Poisonings in the Russian Church Abroad

Konstantin Preobrazhensky | May 8, 2007

 

 

The absorption of the Church Abroad by Chekist Moscow carries a persistent whiff of criminality. Kremlin intelligence killed quite a few priests of the Church Abroad, and indeed the very best ones.

The first part of this article spoke of the murder of the Russian priest of the Church Abroad, Archpriest Lev Lebedev, at its New York Synod in May 1998. A few hours after delivering an exposé there about the red Moscow Patriarchate, he was found dead.

Former cell-attendant of Metropolitan Vitaly, Fr. Paul Ivashevich, is convinced that Archpriest Lebedev was poisoned.

In 1986 Fr. Paul Ivashevich himself mistakenly ate poisoned food intended for Metropolitan Vitaly, whom the Kremlin also greatly disliked, and whom it subsequently got rid of through its agents in the Synod. At that time Fr. Paul lost consciousness, and the Russian doctor who was called to him confirmed poisoning. Fortunately, Fr. Paul was nineteen years old at the time, and his young body coped with the poisoning. But he still did not fully recover: to this day Fr. Paul has to take stomach medication. At that time he was ordered to keep silent about this incident.

In 1970, a priest of the Australian-New Zealand Diocese of the Church Abroad, Vladimir Evsyukov, accidentally witnessed a certain Soviet intelligence operation at the customs office in the Australian city of Melbourne. Fr. Vladimir worked there part-time when he was free from church services; after all, many priests from poor parishes of the Church Abroad had to seek additional income.

Had he been a professional counterintelligence officer, he would immediately have reported it to the proper authorities and kept his mouth shut before everyone else. But Fr. Vladimir was simply a priest, and therefore he told many of his fellow clergy, and even the bishop, about what he had seen, and only after that went to the police.

But the KGB agent network acted quickly, and Fr. Vladimir Evsyukov’s car was rammed by another car. After this, its driver approached Fr. Vladimir, who was still alive, and performed some sort of manipulations on him. Fr. Vladimir was found with his hand stretched out toward a small icon of Blessed Xenia. Neither this car nor its driver was ever found by the Australian police. I think he was one of the Soviet illegal intelligence officers, an officer of Directorate “S” of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. Who knows, perhaps I later met him there at festive gatherings...

At that same time, in the 1970s, killers from the KGB chased Deacon Peter Golofaev of the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ in Buenos Aires through the streets. Born in 1921 in the Donbas into the family of a repressed entrepreneur, he was a descendant of the tsarist general Golofaev, under whom M. Yu. Lermontov had served. A convinced anti-Soviet, Pyotr Kirillovich during the years of the Second World War created an armed detachment for the struggle against communism, the “Hunting Detachment,” which later retreated with the German army and merged into the 5th Regiment of General Shteifon’s Russian Corps.

Deacon Golofaev knew that in the “socialist homeland” he had been sentenced to be shot, and therefore he was always on guard. He immediately recognized the Soviet killers by their clothing in the Argentine crowd, broke free, and escaped from them after they had encircled him as he was getting off a bus. He managed to save himself, but when he returned home, he found a poisoned needle in the folds of his leather coat.

In 1975, Bishop Dionisy of Rotterdam of the MP died in Holland. Shortly before his death, he gathered Dutch journalists and informed them that he was leaving the MP and transferring to the Church Abroad. The occasion was the public statements of the Soviet Patriarch Pimen that people in the USSR were not persecuted for their faith.

Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Sourozh, in everyday life a most intelligent and charming man, had a strange connection with his death. During the Second World War he fought in the ranks of the French partisans, the Maquis, who were subordinate to the French Communist Party and the NKVD. At the end of the war, Soviet intelligence officers made contact with him and advised him to establish a patriarchal parish in London, so that, using material from confessions, he could report to the NKVD on the attitudes of the White émigrés. The future Metropolitan Bloom agreed and very soon was made a bishop of the Moscow Patriarchate.

This case was told to me by the well-known English church writer Vladimir Moss. Shortly before the death of Bishop Dionisy of Rotterdam, Metropolitan Anthony told Vladimir Moss’s wife, Olga, that he was compelled to go to Holland in order to punish Bishop Dionisy for having caused a serious crisis in the Church.

And a few days later Olga Moss herself ended up in Holland and even met with Bishop Dionisy’s cell-attendant, Fr. Arseny. In tears, he told her that he had left the bishop alone for only a few hours after the Liturgy in order to go visit her parents, and when he returned, he found him dead.

“And do you know that Metropolitan Anthony visited Bishop Dionisy then?” Olga Moss asked.

“I had no idea!” Fr. Arseny admitted in horror.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh was a professional surgeon. God alone knows how he used his skill on Bishop Dionisy of Rotterdam. But it can be asserted that this most intelligent man was also a KGB militant.

However, the most sensational event of this kind was the murder of the First Hierarch of the Church Abroad, Metropolitan Philaret, in 1985. A convinced anti-communist and anti-Soviet, an irreconcilable opponent of any rapprochement with the red Soviet church, he was a thorn in the side of the KGB.

Judge for yourselves how prophetic his words about the MP proved to be, sounding from far-off 1980:

“But it is not true Orthodoxy that is spreading there. There the Russian people, under the guise of Orthodoxy, are being offered Bulgakovism, Berdyaevism, and other nonsense of the Eulogian schism; there, sects are flourishing luxuriantly — Baptists and the like. The official Church preaches cooperation with the God-fighting authority, praising it in every way. The True Orthodox Church has gone into the catacombs — hidden from the masses of the people... Is this the ‘rebirth of Orthodoxy’?”

THE UNFAITHFUL SON — FATHER POTAPOV

The words cited above are taken from a letter of Metropolitan Philaret to Fr. Victor Potapov, the current rector of St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Washington and the main engine behind the transfer of the Church Abroad under Moscow’s authority. At that time, in the stagnant and gloomy year 1980, Fr. Victor Potapov declared that Russia was rising from the dead and that Orthodoxy was being reborn in it. In that year I already held a solid post in the KGB and knew perfectly well that Orthodoxy was under our strict control and that there could be no question of any rebirth of it.

Soviet reality provided no facts that could have moved Fr. Victor to such a conclusion. Such a conclusion could only have been suggested to him by Soviet comrades-communists. Yes, precisely by them, since non-communists were not allowed to travel abroad, although nowadays it is not customary to recall this. Therefore, Soviet communists were already working with Fr. Victor at that time. You will agree that in more than a quarter of a century, something could be achieved.

In this same letter Metropolitan Philaret reproached Fr. Victor for having begun to commemorate one of the Soviet hierarchs at the Great Entrance. His name is unknown to me, but this hierarch was surely a KGB agent, like all his other colleagues, and perhaps even a member of the CPSU, because the upper ranks of the Patriarchate had party cards.

Metropolitan Philaret categorically forbade not only prayerful communion with the Soviet church, but even everyday contacts with “Soviet people.” He, as well as Metropolitan Vitaly, who succeeded him as First Hierarch, objected to Fr. Victor Potapov’s unauthorized trips to the USSR as a correspondent for Voice of America, and even, as they say, intended to bring him before an ecclesiastical court.

Both metropolitans cannot be denied discernment. For upon arriving in the USSR, Fr. Victor fell entirely into the hands of only one agency, which was permitted to deal with representatives of the “anti-Soviet émigré center,” as the Church Abroad was called in the USSR. For all other citizens of the USSR, such contact was dangerous.

This agency, however one looks at it, was called the Committee for State Security, and not the Moscow Patriarchate or Intourist at all. Not only the MP hierarchs with whom Fr. Victor associated were from the KGB, but also the chambermaids and drivers, as well as those who did not come into Fr. Victor’s sight: officers of the external surveillance service who tracked his every step, the telephone operators of the OTU, the Operational-Technical Directorate of the KGB, who listened in on his telephone conversations, and the young smirking officers of that same directorate who observed Fr. Victor through the peephole in the ceiling of his hotel room. In KGB language this is called measure “O.”

And if one adds to this the officers on Lubyanka who kept his dossier, and the chiefs who placed resolutions on it and reported to Andropov, then it becomes clear that every visit of Fr. Victor to the Soviet Union provided work for a multitude of “fighters of the invisible front.” By now his dossier already occupies several bookcases. I wonder what Fr. Victor’s pseudonym in the KGB is?

And he has one, since it was forbidden to use the real surname of an object of operational development. I am also certain that this pseudonym is mockingly contemptuous and on the borderline of decency, so that even before reading the operational-development file, the chief would understand what sort of person it concerned.

For every anti-Soviet émigré who arrived in the USSR, an operational-development file was opened. Such a file is opened only on enemies of the state. For those merely suspected of hostility, a softer operational-check file is opened. That can still be closed.

But an operational-development file is the second and final stage of the KGB’s interest in a person. It can end only in recruitment or arrest. Yes, it can also be closed, but then its authors risk a reprimand. The KGB had no intention of passively observing Fr. Victor for twenty-five years; after all, one has to receive decorations sometime. Both the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, intelligence, and the Second, counterintelligence, and the Fifth, the struggle against religion, surely took part in his development. Everyone wanted to get hold of the fat American chick.

Yes, precisely an American one, and not Russian at all. The bureaucratic state of the Russian Federation determines a person’s nationality exclusively by passport, and not by whom he considers himself to be.

To the disappointment of numerous Russian émigrés who are American admirers of the Russian Federation, mostly elderly and never having lived in Russia, I wish to report that the Russian Federation state also considers them only Americans.

It is precisely for this reason that the idea of this pseudo-national commonality is now being energetically implanted among the Russian émigrés by the KGB agent network. Here one can often hear the following idea: let us first unite with our Russian brothers in the bosom of the Church, and then we will explain to them where they are wrong. Alas, respected gentlemen — but certainly not comrades, as people in the Russian Federation still address one another — no one will listen to you! They do not need overseas Soviet sympathizers!

I am certain that the fact that Fr. Victor Potapov was under KGB operational development for more than a quarter of a century has somehow escaped the attention of the American authorities, with their inappropriate political correctness. Soviet intelligence, on the contrary, surrounds with severe suspicion those who consort with Americans, even for work. Therefore we, its officers, were afraid to make the acquaintance of an American abroad one time too many, since this threatened us with just such a stamp in our personnel file: “Was under CIA development.” This predetermined the end of one’s career. The KGB is much stricter with its own personnel than the CIA.

It is especially important to understand this because Fr. Victor Potapov is an American government employee. I think he has access to secrets. He has access both to the White House and to other important government institutions. The instinct of a former assistant to the chief of Soviet intelligence tells me that there Fr. Victor presents the surrender of the Church Abroad to Chekist Moscow as some subtle operation beneficial to America. Supposedly, the Church Abroad will put pressure on the Patriarchate, and the Patriarchate on Putin, and... Alas, his words are received there with enthusiasm.

The re-education of Putin is a favorite project of the Americans. They think that he does not understand all the advantages of Western democracy, and they try with all their might to explain them to him. But in reality, the transfer of the Church Abroad under the authority of the neo-Stalinist Putin state brings America no advantages. On the contrary, it creates a powerful threat to its national security. Now Putin’s intelligence service is no longer afraid to kill U.S. citizens on the streets of Washington. I wonder whether this will finally sober up the American authorities.

Fr. Victor Potapov benefits from the ambiguity of the historical moment, which the Soviet satirists Ilf and Petrov in the 1920s characterized thus: “The era of silent cinema has ended, but the era of sound cinema has not yet begun.” The Russian Federation is already loudly calling America enemy number one, yet America still considers the Russian Federation a friend. But if Fr. Victor were a citizen of the Russian Federation and worked just as openly for America, he would long ago have been imprisoned here for about fifteen years, like Doctor of Sciences Igor Sutyagin and other pro-Western intellectuals.

THE MURDER OF METROPOLITAN PHILARET

The Committee for State Security had long been closing in on Metropolitan Philaret. In the early 1980s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned him that the Soviets were planning to shoot him during the Paschal procession. The Metropolitan nevertheless went out for the procession, but young subdeacons covered him with their bodies, and many Russian émigrés later wondered why Bishop Philaret could not be seen.

In 1984, in the icon-case of the myrrh-streaming Montreal Iveron Icon of the Mother of God, now lost, a listening device was found, disguised as several electric batteries. Experts from the American special services, summoned by Bishop Gregory (Grabbe), testified to this.

But why did this fact not become public knowledge? Who benefited from hushing it up, apart from the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation? After all, it was listening to all the conversations held in the Synod meeting hall! And only KGB agents who had access to that hall could have placed those batteries in the precious icon-case.

And then the tragic day of November 19, 1985 arrived. Metropolitan Philaret and all the bishops were poisoned at the meal. All except one, Hilarion, who dined separately. However, the doctor who was called for some reason diagnosed influenza, not poisoning.

Protodeacon Nikita Chakirov, Metropolitan Philaret’s cell-attendant, was also declared ill by him. For sanitary reasons he was strictly forbidden to go up to the metropolitan’s quarters. Thus Bishop Philaret was left there alone for the whole night. There was also not a soul on the entire floor of the Synod building. Nothing like this had ever happened in the whole history of the Church Abroad.

Needless to say, the next morning Bishop Philaret was found dead. He was lying on the floor, and there were traces of vomit all around. They could have indicated poisoning and provided invaluable material in establishing the causes of death.

At the cry of Fr. Nikita Chakirov, who discovered the body, Bishop Hilarion came running — both then and now openly working for Moscow. The first thing he did was send the cell-attendant away. As many émigrés told me, after this he carefully washed the floor, moved the metropolitan’s body onto the bed, and only then called the doctor. Naturally, the doctor certified death from cardiac arrest.

Fifteen years later, Metropolitan Philaret’s tomb was opened, and everyone saw that his relics were incorrupt. Many believers demanded canonization, but power in the Church Abroad had already been seized by Moscow’s appointees. Metropolitan Laurus ordered the relics to be buried and even added the blasphemous phrase that “let him rot like everyone else.” He even forbade the circulation of photographs of Metropolitan Philaret’s incorrupt relics.

A. G. Shatilova, the daughter of Bishop Gregory (Grabbe) and his longtime assistant in secretarial work at the Synod, told me that shortly before his repose, Bishop Philaret learned that the bishops close to him were deceiving him. Taking advantage of his lack of knowledge of the English language, they slipped him the wrong documents to sign, taking advantage of his lack of knowledge of the English language.

The bishop intended to denounce and even remove certain bishops. But, as usual, death washed away all traces.

The Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church glorified Metropolitan Philaret among the saints. Spontaneous veneration of him also exists among the parishioners of the still-existing Church Abroad.

The question is: why is the Church Abroad uniting with its own murderers?

 

Russian source:

https://www.kavkazcenter.com/russ/content/2007/05/08/50882/otravleniya-v-russkoj-zarubezhnoj-tserkvi.shtml