"Completely Loyal to the State"

Churches are full in the U.S.S.R.'s spiritual heartland

Ever since Christianity first reached it 1,100 years ago, the Ukraine has been strongly religious. Located southwest of Moscow, the region, with a population of 50 million, is agriculturally rich and deeply nationalist. In the 1930s Stalin all but crushed the autonomous Ukrainian Orthodox Church and in 1946 expunged Eastern-rite Roman Catholicism in favor of the more easily controlled Russian Orthodox Church. Even so, the Ukraine by official count still has 4,000 of the 11,000 Orthodox churches now open in the U.S.S.R.--only a fraction of the 53,000 churches in Russia before 1917. Protestant Ukrainians have been active since the early 1960s in a Baptist reform movement against state control. Half the reported 10,000 Soviet Protestants demanding emigration because of religious repression live in the Ukraine.

This fall TIME Moscow Bureau Chief Bruce Nelan, with two other reporters, toured the Ukraine. Though the itinerary was controlled, the officials did not monitor actual interviews. Nelan's report:

The Protestants in the Ukraine are a divided minority, while the Orthodox Church seems to be thriving. Orthodoxy's well-being is partly the result of a new nostalgia for the past apparent in the Soviet Union today. Along with all folk art, architecture and antique mementos, there is a great vogue for icons, church music and church history.

A typical Sunday scene takes place at the Cathedral of St. Vladimir in Kiev.

Inside, people are crammed shoulder to shoulder and spill outdoors into the courtyard. At the railing before the iconostasis, old men and women are so crowded they can hardly cross themselves. At their feet, small children kneel. The congregation is elderly as usual, but at least a quarter seem to be young or middleaged. The chanting and the choir, the incense, the smell of wax, the glow and reflection from hundreds of candles, the sheer body heat slowly become hypnotic. In one corner of the railing is a young woman in an expensive tailored suit, eyes closed, face pale, arms at her sides. She stands rigidly, not seeming to breathe.

Metropolitan Filaret of Kiev, who presided, later explains in his elegant headquarters residence that the surviving 4,000 churches are "more or less enough," despite the overflow visible at the cathedral. Parish priests, he adds, get a minimum of 150 rubles ($225) a month, often more, and usually a free, furnished apartment, sufficient to enable them to get by comfortably in the Soviet Union.

There are no Eastern-rite Catholic parishes left, the Metropolitan says. Despite reports in the West of 300 to 500 underground clergy, only "old priests and a few people" are left. Surprisingly, he declares that "the Soviet state is not an atheistic state. It consists of believers and nonbelievers. There are periods of strong antireligious propaganda and others of less."

The most affecting Orthodox display is in Oster, a 1,000-year-old town some 70 miles from Kiev. This is the diocese where Prince Vladimir proclaimed Christianity the state religion in A.D. 989. The bells of the Byzantine Church of the Resurrection are ringing. There is a red carpet. People offer flowers. Father Vladimir Shtepa, apologizing for his parish's lack of important icons, says: "The people are our treasure." The 5,000 parishioners are mostly farmers and seem old, though again some 30% are young. Shtepa professes a religious relativism: "The main principle of Christianity and Marxism is the same. Believers try to enter the kingdom of God, and Marxists strive for true Communism. The bright future for man and the kingdom of God--aren't they the same?"

In the assembly hall of the seminary in Odessa, portraits of metropolitans and archbishops on one wall stare at portraits of Politburo members facing them from the wall opposite. Copies of Pravda and Izvestiya are posted on bulletin boards, but the library has 25,000 theological works. Rector Alexander Khravchenko says there are 90 to 120 applications for 60 entering places each year, but the graduating class is the same size as in 1913.

He does not mention that this is one of only three seminaries left nationwide. Before the Revolution, for a much smaller population, there were 57.

What Orthodox priests feel personally no doubt varies, but they clearly know the rules. Says Igor Sokolov, the Council for Religious Affairs spokesman on the tour: "The Orthodox Church is completely loyal to the state. It is good that its priests go to a seminary where they see the relationship clearly--the archbishops on one wall and the Soviet leaders on the other. Without this training, priests might be uneducated village people, perhaps fanatics. It is better this way."

From this sophisticated state point of view, seminaries can be useful--if properly supervised. That may explain why the Soviet Baptists are supposed to get a seminary soon, their first since 1928.' The Baptist faith, the main Protestant group, was often persecuted by the Czars because of Orthodox dominance so that when Lenin suppressed Orthodoxy after the Revolution, he was at first lenient with Baptists. But since the late 1920s Baptists have not fared well. They number 200,000 in the Ukraine, about half the official total in the U.S.S.R.

The tidy Baptist prayer house in Irpen, a rural farming town, has no shortage of preachers or of listeners for a harvest festival; there are eight speakers. When the congregation of 300 lifts its collective voice in a Ukrainian gospel song, the balalaikas and violins are drowned out and the walls seem to vibrate.

The evening congregation in Kiev's Central Baptist Church wears citified clothes, and the singing is more sedate.

The more than 450 worshipers, too many for the building to hold, overflow outside, getting the word through a loudspeaker that echoes down the street. Pastor Yakov Dukhonchenko is Ukrainian senior presbyter for the government-recognized All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists, those Soviet Protestants who have chosen to accept state regulation. This makes him a rival of Georgi Vins, a leader of the reform Baptists, who was stripped of citizenship and exiled to the U.S. this year in a prisoner exchange. Says Dukhonchenko: "Georgi Vins said it was impossible to evangelize, but the churches function freely and can preach the Gospel. We baptize publicly, in open water." But to reform Baptists like Vins, evangelism means freedom to preach outside church walls and, especially, to instruct children in the faith.

Dissenters reject all state control, including government-required registration. But one Protestant reports 200 Baptist or Pentecostal congregations have been registered in the U.S.S.R. over the past five years, about half of them Ukrainian. Dukhonchenko reckons there are only about 8,000 reformers left in Kiev, and only 18,000 across the Soviet Union.

Vins' former congregation seems to be flourishing. It has built and registered the biggest Protestant church in Kiev. Sunday attendance runs from 500 to 1,000. The congregation remains in dependent of the still suspect All-Union Council. A handful of parishioners are cleaning the church when our sleek black limousine arrives. It leads them to decide not to say who their leaders are, though they admit that all members who were imprisoned during the Vins days are back. Recalling the times when the congregation had to worship clandestinely in the woods beyond the city, an old woman remarks, "Our services were of ten disturbed." Even now, a man adds "Sometimes at night windows are bro ken." There have also been two small fires in the church.

"We are the real Baptists," a man says softly. How so? "Ask our leaders,' comes the reply. Where are they? "I don't know." There is a pause. "You won't get the right story from the official Baptists," he says finally. "Mixing church and state is a sin."

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