In the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv on October 6, Canon Dr. Michael Bourdeaux gave a lecture "Religious freedom in Ukraine: the contribution Keston College (1969-89)."
In the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv on October 6, Canon Dr. Michael Bourdeaux gave a lecture "Religious freedom in Ukraine: the contribution Keston College (1969-89)." The lecture described the series of religious persecution in Ukraine from the time of Khrushchev to the UGCC legalization 1989.
The full text of the lecture
In 1969 a group of scholars in London set up a new institution, Keston College, objectively to study church-state relations in the communist world, that is, to inform the world of the reality of the persecution of religion. My experience in Ukraine was a central motivation and without it we may never have fulfilled our plan – God’s plan.
Nine years earlier, at the conclusion of my year as an aspirant at Moscow University, the Soviet authorities arranged a propaganda trip for us students to show us the best of their country. Kyiv, in June 1960, was the first stop on our itinerary and our guide showed us the devastation wrought on Ukraine by the Nazi invasion, much war damage being still unrepaired. Our visit to the Pecherskaya Lavra was devastating – not because of the physical so much as the spiritual devastation. I had found out, through living for a year in Moscow, that Nikita Khrushchev had begun a new campaign against religion and I read about it in Nauka i religiya. Now, though, it was in the Lavra that this became a reality. The monk who showed us round could not directly inform us of the plans of the atheists, but his look said it all. I have never seen greater sadness etched on the face of a man, as he recounted the supposedly joyful news that this was where the Christianization of Rus’ began nearly a thousand years earlier. We did not know it then, of course, but I later discovered that we were probably the last foreign visitors to the Lavra before its imminent enforced closure and the dispersal of the monks.
Exactly twenty-eight years later, June 1988, my wife and I stood on the same spot. This time we were told the joyful news: the Lavra had re-opened and the years of atheism were over. We were visiting Moscow – and then Kyiv – for the Millennium celebrations (tysyachiletie) of the Baptism of Rus’. But that is the end of my story. This lecture recounts what happened in between.
It wasn’t easy, the start of our work, but eventually my first book, Opium of the People, appeared in London in 1965 from the fine publishing house of Faber and Faber. I mention this because this helped to attract some favourable reviews, as a result of which I was slowly able to assemble a small team of advisers, including Xenia Dennen, the present chairman of Keston Institute (as it is now called) and we began our collective research in a modest way – but soon the BBC, the British – and eventually the world – press began to take notice, based on the reliability of the facts we presented. Our influence grew and before long we had a study programme on all the communist countries, even including something on the little-known country of Albania, which proclaimed itself to be the first state to have totally eradicated religion.
Along the way, Ukraine continued to exert its influence on us. An early example, a story which became well known around the world, is my encounter with two babushki from Pochaev, where the great Lavra was under imminent threat of closure. The atheist authorities were brutally dispersing the monks and throwing some of them into psychiatric hospitals. The mother of one of them, with a friend, wrote an account of the persecution, brought it to Moscow, met a French schoolteacher on holiday there and so the document reached Paris – and eventually me in London. A few weeks later I was able to return to Moscow, went to the site of a church which had just been demolished two weeks earlier – and – amazingly – I encountered these same two women, also come to see the latest devastation. “Come with us”, they said. Amid a scene of unbelievable tension – and all of us realizing that we were experiencing the direct hand of God in our lives, they told me that they had brought an updated account of the Pochaev persecution – would I take it back to England? With trepidation I agreed – and later was not searched on leaving the airport. “Beyond this, what can I do?” I asked them. ”Be our voice and speak for us”, they replied. Their words became the guiding principle of Keston College – not my words, but their words, Ukrainian words in the Russian language, a message from the heart of the Orthodox Church. We would tell the truth. Our course was set.
Already before this, in 1962, while I was serving as a young priest in an Anglican parish in North London, I began to be more aware of the general Khrushchev persecution of religion, especially of the Baptists and Evangelicals, on whose behalf we would, in few years time, spearhead an international campaign. I began to receive documents from a group which called themselves “Initsiativniki” – this was the world they used to describe themselves as attempting to initiate a campaign for the freedom of Protestants from state control. They wanted to summon a free congress. This became a long an emotional story, with the press and eventually politicians from the West taking up the cause and eventually playing a major role.
Again Ukraine was centrally involved. Pastor Georgi Vins was born and raised in Kyiv and it was in Ukraine that the strongest group of Protestants lived, worked – and unsuccessfully tried to worship without state interference. Many were prepared to register with the authorities, if this would give them limited freedom to profess their faith, but the state denied them this privilege, on the grounds that they were committed to bringing up their children in their own faith. Pastor Vins, an electrician by profession, became their most vocal spokesman. He put his case for freedom from state interference with great vigour and claimed he was following Leninist principles of the separation of church and state. For his outstanding bravery and capacity for setting up a Soviet-Union-wide organization, he was imprisoned. During the 1960s and ‘70s there were usually about 200 leaders of his Initsiativniki movement in prison. Vivid and detailed news about their trials, their sentences and their prison conditions systematically reached us at Keston College and this was largely due to the tireless efforts of a group of women, whose husbands were imprisoned. They called themselves the “Council of Baptist Prisoners’ Relatives”, a totally new departure in the field of civil liberties in the Soviet Union. The dominant figure was Lidia Vins, Georgi’s mother, who, needless to say, was soon imprisoned herself – but the clandestine work of gathering information and somehow sending it out of the Soviet Union continued. We passed on this information to a new group, Amnesty International, which soon began to campaign worldwide for the release of the Baptist activists.
We, on our part, continued to gather and publish the developments in this astonishing story. Eventually I told this in two books, the first an academic study, Religious Ferment in Russia,[1] the second in more popular vein, Faith on Trial in Russia[2] (I should have said Ukraine, but Russia, I’m sorry to say, was the only generic name for the whole Soviet Union acceptable in the UK, and the publishers insisted it must be used.
The second book started with a demonstration on Staraya Ploshchad’ in Moscow, outside the building of the Central Committee of the Soviet Union. Amazingly, Pastor Vins and his co-organizers had managed to assemble representatives from almost every republic of the Soviet Union. There had never been anything like it before. Eventually, after the demonstrators had refused to disperse, although threatened by the police, they sat on the steps of the imposing building. Eventually the police allowed two ringleaders, Pastors Georgi Vins and Gennadi Kryuchkov, to go in to present their petitions. They did not emerge.
The scene now changes to a Moscow courtroom. We know exactly what happened, because we have – now preserved in the Keston Archive at Baylor University, Waco, Texas - a full transcript of the proceedings. The two accused, Vins and Kryuchkov, had been denied proper access to defence lawyers and had been held incommunicado in prison until the opening of the trial on 29 November 1966. Only KGB collaborators were allowed access to the courtroom (though there were a few Baptist infiltrators, one of whom made the transcript notes).
The trial lasted two days, on the first of which Pastor Vins was held in the dock giving his testimony until 12 midnight. Then the accused were sent back to prison, deprived of sleep, and at 5 am they were returned absurdly early to the courtroom. We can read the words of the false witnesses in the transcript. Eventually, having no time to prepare his “Final Address” (the right of all accused in those days), Pastor Vins addressed the courtroom in these words:
“I want to say that I consider myself fortunate to be able to stand here and testify that I’m in the dock as a believer. I’m happy that for my faith in God I could come to know imprisonment , that I’ve been able to prove and strengthen myself. I do not stand here as a thief, a brigand or as someone who has infringed the rights of another person. I stand before you with a calm and clear conscience; I have honourably obeyed all the civil laws and faithfully respected the laws of God.”[3] Before long the judge interrupted him and Pastor Vins continued by quoting one of the hymns he had written. Amid uproar, the judge dismissed him from the dock.
The two exhausted prisoners received their sentences at 1 am – the conclusion of the second day, during which they had been mentally tortured for some fifteen hours, virtually without a break. The “guilty” verdict resulted in the sentence of the two prisoners to three years in ‘special regime’ camps.
I must emphasize that during these years, Keston College was developing its work and, as well as books, was publishing a stream of reports from all over the communist world in its journal, Religion in Communist Lands (from 1973) and a news service which began to be read all over the world – including, often, reports to Eastern Europe through the broadcasts of Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and the BBC. This, in its turn, stimulated the persecuted to assemble more information and send it, by whatever means, to Keston. As a result, the work expanded rapidly.
One of the results of this was that the friends and family of Pastor Vins established contact with us. Somehow he secreted a memoir, clandestinely written, from prison to his wife, Nadezhda, in Kyiv and eventually we received it in London. Jane Ellis, a senior member of our staff, translated this and published it under the title, Three Generations of Suffering[4]. Sir John Lawrence, our wise and influential chairman, decided that we should not ourselves profit from the moving literary work of Pastor Vins, however fragmentary it was. We took the decision – astonishing though it seems in retrospect – to go to Kyiv to consult with Nadezhda to discuss establishing a financial fund for her husband, which would be available to the family when it became possible.
We had no realistic prospect, I thought, of realizing our aim. Somehow, my Soviet visa, long denied because of the publication of Opium of the People, was restored in 1975 for a short trip to Moscow with Gillian, my first wife. So Sir John Lawrence and I applied for a visa for a similar short trip two years later to visit Moscow and continue to Kyiv. So, to our astonishment, on 6 March 1977, with address of Nadezhda Vins concealed in a private place, we set off, perhaps in astonishment and with little prospect, as we thought, of achieving our goal. Sir John, though, through a lifetime of devotion to the people of the Soviet Union, resulting from his having been Press Attaché at the British Embassy through the thick of the Great Patriotic War, commanded a certain respect in the highest quarters of Soviet officialdom.
In Kyiv we expected obstruction from the KGB. None came, as we set off in a taxi and found Nadezhda Vins at home. Georgi was by this time serving his second term of imprisonment. To the astonishment of his wife, we told her about her husband’s manuscript, our translation and publication of it and the proposal for a financial fund from the royalties. She agreed to this – mission rapidly accomplished. What would we like to do next, she asked. There was a meeting at the Baptist church which her husband had founded. Would we like to go there? Of course we said yes, were soon in another taxi with Nadezhda, and then in a sort of nondescript office building. So this was the so-called “underground” church, openly meeting for prayer. The welcome was something neither of us would ever forget. We stayed and talked for a long time. “Would you like to see the real underground church?” one of them asked. Of course we said yes and to our astonishment we were led through a kind of trapdoor below into a room below ground level. There an astonishing sight met our eyes: a circle of teenage children, intensely gathered round a single Bible, being instructed by a teacher. The welcome was even more overwhelming than what we had experienced in the room above and we were invited talk of our faith to the young people. As we left, we asked whether we should stay silent about what we had just experienced. “Tell the world, we are not afraid”, came back the response. So we did.
The culmination of this story came on 28 April 1979. I was deep asleep at home when the phone rang in the middle of the night. “This is the State Department, Washington DC, calling. We require you to come to New York immediately to help us debrief Pastor Georgi Vins. The Soviet authorities have just released him, with a group of other prisoners, following our negotiations and he’s now in mid-Atlantic on his way to us.” Having done a double take and demanded some sort of verification that this was not a hoax, I got up and presented myself at the airport for an immediate flight to New York, where at the United Nations Plaza Hotel I first set my eyes on a disorientated Pastor Georgi Vins. I tried to help calm him – he had not wanted to leave the Soviet Union, nor had he been consulted – but here he was, bereft, for the time, of his family and fellow-believers. The next day I accompanied him to Washington DC and prepared him to meet President Jimmy Carter. From Soviet gaol to the President’s office in 48 hours! President Carter remembered the episode when I met him in Oxford about three years ago. Keston had presented the documentation on the case to the State Department, but had no prior knowledge of the group exchange (seven activists for four Soviet spies!) and would have advised that Pastor Vins should have been returned to his family, had we been consulted. They later joined him in America.
“Za vilnu Ukrainu!” At some point we became aware that the cries for religious freedom, which were now hearing consistently from the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, also incorporated, by implication, a growing demand for political independence.
I was first made aware of the full extent of Stalin’s annihilation of an ancient and honourable institution by a Ukrainian scholar friend of Peter Reddaway, another co-founder of Keston College. Professor Bohdan Bociurkiw, of Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, when he came to the London School of Economics for a sabbatical year in the early 1970s. He was a modest man, but the fount of all knowledge about the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, the world’s most respected scholar at liberty to tell the story. Therefore it was with us from Keston’s early days. We became firm friends and, as our knowledge of these tragic events grew, we also began to receive information that, far from being dead, the Church was experiencing a strong underground revival. This would shortly become “above ground”, as news of street demonstrations and liturgies celebrated in the open air began to reach us.
Keston College soon became known for the reliability of its information on the persecution of Catholics in the Soviet Union - and at the same time we began to receive information about the extensive persecution of the Latin Catholic Church in Lithuania, through the agency of their clandestine journal, Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church.
Through my friendship with Professor Bociukiw, I twice received invitations to conferences at Carleton University, but these soon led to the request to undertake an extended tour of Canada, coast to coast, to give lectures sponsored by local Ukrainians. Everywhere, between 23 September and 4 October 1976, I received not only wonderful Ukrainian hospitality, but was also greeted in Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg and Vancouver, with the cry, “Za vil’nu Ukrainu!”
What did I lecture about? The basic message was simple. By this time I had enough information to speak not only about the persecution of religion in Ukraine, but also its revival, under the harshest conditions, among Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants. Among the devastation there was also encouragement. By this time, too, I had been to Rome and met Cardinal Josyf Slipyj, whom Khrushchev had released to the Vatican in January 1963. Here was an old man with sainthood and suffering in equal measure marked on every line of his face. I was deeply moved by his humility and forbearance – and willingness - to give time to young man from England whom he did not know. Pope John Paul II would echo his words of encouragement a decade later when he told me to “continue your verk” in his inimitable Polish accent.
As reflected in our Keston News Service and journal, Religion in Communist Lands, we continued through the 1970s and ‘80s to gather extensive information about the resurgence of the life of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. I will not here recount the story, because it is already well known to all of you. What I want to do now is recapture some of those moments, as I was finally able to represent them in Chapter 8 of my book, Gorbachev, Glasnost and the Gospel, published in London in 1990[5].
Mikhail Gorbachev, I am sure, became perturbed early in his years as General Secretary of the Communist Party by the constant demonstrations he faced on his numerous trips abroad. The principal organizers of these were the Jewish community, striving for publicity which might lead to the release of some of their Soviet co-religionists and the right of the refuseniks to emigrate. This led to a reconsideration of their policies by the Soviet atheist authorities in which they yielded to pressure. At the same time, I believe Gorbachev, after initial hesitation, became genuinely concerned to restore religious as well as political rights (though never to overturn the basic adherence to Marxist-Leninism).
Robert Conquest’s great book about the Holodomor, Harvest of Sorrow[6], was published in 1986, the year after Gorbachev’s accession, made a great impression in the West. Gradually, very gradually, the public was becoming aware that Moscow’s oppression of Ukraine was leading to calls for independence. Greater political freedom meant that this cry could be heard more consistently. But it was not the events of a distant famine in the 1930s which made the greatest impression. It was something immediate and actual: the comsequences of the wrong Stalin imposed on Ukraine with the suppression of the Greek-Catholic Church. Amidst the chaos in Europe at the end of the Great Patriotic War (which we in the UK call the Second World War), news of the so-called sobor of Lvov on 8 March 1946 barely rated a news paragraph in the West. The Moscow Patriarchate, as it developed its contacts in the West, firmly claimed – as it does to this day – that this was an illegitimate return by Ukrainian schismatics to their mother church of Russian Orthodoxy. Not a single Greek-Catholic Church nor any of its institutions remained open. Those who resisted were all imprisoned; many did not survive – but in those days there was no Amnesty International to fight for the rights of the incarcerated. World opinion broadly accepted the outcome as “stable” in that part of Europe.
This was always far from the truth. As the work of Keston College evolved, we came to see that the defence of religious liberty in Ukraine was one of our priorities. We would never proclaim that we played a major role in reversing that situation, but nevertheless the world media began to listen seriously to our account of the facts.
In 1974, at a time when even the Vatican was silent about the rights of the Greek-Catholic Church in Ukraine, we received information about Fr Pavlo Vasylyk. In prison he had been secretly ordained by a bishop with whom he shared a cell; then later he was consecrated as bishop there and was now ordaining new clergy, forming a whole incarcerated unit of the underground church. [7]
Already, before this, the Ukrainian nationalist movement was beginning to raise its head publicly above the parapet. In 1968 human rights movements began to emerge in various parts of the Soviet Union. The first sign that Ukrainians would be increasingly involved came in the same year, when 139 intellectuals signed a letter addressed to the Kremlin stating that their rights to freedom of speech were being systematically violated. The response was clear: the official Ukrainian leader, Petro Shelest, who was showing some inclination towards moderation, was removed in 1972 and replaced by the formidable Volodymir Shcherbitsky, who significantly retained power until September 1989, perhaps the last regional representative whose policy was one of uncompromisingly pre-perestroika tendencies.[8]
Amid the new round of repression the heroic figure of Iosyp Terelya emerged, a layman who openly proclaimed his allegiance to the Greek-Catholic Church. In 1969 he was sentenced to seven years in prison for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”, but after three years was transferred to the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow and spent the rest of his term in a psychiatric hospital. After a further arrest he co-founded (with Fr Hryhori Budzinsky and three others) the “Action Group for the Defence of Believers’ Rights”, the aim of which was to secure the re-legalization of the Church. In February 1985 he was arrested yet again and sentenced to twelve years, but received an amnesty two years later, as a result of Gorbachev’s new policies. After this he emigrated to Canada, where he died, having spent twenty years of his 65 years in labour camps and psychiatric hospitals. Such was the human cost of those who campaigned for their religious rights.[9] In 1986 Keston recounted his campaign in detail, publishing a small book in his honour.[10]
Lay people were remarkably tough in sacrificing careers and often liberty for their Church. Another such was Stepan Khmara, a dentist by profession. He went to prison in 1980, charged with editing the Ukrainian samizdat journal, Ukrainsky visnik. He served seven years in the notorious Perm 36 labour camp and, upon his amnesty in 1987, he devoted himself to the same cause with renewed vigour. I had the privilege of meeting him in Kyiv in June 1988, when we discussed the Millennium celebrations. He claimed (rightly, in my view) that Moscow had usurped Kyiv’s right to play the central role in the festivities and impressed on me the “unconditional inadmissibility of the Russian Orthodox Church’s having any say in the future of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. He and his committee would not acknowledge the legitimacy of any discussion in which the Russian leadership played a role, either with or without the participation of the Vatican.”[11]
After Terelya’s emigration, Ivan Hel, another layman who had spent seventeen years of his life in prison, took over the leadership of the Action Group. Again I had the privilege of meeting him in 1988 and, when he died in 2011,The Guardian (London) invited me to write his obituary.[12] He lived to see the restoration of legality to his Church, but at the time he assumed leadership of the campaign there was still a long way to go.
Rukh (meaning simply “movement”, and exactly parallel to the Catholic movement for freedom in Lithuanian, Sajudis) played out most of its drama on the streets, not least in this great city of Lviv. Solidarnost was also fully active in neighbouring Poland. The Catholic Church, both Latin and Eastern Rite, was beginning to undermine the very legitimacy of communist domination – and at last the world was beginning to take notice. Such leadership of Ukrainian religious institutions as there was resided firmly in the hands of the Russian Orthodox Church, which, through the events of 1946, had acquired a huge number of churches and their associated properties. The Moscow Patriarchate claimed in international forums that Ukraine was its own major stronghold.
It was time for the suppressed Ukrainian hierarchy to emerge from the underground. In August 1987 Bishops Ivan Semedi of Transcarpathia and Pavlo Vasylyk (now at last free from prison) announced their emergence from the underground and stated that they would from now on act openly as bishops of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. A month later a Synod of Ukrainian Catholic bishops (in exile) convened in Rome and announced that the head of the Church was now Bishop (later Metropolitan) Volodymyr Sterniuk, 80 years old and living modestly in this city of Lviv, having been secretly consecrated eleven years earlier. [13] Seven more bishops, it was further stated, were now living in secret. These two dramatic events, following so swiftly one after the other, changed the face of the struggle, but there was still a long way to go before the re-estalishment of legality.
Public processions and open-air masses now became weekly events in many places, still accompanied by police harassment, fines and short-term detention for the ringleaders, at a time when most other believers in the USSR were beginning for the first time to experience freedom.
Soon after this, in June 1988, I became personally involved in a way that was totally unexpected. Arriving in Moscow as leader of a group coming to celebrate the Millennium of the Russian Orthodox Church, I met up with my Moscow contacts. One of them, the doughty campaigner for religious liberty, Aleksandr Ogorodnikov, invited me to accompany him to a secret meeting. I quote what happened next from the opening paragraph of the obituary of Iven Hel I wrote for The Guardian when he died in 2011:
“ The door of the drab Moscow apartment opened suddenly to reveal a blaze of colour inside. The room was full of bishops of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, crammed into a small space, and every one dressed in full regalia. It would have been an amazing sight under any circumstances, but here in 1988 every cleric was ‘illegal’, representing a church which had been suppressed by Stalin forty years earlier. The only layman in the room was Ivan Hel.”[14]
This was a moment I shall never forget – I can picture these wonderful people in my mind’s eye even today. But there was more. After being introduced, Bishop Sterniuk asked me whether I was in touch with the official Vatican delegation. I said no, but that I might be able to contact them. They gave me a verbal mission. Go to the head of the delegation and tell him what you have seen in this room. Say that we warmly invite him to come and meet us. We want to discuss our situation with him. I was able to pass on the message and the two delegations did meet. This was a significant stage when the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church proved to the Vatican that it was now openly operative.
Continuing to Kyiv, we visited the newly-reopened Pochaev Lavra and went on to meet several lay activists. The Church had come out on to the streets in both Moscow and Kyiv; the revelation to me was that state atheism had reached the end of the road.
A scholar who was later to become a close associate of Keston College, Sergei Filatov, of the Institute of the USA and Canada, took the argument strongly forward a year later. Verbatim in the influential English-language version of Moscow News Filatov wrote:
“For many years it has been hoped that the Uniates will return to Orthodoxy. It was widely believed that the Uniate Church owes its existence solely to the support of foreign governments. Life has shown that this was a delusion… I think that the St Yura Cathedral [Lviv] must be given to its real owners.”[15]
This addressed a key issue which would vitiate an easy solution for several years: the ownership of the buildings expropriated by the Russian Orthodox Church forty years earlier.
The widely-read magazine, Ogonyok, two months later published an article which re-examined at length the illegitimacy of the Lviv sobor, proclaiming that it was the work of NKVD and “an act of terrorism against innocent people”.[16]
The stage was set for the dénouement. According to one report, 200,000 demonstrators and worshippers turned out on the streets of Lviv on a cold Sunday in November. A western observer reported to Keston College the scenes in Lviv as follows:
“Every evening there is an open-air Greek-Catholic service in Lviv, usually outside the closed Carmelite church… The esplanade down Lenin Prospect has become a permanent centre of unofficial political gatherings and discussions, where the (theoretically illegal) Ukrainian national flags are always flying.”[17]
Mikhail Gorbachev travelled to Rome to meet Pope John Paul II on 26 November 1989 and his “gift” was the re-legalization of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. Over forty years of one of the gravest injustices in the history of the Church had been rectified. In fact, this reversal had already taken place, because two days earlier Ukrainian TV had already announced the Greek-Catholic parishes were now free to register. This was the fulfillment of something long-expected, perhaps a year later than it might have been. But the meeting, of which, of course, no transcript is available, produced one real surprise: the restoration of diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the Kremlin.[18]
As Sergei Filatov had hinted, this “conclusion” was only the opening salvo of what was to become many years of disastrous relations between the Greek-Catholic and the Orthodox Church in Western Ukraine, but to continue the story of the conflict over church buildings and the legitimacy of the Moscow Patriachate on Ukrainian soil would take us into a new field, which I must leave to experts far more qualified than myself. I wish to end by simply stating that, to observe – and even occasionally to participate in – the winning of religious liberty for Ukraine has been an inspiration in my life and I am grateful that Keston College was able to record it.
[1] Michael Bourdeaux, Macmillan, London, 1968.
[2] Michael Bourdeaux, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1971.
[3] Ibid, p.127.
[4] Georgi Vins, translated by Jane Ellis, Hodder & Stoughton, 1976.
[5] Hodder & Stoughton.
[6] Oxford University Press, New York, 1986.
[7] Gorbachev, Glasnost and the Gospel, p.162.
[8] Ibid, p.163.
[9] Ibid, p.164.
[10] Terelya, Iosyp. For My Name's Sake: Selections from the Writings of Iosyp Terelya. Keston, U.K.: Keston College, 1986.
[11] Bourdeaux, Gorbachev, p.164.
[12] 26 May 2011.
[13] Bourdeaux, Gorbachev, p.166.
[14] The Guardian, 26 May 2011.
[15] Moscow News, 30 July 1989.
[16] Ogonyok, September 1989, pp.6-8.
[17] Religion in Communist Lands, Keston College, Vol.17, No.1, 1989, p.82.
[18] Bourdeaux, Gorbachev, p.180.