Plot in Progress

As it has on almost every Sunday morning since last May, a sleek black limousine pulled away from the Soviet legation in Tel Aviv last week, threaded its way through the stony Judean hills to Jerusalem, and rolled to a stop before a wide white building with green onion domes. Out of the car and into the incense-filled Russian Orthodox Church filed Pavel Ivanovich Ershov, Soviet minister to Israel, and some of his top staff aides. The churchgoing Communists were adding some new wrinkles to an old plot they had inherited from the czars.

More than 100 years ago, a czarist agent, Bishop Euspensy, hatched the scheme of wresting the Jerusalem patriarchate away from his church's liturgical twin, the Greek Orthodox Church. The best he could do was to wean a few Christian Arabs away from the Greek church. But the czars, eager to extend their power through the Middle East, kept the plot boiling. In 1860, the Russian Palestine Society was founded. Its main business: buying up property in Jerusalem and Nazareth and running a theological seminary where the students boned up on power politics when they were not chanting their Kyrie eleisons. It also guided pilgrims around the Holy Land.

The Russian Revolution ended the trade in pilgrims, property and Orthodox propaganda. For 24 years, dust thickened on the icons in the Russian churches in Palestine. Then in 1941, the Politburo ordered the churches reopened and dusted off the old czarist scheme. All Orthodox prelates in the Middle East were invited on a junket to Moscow to view the installation of Patriarch Alexei, hero of Leningrad.

This year the plot has turned less subtle. Since January the Soviets have: 1) reopened the Russian Palestine Society under the direction of agents from Moscow, 2) replaced Archimandrite Vladimir with English-speaking Ignaty Polikarp, thirtyish, handsome and Communist trained, and 3) won over many Communist-voting Christian Arabs to the Russian church.

Thus far, the Greek clergy have resisted Russian blandishment, and remained loyal to their own church, but Greek Orthodox supporters are bracing for trouble. Said one last week: "Polikarp and his fellows . . . can travel freely throughout Israel and over the border into the Arab states without fear of a police check. An awfully large heap of gold sovereigns can be hidden away in a big car like theirs. And the Greek clergy are very poor men." Meanwhile, the Russians from the embassy keep attending Sunday services and praying for the worst.

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