MARK R. ELLIOTT
Reading One Word of Truth brought back a flood of memories of many of the same people, places, and policy debates that have figured prominently in my professional life, parallel to those of Michael Bourdeaux. I first met Michael in October 1983, at the beginning of one month of research at his Keston College Library and Archive, located in a suburb of London, England. The back story to what gave occasion for our first meeting dates back a decade, to 1974, when, after I had completed my Ph.D. at the University of Kentucky, my wife and I made our first trip to the Soviet Union. As people of faith, Darlene and I took advantage of our two weekends in the Soviet Union to worship with fellow believers in Moscow and Kyiv. Those brief hours with Christians under duress were unforgettable and life-altering. In Moscow, wandering labyrinthine streets in the vicinity of the capital’s lone Evangelical Christian-Baptist church, a lady in Sunday dress passed us, pointed heavenward, and beckoned us to follow her to worship. In Kyiv, following another service, Darlene gave a little girl a pocket calendar with a reproduction of Sallman’s Head of Christ. You would have thought this was a gift of gold as some forty people in the church courtyard pressed close around to gain a glance at this popular rendering of the Savior. In sharp contrast to our worship in two living churches was our visit to Leningrad’s Kazan Cathedral, converted for use as the Soviet Union’s premier anti-religious temple: The Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism. The hostility to religious belief was on full display, with exhibits exclusively upon negative chapters in church history. Professionally, I came back from the Soviet Union a different person. I vowed, given time, to change course from a research focus on Soviet military and diplomatic history to one devoted to Russian church history and current conditions facing people of faith in the USSR.
Thus, when a sabbatical was forthcoming from my employer for fall 1983, I was off to England and Keston College to study the scope of Western missions that were rendering aid to Soviet-bloc believers. Keston’s resources for my project were abundant: vertical files on mission organizations, relevant monographs and serials, an archive of primary sources, including samizdat (“self-published,” fugitive documents secreted from East to West), and an entrée to an unmatched coterie of specialists. I was thus able to rub shoulders with perhaps the greatest concentration anywhere of scholars and activists keen to publicize the trials and “be the voice” of Soviet-bloc believers. In addition to Michael Bourdeaux, I made my first acquaintance with Russian Orthodox specialist Philip Walters, editor of Keston’s academic journal, Religion in Communist Lands (later, Religion, State and Society); Jane Ellis, later author of two outstanding monographs, The Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History (London: Routledge, 1986) and The Russian Orthodox Church: Triumphalism and Defensiveness (London: Macmillan, 1996); Walter Sawatsky, author of the still-must read Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II (Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 1981); Michael Rowe, later author of Russian Resurrection (London: Marshall Pickering, 1994), another volume on Russian Evangelicals; Marite Sapiets, later author of True Witness: The Story of Seventh-Day Adventists in the Soviet Union (Keston, UK: Keston College, 1990); John Anderson, later author of Religion, State, and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Ginte Damusis, later an ambassador in the service of an independent Lithuania—an eventuality unimaginable in 1983; Sandy Oestreich, later a missionary for decades in Russia and Armenia; and Malcolm Walker, Keston’s indefatigable librarian. At its height Keston College employed 21 specialists who, along with part-time volunteers, could read 19 East European languages (157).
Michael Bourdeaux and his researchers-in-residence have been, above all else, advocates for unfettered freedom of conscience in Communist states. This positive defense of the right to believe was persistently under assault from a surprisingly diverse array of forces making light of or ignoring violations of religious liberty in the Soviet orbit. Those undermining Keston’s advocacy, directly or by implication, included not only Soviet-bloc states and their security services, but also East-bloc captive church spokesmen and most of the international ecumenical movement, most prominently the World Council of Churches and the U.S. National Council of Churches.
Over time the ecumenical movement came to view socialism more favorably than capitalism. This political and economic stance contributed to the employment of what One Word of Truth calls “selectivity of …conscience” (158), which I have long similarly labeled “selective compassion.” This may be defined as a coupling of a justifiable condemnation of human rights’ abuses on the right (by non-Communist, authoritarian regimes) with a shameful downplaying or ignoring of human rights’ abuses on the left (in Communist states). (To be sure, during the Cold War, anti-Communist groups and governments employed the same double standard in reverse: highlighting human rights’ infringements in Communist states while turning a blind eye to the same abuses in right-wing, authoritarian states.)
Representative of Soviet efforts to counter Keston’s truth-telling was a 1969 article in the magazine Nauka i religiia [Russian: Science and Religion] arguing that “Bourdeaux’s scribbles” formed part of “the arsenal of imperialist propaganda, poisoning the minds of people in the West with the venom of anti-Soviet ideas” (119). The Soviet state also pressed Russian churches into service of its disinformation efforts. One year after Bourdeaux’s Opium of the People (London: Faber and Faber, 1965) revealed the drastic extent of Khrushchev’s anti-religious campaign, for example, Patriarch Aleksy I wrote Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey, attacking the book. In his view “it portrays in a distorted manner our country’s attitude to freedom of conscience” and “falsifies and misrepresents the position of religion and church life in the USSR” (110).
Just as much was required of state-recognized Evangelical Christian-Baptist leaders. On a 1968 visit to England, Moscow ECB pastor and unofficial ECB “foreign minister” Mikhail Zhidkov met with Bourdeaux and pointedly objected to the latter’s defense of unregistered Baptists in his Religious Ferment in Russia (London: Palgrave, 1968). For its part, the ECB house organ, Bratskii vestnik [Russian: Fraternal Herald], could assert, “Not only do the Russian Baptists not consider Communism to be an obstacle to evangelism, but they contend that its socio-economic principles do not contradict the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (197).
One can sympathize to some extent with church spokespersons under duress, pressured to sing the song of their captors. After all, those of us in the West should make allowances in light of the fact that we must contemplate how courageous or cowed we might have been under the same circumstances. It is altogether another matter, however, to absolve church folk in the West who knew better when they alleged greater religious liberty in the East than was the case, and when they lauded the superiority of Socialism. In hyperbolic defense of conditions for believers in Soviet-bloc states, Paul Hansen of the Lutheran World Federation thus contended, “For every story about congregations which come together secretly in the woods, we can tell about thousands of others which gather in their church buildings, with state permission” (215).
Above all, the World Council of Churches came to put the best face it could on Soviet church-state policy. Once the Kremlin permitted churches in the USSR to join the WCC from 1961, it could rely upon its ecumenical representatives to work to suppress any negative publicity regarding conditions facing believers in the Soviet orbit. Thus, at the WCC’s Fifth General Assembly in Nairobi in 1975, in response to the courageous pleas of Father Gleb Yakunin of the Russian Orthodox Church for an ecumenical defense of believers’ rights in the Soviet Union, WCC apparatchiks worked overtime to delay, sidetrack, and undermine such an outcome. For his outspoken rejection of the party line on church-state relations, Soviet courts would later sentence Fr. Gleb to eight years in prison in the 1980s.
Regarding ecumenical relations, Bourdeaux notably lauds the expertise and sagacity of Episcopalian Paul Anderson, who for decades gave the U.S. National Council of Churches a clear-eyed picture of the fraught circumstances of Soviet church-state relations. Anderson’s insightful People, Church and State in Modern Russia (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1944) was one of the rare, early volumes offering credible documentation on the subject, as did his much later memoir, No East or West (Paris: YMCA Press, 1985). (On a personal note, Paul Anderson is the only person Bourdeaux and I have known who was an eyewitness to Lenin’s declaration of the October Russian Revolution. As a YMCA staffer in Petrograd in 1917, he was on hand in the headquarters of the revolution in the Smolny Convent when Lenin proclaimed his party’s revolutionary uprising [106].) In 1972, the year Paul Anderson retired from the NCC, he visited Keston College and shared his concern with Michael over the “growing pro-Soviet mood in church circles” in the U.S. (130).
The trouble was that most Western ecumenists were to the left of Keston in favoring discretion exclusively (quiet diplomacy), while others to the right of Keston, such as two particularly problematic East European missions, Joe Bass’s Underground Evangelism and Richard Wurmbrand’s Jesus to the Communist World, practiced combative, public protest that too often conflated the cause of religious liberty and politically charged anti-Communism (103-04). Bourdeaux has frequently been accused of being in the latter camp, which I would argue is a misreading of his motives and actions. As early as 1965 he wrote in Opium of the People:
Some take the attitude that any publicity about the real state of affairs in the Soviet Union is likely to make the situation for Christians very much worse. This may have been true in Stalin’s time, but it is emphatically not so today. There has been every sign in the last few years that Khrushchev’s Russia is sensitive to world opinion…. The Soviet Government would like to have a phantom Church—one which has no members at all within the USSR, but which has powerful international connections which can be used to support Soviet strategy. We must make it known that we see through this. (90).
In Leningrad, police arrested unregistered Baptist Aida Skripnikova on three occasions (1962, 1965, and 1968) for passing out handwritten Bible verses in public and for participation in unregistered worship services. She spent 1965- 66 and 1968-71 in the gulag. [Editor’s note: A similar fate awaits some religious believers in today’s Russia. Since mid-2016 the unregulated public (and sometimes private) distribution of religious literature and/or worship has resulted in numerous fines, typically for Muslims and Protestants. Since their national organization was outlawed as extremist in 2017, 29 Jehovah’s Witnesses have been incarcerated for up to seven and a half years, some in labor camps.]
In 1972 Keston published Skripnikova’s story of stalwart faith, which Bourdeaux reasonably contends, spared her an additional term in prison (123). Perhaps no case of the persecution of believers better illustrates the efficacy of public protest than the Soviet assault on the Pochaev Monastery in western Ukraine. Employing samizdat and his own firsthand, providential interviews with eyewitnesses, Bourdeaux publicized myriad state measures against defenseless Orthodox monks and pilgrims: arrests, confiscation of property, removal of elderly monastics to mental hospitals, conscription of novices into the army, and multiple injections of healthy monks to treat nonexistent dysentery (85-88). These revelations in Opium of the People “hit the press with some considerable force.” And:
There were consequences. Perhaps the most important was that the Soviets never did succeed in closing down the Pochaev Monastery. World opinion had been alerted, and it seemed that now the Soviets wanted to hold back from such a scandalous act against one of the most influential monasteries of the Russian Orthodox Church. (88).
The Soviet response was instead to convert Pochaev into a Potemkin village propaganda set, pretending to uphold freedom of religion. Yet, at least Bourdeaux’s public protest in print had spared the monastery dissolution. In a sentence, One Word of Truth is a rewarding read for anyone wanting to understand conditions faced by Christians in the Soviet Union in the post-Second World War era and the conflicting Western responses to their plight. Thankfully, Michael Bourdeaux was able to see his memoir published prior to his repose on 29 March 2021.
This review is an abridged version of the author’s lengthier piece published in Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe 41, no. 3 (2021), 49-70, used with permission.
Dr. Mark R. Elliott is Editor Emeritus of the East-West Church Report
