. The church is plagued by internal feuds and challenged by aggressive foreign Protestant missionaries.

Senior clerics in Kiev broke away in 1992 to form the independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church, followed by millions of believers in 1,557 parishes.

At least 76 parishes out of about 12,000 in the former Soviet Union have defected to the New York-based Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, which accuses the Moscow hierarchy of failing to atone for decades of collaboration with the Soviet regime.

Sergei Fedin, 16, typifies Russia’s newest generation of Orthodox believers.

He grew up listening to a religious grandmother challenge an atheist father in theological debates that only whetted his curiosity. It was the babushka who coaxed his mother to baptize the boy and take him to church.

Sergei was 8 when playmates dared him to go into the ruins of Epiphany alone one night in 1986.

“It was horrible and scary, but I went,” he recalled. “I wanted to become privy to its secret.”

Five years later, he went back and made his discovery. By then the cathedral had been restored as a splendid work of art, offering religious inspiration for the aspiring young artist.

“I immediately felt this was something extraordinary and marvelous,” he said. “Only with time did I understand the meaning. It’s hard to define, but I know that people need something to believe in. They cannot just eat, sleep and exist day to day.”

Father Adrian’s school has taken Sergei and other children a step further, immersing them in religious as well as secular subjects, and peer reinforcement.

Igor Svetaylo, a friend and 10th-grade classmate, gave Sergei a Bible for his birthday.

In Noginsk, the main challenge to Orthodox belief has come from free-lance Russian faith healers. The church seems to be winning that battle, at least at Epiphany.

Tatyana Gavva, 35, an accountant, first went to the cathedral two years ago to break what she called a sinful dependence on Anatoly Kashpirovsky, a healer whose televised seances filled Moscow stadiums in the late 1980s.

“Immediately after that, whatever he was trying to tell me I did not hear, and whatever he was trying to get me to do I did not obey,” she said. “I was amazed to feel a heavenly divine force protecting me.”

If something spiritual draws believers to the cathedral, it is a sense of community well-being that holds them.

Father Adrian’s close-knit parish is a successful business, thriving on political influence, mutual self-help and outside charity.

Parishioners say the short, bearded 50-year-old priest works exuberantly but on edge for 18 hours a day, exploding at times when hovering favor-seekers press too hard.

Born in Ukraine, the youngest of five children of a peasant soldier killed in World War II, Adrian was guided by a mentor priest to degrees in music and teaching. He taught himself architecture and, after seminary and ordination, earned the name “Adrian the Builder” for his ability to restore churches.

Epiphany Cathedral, where he took charge in early 1989, was his eighth restoration. By then he was quite an operator, adept at scrounging construction materials and working without blueprints.

“He was very good at intercepting truckloads of bricks and sand,” said Natalya K. Kekerova, a local journalist. “He simply stopped a truck and told the driver: ‘Look, brother, I need these bricks to be sent there and there. Please, in the name of God . . . ‘ “

Watching him in action, believers flocked to the cathedral with savings, jewelry and long-hidden icons.

“Enthusiasm was enormous,” said Galina I. Krasilnikova, the parish school principal. “It was a holiday of the soul.”

The popular priest was elected to the City Council in 1989 and to the Moscow Regional Council in 1990. He campaigned to help Mikhail S. Guberman, director of Glukhovsky Textile in Noginsk, win election to Russia’s Parliament. Guberman’s mill, the biggest in Russia, later put up $993,000 of the $1.75 million drawn from local enterprises to restore the cathedral.

Father Adrian’s Sunday services regularly draw several hundred people. More than 200 are active sewing clerical robes, tending the farm, cooking in the soup kitchen. They work for a token salary, a free meal or occasional material help. Food and clothing from Germany and Austria go first to church workers and students.

“Adrian has always been obsessed by the idea of setting up a parish that would be as self-sufficient and independent as possible from the outside world,” the Moscow newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets said. “He tried to implement that idea in Noginsk.”

Independence for Father Adrian meant cutting financial ties with his clerical superiors in Moscow--and forging new ones with secular Noginsk.

Metropolitan Yuvenaly, bishop of the Moscow Region, asked repeatedly for charity contributions of 20% to 50% of Epiphany Cathedral’s income between 1989 and 1992, according to parish records.

In those years the Moscow hierarchy made a single grant to the parish: $290,000 to build a seminary. Father Adrian was even more sparing, sending Yuvenaly a total of $90,000.

“People need to see what is being done with their donations,” Father Adrian explained over soup in the parish kitchen. “The top priority for the church is to feed hungry people, but you don’t see the Moscow Patriarchy doing that. They appropriate people’s money without any accounting. That is a great sin.”

One man who identifies with Father Adrian’s revolt is Noginsk Mayor Vladimir N. Laptev. He also helps underwrite it.

The local government donates real estate for the expanding church parish and pays to lease some of it back. Elite teachers leave public schools, drawn by the freedom to write their own curriculum at Father Adrian’s--but stay on the public payroll.

A former middleweight boxer elected mayor in 1989, Laptev points to a red phone on his desk and recalls the humiliation of taking orders from Soviet bureaucrats in Moscow.

Today, the city is more autonomous, and so he believes that parishes in the church should be. Father Adrian’s money comes from the city’s people, helps the city’s needy and eases the city’s financial burden, “so why should any of it go to Yuvenaly?”

“If I worked for the church,” the mayor reflected, “I too would have been fired for being rebellious.”

The priest’s troubles began in his moment of triumph in mid-1991.

He had attained the rank of archimandrite, a priest of distinction. A major church procession bearing remains of an 18th-Century saint made a stop in Noginsk that summer so that Alexei II, patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias, could hail Adrian the Builder as a model servant.

Overjoyed, the priest immortalized the procession with a fresco on the cathedral’s ceiling. Prominent faces included those of Alexei II, Yuvenaly and Father Adrian himself.

A Moscow church commission later condemned the fresco because it glorified people still living.

That summer, Father Adrian had a run-in with Pamyat, an ultranationalist, anti-Semitic group that has some Orthodox priests as members. Pamyat wanted one of its priests installed in a nearby church that Father Adrian oversaw, but he would not allow it.

Pamyat’s leader, Dmitri Vasiliev, began writing Alexei II and threatening to “yank (Adrian) by the beard from the altar.”

The night of Dec. 13, 1991, according to a police report, Vitaly G. Sviridov, an altar boy, unlocked Epiphany Cathedral and alerted Sergei V. Kudrin, a deacon, who slipped in and stole its most valued artwork, the Icon of All Saints, then worth an estimated $45,000.

Two days later, detectives arrested both 18-year-olds and recovered the icon.

The boys obtained a Pamyat lawyer and made a startling assertion: They stole the icon to publicize a complaint they said the authorities were ignoring--that Father Adrian had raped the altar boy and made homosexual advances to the deacon.

The scandal absorbed, divided and confused a community accustomed to shrugging off such charges as Soviet KGB frame-ups to discredit popular priests.

This time, the accusers were churchgoers. As black-clad Pamyat militants packed the courtroom, a judge set the boys free after eight months in jail, pending an investigation.

A second trial cleared the priest and gave the boys suspended sentences for grand larceny. By that time, a church commission set up by Yuvenaly had condemned Father Adrian for “indecent conduct.” It also reported “canonical violations,” including the self-serving fresco.

Citing the report, Yuvenaly stripped Father Adrian of his duties on Oct. 1, 1992, turning Epiphany Cathedral into a battleground.

A group of parishioners heard the announcement in Moscow and raced home, overtaking the carload of Noginsk priests chosen by the bishop to seize the church.

“We stood in their path,” recalled Zoya I. Rumyantseva, an imposing nurse at the parish clinic who joined a human barricade at the cathedral door. The defenders swelled to more than 200, forcing the priests to retreat, and organized a 10-day vigil.

Two later incursions were halted--first on the steps, then at the outer gate.

It did not stop there.

Last year, Yuvenaly ordered Father Adrian to a distant monastery and defrocked him for refusing the post. The priest then joined the New York-based Orthodox church, and Yuvenaly sued for the parish property.

Prodded by Pamyat, the New York hierarchy defrocked its new priest for the same “heinous moral crimes” alleged by the Moscow church. Father Adrian then joined his parish with the breakaway Ukrainian church, which last month ordained him a bishop.

Amid all the scandal, the Epiphany congregation split, and a minority left. Three parish teachers were fired for opposing their boss--one accused him of biting her finger in a scuffle--and seven children were taken out of the school.

As these dissidents see it, Father Adrian would have been charged with crimes or run out of town long ago had he not been so cozy with the mayor, who influences the prosecutor and police.

“There are no secrets from the Almighty,” Lidia Kuzmina, a founder of the congregation who defected, told Volkhonka. “Everything people are whispering about him will someday come to light.”

But 800 parishioners have signed a petition in his favor and carry on.

“It all boils down to the fact that this is a very profitable parish that somebody wants to get hold of,” said Alexander M. Petrov, the deputy chief of police detectives, who investigated the rape claim and is so dubious of it that he left two sons in the school.

The alleged rape victim’s father, interviewed twice by The Times, could produce no copy of the rape complaint his boy supposedly filed a month before stealing the icon. Nor would the Moscow hierarchy show any report detailing Father Adrian’s “indecent conduct.”

“As for the moral question, you must know that not everything should be discovered,” Father Alexander Ganaba, Yuvenaly’s secretary, said in an interview. “There are church secrets that should be kept secret.”

Dismissing the issue of parish donations as irrelevant, he insisted that Father Adrian’s gravest sin was refusing a new assignment. “We’re like the army, only holier,” he said.

That is exactly the point of so much criticism rising from other active parishes.

Unless the hierarchy sheds its secretive, dictatorial ways, their priests contend, the Russian Orthodox Church can never fully revive or hold together.

Said Father Gleb P. Yakunin, a member of Parliament: “In every sphere of Russian life, even the Communist Party, changes are occurring. Yet the church hierarchy remains the iceberg of a totalitarian regime.”

The next battle for Epiphany Cathedral is in Russia’s arbitration court.

Its judges, who sit in Moscow, are sensitive to the patriarch’s close ties with Yeltsin. Legal specialists predict they will order police in Noginsk to evict Father Adrian.

So the priest is arming himself for a battle of prayer and wills.

Standing before his congregation during that chilly Sunday Mass, he wore a tall gold hat and wielded a gold crosier, emblems of his new bishop’s rank. Archpriest Father Vladimir Medved, his lifelong mentor, spoke.

“May all those here today love you and protect you from all evil-wishers,” he intoned. “Oh God, may all evil-wishers retreat in peace and never touch this holy church, this blessed flock or yourself!”

Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.