Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the propaganda of the “Russian world,” and the overall system of state-church relations in Russia have sparked a growing interest in the history of Russian Orthodoxy, particularly in the 20th century. A now widespread phrase, which has practically become a meme, claims that the modern Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) was founded by Stalin in 1943.
It is evident, however, that the process of the state absorption of the Moscow Church began much earlier, when, in the mid-15th century, it unilaterally separated from the Kyiv Metropolis and, with the help of tsarist authorities — through violence and bribery — secured patriarchal status. Its representatives developed the idea of the “Third Rome,” which has become a foundational myth of the “Russian world.” Stalin’s actions in September 1943, however, launched a new era. From the highest levels of leadership down to parish structures, the ROC-MP fell under the control of the USSR’s security services, often becoming their active agents.
The issue of the Russian Orthodox Church’s collaboration with the KGB drew significant attention in the final years of the Soviet Union, and interest in it has only grown since, especially in light of efforts by the Moscow Patriarchate’s senior clergy to preserve that alliance. In post-Soviet Russia, as calls to revive the USSR re-emerged, this collaboration began to be reinterpreted — not as a shameful legacy, but even as something "necessary," particularly amid the resurgence of Stalin’s cult of personality. At the same time, access to archival evidence was increasingly restricted, and much of it was deliberately destroyed, especially given that many of the individuals featured in those files are still active as agents today. In Ukraine, after a burst of archival research during President Viktor Yushchenko’s term, the process was again obstructed under the pro-Russian Yanukovych regime. Still, the groundwork laid during that earlier period was not lost — over the past decade, research has resumed and even intensified.
One of the most prominent historians specializing in NKVD–KGB archives related to church affairs is Roman Skakun, deputy director of the Institute of Church History at the Ukrainian Catholic University. Now in his third year of military service with the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Skakun has just released a new book focused on Soviet secret police infiltration within the Kyiv Exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Roman Skakun. The NKVD–MGB–KGB Agent Network in the Orthodox Episcopate of Ukraine (1939–1964): Formation, Functions, and Behavioral Models. Lviv: Ukrainian Catholic University Press, 2025 – 360 pages.
While 1943 marked a major turning point in Soviet religious policy, the groundwork for church-state collaboration was already being laid in 1939. That year, as World War II began, Stalin’s regime — then aligned with Nazi Germany — participated in the partition of the Second Polish Republic, taking over Western Ukrainian territories populated by Greek Catholics and Orthodox Christians. It was at this point that the NKVD began recruiting agents within religious circles to operate in what it viewed as ideologically hostile territory. As a result, Roman Skakun’s study spans from 1939 to the end of Khrushchev’s rule in 1964.
Drawing on recently declassified archives from the former KGB of the Ukrainian SSR, the author reconstructs for the first time the makeup of the postwar Orthodox episcopate’s agent network. He outlines the specific tasks assigned to these bishop-agents and details how the Soviet authorities maintained control over their activities. Skakun devotes particular attention to how these agents were used to advance the Soviet atheist agenda during Nikita Khrushchev’s anti-religious campaign.
"Over the past thirty years, thanks to the 'archival revolution' of the early 1990s, we’ve made major strides in understanding the mechanisms of control that underpinned the Soviet regime — repression, propaganda, and social engineering," the author writes in the book’s preface. "Yet because that revolution was never fully completed—and due to the inaccessibility or outright destruction of KGB archives in most former Soviet republics — one of the key pillars of the system has remained largely overlooked by historians. In the absence of solid evidence, the topic has been left to more or less responsible journalists and commentators, with plenty of room for sensational speculation."
"What’s at issue," he explains, "is the sprawling agent network of the Soviet security services — an apparatus that began to take shape immediately after the Bolsheviks seized power and was already well-formed by the mid-1920s. It wasn’t just about random 'informants,' but rather systematic intelligence reporting — organized into personal files and group dossiers, which became the foundation of the repressive system. The only partial exception was the period of mass operations in 1937–1938, when centrally imposed arrest quotas outpaced the ability of agents to deliver targeted reports."
"It was this internal agent network that played a decisive role in crushing nationalist resistance and uncovering various so-called 'anti-Soviet' groups. Ultimately, it was also the main instrument for monitoring every segment of Soviet society — party and government officials, academics and artists, workers in key institutions and industries, youth, and, crucially, members of the clergy."
As the author notes, the scale of the Soviet agent network was staggering. "In the first years after World War II, the network operating in the Ukrainian SSR included nearly 150,000 informants, agents, and resident operatives, specifically, 146,927 as of January 1, 1947. At its peak in 1951, the number reached 203,750." After a series of internal purges and the onset of the Khrushchev-era 'thaw,' the figure dropped significantly, to around 28,500. By the early 1960s, it declined further to somewhere between 21,000 and 25,000. However, during the 1970s, the numbers began to climb again, reaching nearly 77,000 by 1988, and that was just the KGB. Separate networks operated under the police and other institutions.
“Failing to account for the role of the Soviet agent network, not only in launching repressions against ‘anti-Soviet’ groups and underground organizations, but also in monitoring legal institutions — leads to a seriously distorted analytical perspective,” Roman Skakun emphasizes. “This is especially true when analyzing how decisions were made and what motivated various key actors.”
“For example,” he continues, “understanding the extent to which security services controlled specific nodes within the church hierarchy — or entire church institutions — and uncovering the covert methods used to stage councils and other church events allows us to assess the Church’s actual agency in its dealings with the Soviet state and abroad. It helps determine how much of its public activity and internal development during that era was genuinely autonomous, and how much was externally directed.”
Claims that segments of the senior Orthodox clergy collaborated with Soviet security services — especially after the Russian Orthodox Church was officially reestablished in the fall of 1943 — have, as the author notes, become something of a cliché. “Talk of clergy ‘with epaulettes under their cassocks’ was common not only among internal and émigré Orthodox opposition circles,” writes Roman Skakun, “but also among religious groups persecuted by the Soviet regime, such as Roman and Greek Catholics, or in propaganda materials produced by the Ukrainian nationalist underground in the mid-1940s.” He traces the origins of these claims, noting that solid documentary evidence only became available in the early 1990s, when some researchers gained access to KGB archives of the former USSR. After the failed August 1991 coup, a special commission was created to investigate these archives. It officially addressed the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church, stating that the CPSU Central Committee and the KGB had unlawfully exploited the Church by infiltrating it with agents and recruiting clergy as informants.
“Agents operating through the Department for External Church Relations traveled abroad and carried out assignments for the KGB leadership under code names such as ‘Sviatoslav,’ ‘Adamant,’ ‘Mikhailov,’ ‘Topaz,’ ‘Nesterovich,’ ‘Kuznetsov,’ ‘Ognev,’ ‘Esaulenko,’ and others,” the Commission’s statement reads.
*“The nature of the tasks assigned to them indicates that the Department was not separate from the state, but had been transformed into a covert KGB agent center among the faithful […].
The KGB of the USSR exercised its complete dominance over the Church primarily in four areas: 1. support on the international stage for the internal and external policies of the CPSU […]; 2. use of clergy and religious figures traveling abroad to carry out KGB intelligence missions, as well as to monitor and ‘process’ foreign religious leaders visiting the USSR; 3. management of the internal life of religious organizations in the USSR, especially in the selection and placement of clergy […]; 4. organization of criminal and administrative persecution of clergy and believers who refused to comply with KGB demands and expressed independent views on political or religious matters in the country.”
The then-head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Alexy (Ridiger), succeeded in shutting down the commission’s work in 1992. However, its findings made their way into mainstream media and continue to circulate online to this day. As expected, the commission, which was later established within the ROC to review these materials, did nothing of substance. Of the entire episcopate, only one bishop — Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Lithuania — admitted to having served as an agent under the codename “Restavrator.” Much later, the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate (UOC-KP), formerly ROC Metropolitan of Kyiv, Filaret (Denysenko), acknowledged that during the Soviet era, all bishops without exception were ‘connected’ to the KGB and were required to coordinate priestly appointments with the security services.
Roman Skakun notes that “representatives of the ROC often try to deflect attention away from the MGB–KGB and their agent networks within the Church by focusing instead on the Council for Religious Affairs and its commissioners — as if these were purely external, state-imposed influences. They tend to equate secret collaboration with the security services to mere civic loyalty or attempt to trivialize these ties as inconsequential formalities, downplaying their actual substance. For example, in a 2019 interview with an Estonian newspaper, Metropolitan Tikhon Shevkunov of Pskov argued that collaboration between Orthodox hierarchs and the KGB, while unpleasant, was a conscious decision made in good conscience — a gesture of loyalty that, he claimed, did no real harm to others and in fact brought great benefit to the Church.”
In his study, which forms the basis of the book, the author not only presents the historical context of state–church relations during that period but also provides a detailed account of how the ROC episcopate in Ukraine cooperated with Soviet security services. This includes bishops who were former Greek Catholics (“Uniates”), exploring how they were selected and how control was exercised over them. The third chapter of the book focuses on the activity of the Orthodox episcopate during Khrushchev’s atheist campaign, under the title “A Test of Loyalty.” It covers the purges within the episcopate, the new assignments imposed on them, the work of agents tasked with “liquidation,” the closure of monasteries and seminaries, and the consolidation of agent control during this period.
Summing up his research, Roman Skakun notes:
“Unquestioning and unconditional loyalty of a state-subordinated Orthodox Church to an authoritarian regime is by no means an exception—it is, in fact, quite typical. In the Russian Empire, it was not unusual for clergy to be involved in political surveillance and the suppression of dissent both within the Church and beyond. Nor was the ideologically driven, brutal campaign launched by the Bolsheviks against the former dominant Church historically unique on a global scale, even though, by and large, that Church had been willing to come to terms with the revolution. What constituted a new historical precedent — soon replicated in some of the USSR’s satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe — was the resurrection of an old model of church subordination and instrumentalization under the conditions of an officially atheist regime that ground thousands of clergy and believers through the gears of repression. Another innovation, paradoxical but in some sense understandable, was that due to the ideological incompatibility of the two sides, the alliance between Church and state could not be open or public. Instead, it was built on the covert recruitment of a significant number of key church figures into direct collaboration with the political police. This was not merely about hidden contacts or backdoor arrangements — it involved agent activity in the strict sense of the term, with all its classic elements: recruitment, clandestine meetings, tasks from handlers, handwritten reports, payments to agents, and more. Given the odious reputation that always surrounded the ‘informers’ of the tsarist secret police — and later, the Soviet security services — as well as the widespread eschatological view among the faithful of the Bolshevik regime as inherently anti-Christian, such collaboration carried, and still carries, a powerful compromising potential. Fear of confronting that legacy has prevented the post-Soviet ROC from acknowledging, reflecting on, and turning the page on this chapter of its past.”
This research was conducted as part of the international project “Power Against Faith: Mechanisms of Persecution of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the Soviet Union and Forms of Its Resilience and Resistance” and the partnership program “Standing in Solidarity” (2022–2024) between the University of Notre Dame (USA) and the Ukrainian Catholic University.
The book will be of interest to anyone seeking a deeper understanding beyond the usual clichés about Orthodox clergy collaborating with Soviet security services, because, as is often said, there is no such thing as a “former” agent. And just as today’s FSB-run Putin regime is not only the historical heir of the NKVD-KGB but also their methodological successor, so too does the modern Russian Orthodox Church continue to function as an active and deliberate network for advancing Kremlin interests, especially beyond Russia’s borders.