The Sword and the Shield

by Christopher Andrew

  The Soviet press, meanwhile, accused the Witnesses’ Brooklyn headquarters of organizing an aggressive crusade against the countries of the Soviet Bloc.102

  The Centre was disturbed by reports that, even in labor camps, “the Jehovah leaders and authorities did not reject their hostile beliefs and in camp conditions continued to carry out their Jehovah work.” A conference of KGB officers working on operations against Jehovah’s Witnesses met at Kishinev in November 1967 to discuss new measures “to prevent the sectarians’ hostile work” and “ideological subversion:”

  The agencies were to strengthen in every way their agent positions among Jehovah’s Witnesses within the country; they were to collect and build up information about young members of the sect and about the Jehovah authorities for operational purposes, recruitment, compromise and for open countermeasures… The conference recognized that it was essential to select and promote to leading positions in the sect, with the help of agents, people who were barely literate, who lacked initiative and were unlikely to stimulate the activity of subordinate units.103

  The seriousness with which the conference discussed the Jehovist menace was, once again, almost surreal. The allegedly dangerous conspiracy which the Centre devoted so many resources to combating amounted to little more than the attempt by small groups to worship together in private, mostly in each others’ homes, and their refusal to perform military service. Yet the conspiracy was judged so dangerous that the conference agreed on the need for agent penetration of the Brooklyn headquarters and its west European branches.104 It was also feared that Brooklyn might correctly identify some Jehovah’s Witnesses who had gone long periods without arrest as KGB agents. The conference therefore agreed on the need to “create a reliable reserved of understudy agents” for use if the existing agents were unmasked.105

  As well as grossly exaggerating the menace of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and other sectarians, the KGB Sbornik also contained self-congratulatory accounts of the active measures used to destabilize them. One such case study in the mid-1970s concerned the leader of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Khmelnitskaya Oblast, codenamed PAVEL, whose “criminal activities consisted of drawing new members into the sect, conducting illegal gatherings, inducing young believers to refuse to serve in the army, holding and disseminating religious literature.” The KGB concocted “well-documented defamatory materials” which were used in a press campaign against him. Even PAVEL’s children from his first marriage were persuaded to sign a newspaper article about him. Finally an evening meeting was arranged by the KGB in Shepetovka, attended by local Jehovah’s Witnesses, as well as representatives of the Party, provincial administration, collective farms and newspapers, at which PAVEL was subjected to a series of doubtless well-rehearsed denunciations of his alleged indolence, cruelty, egoism and dissolute behavior. The KGB report on the meeting noted with satisfaction that the evening ended in PAVEL’s utter humiliation and the “unrestrained sobbing” of his second wife.106

  Like the other sectarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses showed an astonishing capacity to survive persecution. During the Gorbachev era, the KGB’s campaign against them gradually disintegrated. In October 1989, doubtless to the outrage of many KGB officers, the head of the European department of the Brooklyn Centre, Willi Pohl, arrived in Moscow as the guest of the Council of Religious Affairs to visit Soviet Witness communities and discuss their future.107

  DURING THE LATER 1980s the Moscow Patriarchate seemed to be trying neither to fall behind nor to overtake the speed at which the official programs of glasnost and perestroika were developing. In 1991, a year after succeeding Pimen as Patriarch, Aleksi II, finally dissociated himself and the Russian Orthodox Church from the “declaration of loyalty” to the Soviet system issued by Metropolitan Sergi in 1927. When an interviewer reminded him that, a quarter of a century earlier, the Council for Religious Affairs had classed him as one of those bishops most loyal to the state, the Patriarch asked for forgiveness and understanding of his attitude at the time. As the Soviet Union began to disintegrate in the final months of 1991, Aleksi II declared that “Russia has suffered a severe illness in the form of Communism.”108

  The Russian Orthodox Church, however, continued to be haunted by its past history of KGB penetration. After the failure of the August coup in 1991, the Russian government’s Committee on Freedom of Conscience, which included Father Gleb Yakunin, was given access to a section of the KGB archives which showed that some members of the Orthodox hierarchy had been KGB agents. After Yakunin published a selection of the documents, the archives were closed once more; he was accused of having betrayed state secrets to the United States and threatened with a private prosecution. 109 Father Gleb remained defiant. He wrote to the Patriarch in January 1994:

  If the Church is not cleansed of the taint of the spy and informer, it cannot be reborn. Unfortunately, only one archbishop—Archbishop Khrizostom of Lithuania—has had the courage publicly to acknowledge that in the past he worked as an agent, and has revealed his codename: RESTAVRATOR. No other Church hierarch has followed his example, however.

  The most prominent agents of the past include DROZDOV—the only one of the churchmen to be officially honored with an award by the KGB of the USSR, in 1988, for oustanding intelligence services—ADAMANT, OSTROVSKY, MIKHAILOV, TOPAZ and ABBAT. It is obvious that none of these or the less exalted agents are preparing to repent. On the contrary, they deliver themselves of pastoral maxims on the allegedly neutral character of informing on the Church, and articles have appeared in the Church press justifying the role of the informer as essential for the survival of the Church in an anti-religious state.

  The codenames I discovered in the archives of the KGB belong to the top hierarchs of the Moscow Patriarchate.110

  The letter to Aleksi II was unprecedented in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church—for, as the Patriarch must surely have been aware, DROZDOV, the most important of the KGB agents discovered by Father Gleb in the KGB archives, was in fact himself.

  TWENTY-NINE

  THE POLISH POPE AND THE RISE OF SOLIDARITY

  For forty years all challenges to the Communist one-party states established in eastern Europe in the wake of the Second World War were successfully contained. Opponents of the regimes usually felt too powerless to organize any visible opposition to them. On the rare occasions when the survival of the one-party state seemed in question—in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968—it was swiftly and brutally shored up with an overwhelming show of force. The Polish challenge to the Soviet system, however, eventually succeeded where the Hungarian Uprising and the Prague Spring failed. Though contained for a decade, it was never mastered and eventually began the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc.

  The Polish crisis began in a wholly novel and unforeseen way—not, as in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, with the emergence of revisionist governments, but with the election of October 16, 1978 of Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, Archbishop of Kraków, as Pope John Paul II. No Soviet leader was tempted any longer to repeat Stalin’s scornful question at the end of the Second World War, “How many divisions has the Pope?” The undermining of the empire built by Stalin after Yalta was begun not by the military might of the West but by the moral authority of the first Polish Pope, which rapidly eclipsed that of the PUWP (the Polish Communist Party).

  Boris Aristov, the Soviet ambassador in Warsaw, reported to the Politburo that the Polish authorities regarded the new Pope as “a virulent anti-Communist.”1 The Centre agreed. Since 1971 Wojtyła had been the target of PROGRESS operations designed to monitor his allegedly subversive role in undermining the authority of the Polish one-party state.2 The day after Wojtyła’s election, the head of the KGB mission in Warsaw, Vadim Pavlov, sent Moscow an assessment of him by the SB, the KGB’s Polish equivalent:

  Wojtyła holds extreme anti-Communist views. Without openly opposing the Socialist system, he has criticized the way in which the state agencies of the Polish People’s Republic have functioned, making th
e following accusations:

  • that the basic human rights of Polish citizens are restricted;

  • that there is unacceptable exploitation of the workers, whom “the Catholic Church must protect against the workers’ government”;

  • that the activities of the Catholic Church are restricted and Catholics treated as second-class citizens;

  • that an extensive campaign is being conducted to convert society to atheism and impose an alien ideology on the people;

  • that the Catholic Church is denied its proper cultural role, thereby depriving Polish culture of its national treasures.

  In Wojtyła’s view, the concept of the one-party state “meant depriving the people of its sovereignty.” “Collectivization,” he believed, “led to the destruction of the individual and of his personality.” The fact that he dared to say what most Polish Catholics thought seemed to both the KGB and the SB evidence of his commitment to ideological subversion.

  The SB report forwarded to the Centre reveals that as early as 1973-4 the Polish Procurator-general had considered prosecuting Wojtyła for his sermons. Three of his homilies—in Warsaw on May 5, 1973, in the Kraków steelmaking suburb of Nowa Huta on May 12, 1973 and in Kraków on November 24, 1974—were judged in breach of article 194 of the Criminal Code, which provided for terms of imprisonment of from one to ten years for seditious statements during religious services. According to an SB informant, Wojtyła had declared during one of his sermons, “The Church has the right to criticize all manifestations and aspects of the activity of the authorities if they are unacceptable to the people.”3 Wojtyła, however, was protected by his eminence. Though the UB (predecessor of the SB) had interned the Polish primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszýnski, for three years in the 1950s, by the 1970s the Gierek regime no longer dared to arrest a cardinal.The SB thus lapsed into a tone of largely impotent outrage as it denounced Wojtyła’s “moral support to the initiatives of anti-socialist elements.”

  In June 1976 Gierek repeated the mistake which had led to Gomułka’s downfall six years earlier and ordered a sudden increase in food prices. After a wave of protest strikes and riots, the price rises were withdrawn. On September 30 Wojtyła set up a fund to assist the families of those in the Kraków archdiocese who had been imprisoned for taking part in the protests or injured in clashes with the riot police.4 He also took an active interest in the formation after the strike wave of KOR, the Workers Defence Committee, which sought to create an alliance of workers and dissident intellectuals. According to SB surveillance reports, during the autumn of 1976 Wojtyła had a series of meetings with KOR’s founders in the apartment of the writer Bohdan Cywiński, later a prominent Solidarity activist.5 The SB also reported that he met individually KOR militants from a great variety of backgrounds: among them the dissident Communist Jacek Kurón, the wartime resistance fighter Jan Józef Lipski, the ex-Maoist Antoni Macierewicz and the writer Jerzy Andrzejewski.6

  Wojtyła rarely read newspapers, listened to the news on the radio or watched it on television. Every fortnight, however, Father Andrzej Bardecki, the Church’s liaison officer with the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny (to which Wojtyła was a regular contributor), came to his study in the archbishop’s palace at Kraków and gave him a news briefing.7 Bardecki had been a target of PROGRESS operations by KGB illegals ever since BOGUN, posing as a West German press photographer, had first made contact with him in 1971.8 In 1977 another illegal, Ivan Ivanovich Bunyk, codenamed FILOSOV (“Philosopher”), who had been instructed by the Centre to develop sources inside the Polish Church, had a series of meetings with Bardecki. Bunyk had been born in France but had emigrated as a teenager with his Ukrainian family to the Soviet Union in 1947. In 1970 he had returned to France as a KGB illegal, trained as a journalist and set himself up as a freelance writer and poet. On his first meeting with Bardecki in 1977, FILOSOV probably presented him with one or more of the books he had published in France with the aid of KGB subsidies. Though the files noted by Mitrokhin do not include FILOSOV’s reports from Poland, there is little doubt that his main priority in cultivating Bardecki was to seek out information on Wojtyła.9

  SB surveillance reports during 1977 showed Wojtyła aligning himself with a variety of protest movements. On March 23 he received the student organizers of a petition of protest to the authorities and gave them his support.10 Increasingly he invoked the example of St. Stanisław, the martyred bishop of ancient Kraków whose silver sarcophagus formed part of the high altar in the cathedral, as a symbol of resistance to an unjust state:

  St. Stanisław has become the patron saint of moral and social order in the country… He dared to tell the King himself that he was bound to respect the law of God… He was also the defender of the freedom that is the inalienable right of every man, so that the violation of that freedom by the state is at the same time a violation of the moral and social order.11

  It is easy to imagine the rage in the Centre as Wojtyła continued with impunity to defend the rights of the individual against violation by the Polish state.

  Among the greatest triumphs of Wojtyła’s years at Kraków was the consecration on May 15, 1977 of the great new church at Nowa Huta, constructed after many years of opposition from a regime which had sought to exclude a visible Catholic presence from what it intended as a model “Socialist city.”12 In his sermon to a congregation of over 20,000, Wojtyła gave his blessing to those protesting against the death of a KOR activist, Stanisław Pyjas, who was widely believed—despite official denials—to have been murdered by the SB.13 That evening a long procession of mourners wound its way through the streets of Kraków to Wawel Castle, where a Committee of Student Solidarity was formed. Similar committees followed in other cities, all independent of the officially sponsored Socialist Union of Polish Students.14

  As church bells rang out across Poland on October 16, 1978 and the streets filled with excited crowds to celebrate Wojtyła’s election as pope, the PUWP Politburo reacted with private shock and alarm. Publicly, the Politburo reluctantly felt compelled to associate itself with the mood of popular rejoicing and sent a lengthy telegram of congratulations to the Vatican, expressing hypocritical joy that for the first time “a son of the Polish nation… sits on the papal throne.” What particularly disturbed the KGB, however, was the evidence that among many PUWP members, even some senior officials, the joy was genuine.15 As well as sending official reports on Polish popular rejoicing, KGB officers in Warsaw also unofficially relayed to their colleagues at the Centre some of the political jokes circulating immediately after John Paul II’s election. The white smoke from the Vatican chimney, traditionally used to signal the election of a pope, was said to have been followed on this occasion by red smoke; Wojtyła had burned his Party card. According to another satirical account, the new pope had secretly visited the Polish interior minister, who was responsible for the SB, and announced after the election, “Comrade minister! Your important instructions have been carried out!”16

  Two days after the election, Aristov, the Soviet ambassador, reported to Moscow in more serious vein:

  The leadership of the Polish People’s Republic considers that the danger of Wojtyła’s move to the Vatican is that it will now clearly be more difficult to use the Vatican as a moderating influence on the Polish episcopate in its relations with the state. The Catholic Church will now make even greater efforts to consolidate its position and increase its role in the social and political life of the country.

  At the same time, our friends consider that Wojtyła’s departure from the country also has its positive side, since the reactionary part of the episcopate has been deprived of its leader—one who had an excellent chance of becoming Primate of the Polish Catholic Church.

  Aristov criticized the Polish Politburo for compromising its ability to resist the Church’s future demands by its past weakness in permitting the construction of new churches, the ordination of more priests and larger print-runs for Catholic publications.17

  A
t the time of Wojtyła’s election, Poland was probably the world’s most Catholic country. The KGB estimated that 90 percent of the population were Catholic.18 With 569 ordinations in 1978, Poland had the highest ratio of priestly vocations to population anywhere on earth. In total, there were 19,193 Polish priests and 5,325 students in seminaries.19 Somewhat alarmist KGB assessments put the figures higher still.20 A steady rise in religious practice continued over the next few years. According to a secret study circulated to the PUWP central committee, “This phenomenon emerged particularly acutely among the intelligentsia, especially among persons with higher education.” In 1978 25 percent of those with higher education were reported to engage in private prayer at home; by 1983 the figure had risen to over 50 percent. The central committee study plausibly attributed the increase to the “social-political crisis” and the influence of the Polish Pope.21 Even many Polish Party officials felt in awe of Wojtyła’s intense, mystical spirituality. They reported to Moscow that he often spent six to eight hours a day in prayer. On entering his private chapel, aides would sometimes find him lying motionless on the marble floor, his arms outstretched in the shape of a cross.22

  The KGB privately denounced some of John Paul II’s first acts in the Vatican as “anti-Soviet gestures.” Among them was his order on the day after his election that the red zuchetto—cardinal’s skullcap—which he had worn at the papal conclave should be taken to Lithuania by two priests from the Kraków archdiocese and placed on the altar of the church of the Virgin of Mercy in Vilnius.23 What most concerned the Centre during the early weeks of the new pontificate, however, was the Pope’s evident determination to give the Vatican a major voice in world affairs. Though John Paul II’s concerns ranged widely over the problems of peacekeeping and human rights around the globe, his first priority was the situation in Poland and eastern Europe.24 The Centre was particularly suspicious of the Pope’s appointment of the Lithuanianborn Andris Backis as one of his chief advisers on the Vatican’s relations with the Soviet Bloc. Backis’s father had served as pre-war ambassador of independent Lithuania in Paris, and Backis himself was believed to follow in the same “bourgeois” tradition. His appointment was, in the Centre’s view, another “anti-Soviet gesture.”25 On November 5 the Pope made his first official visit outside the Vatican to Assisi, the city of St. Francis, patron saint of Italy. A voice from the crowd urged him to remember eastern Europe: “Don’t forget the Church of Silence!” “It’s not a Church of Silence any more,” replied John Paul II, “because it speaks with my voice.”26