After the uniates and other Catholics, the KGB was most concerned during its war against religious «ideological subversion» in the Soviet Union by the activities of the unregistered Protestant churches and sects, which—like the Uniates—were outside direct state control. In the late 1950s the KGB estimated the membership of what it termed «illegal sectarian formations»—chief among them the Reform Baptists, Pentecostalists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Reformed Adventists—at about 100,000.91
The fact that throughout the Brezhnev era the KGB continued, on Andropov’s instructions, to spend so much time and effort on groups who represented no conceivable threat to the Soviet system is further evidence of its obsession with even the most harmless forms of dissent. Andropov made the keynote of his address to an all-union KGB conference in 1975 the claim that anti-Soviet elements were conspiring against the state «under cover of religion.» The first essential in unmasking and defeating the conspiracies was agent penetration:
This is difficult, since false perceptions of the attitude of the state towards religion which still prevail in their milieu have left a definite mark on the psychology of the believers. Among sectarians there is a prejudice that any assistance to the authorities, including the KGB, is a great sin – treason. There is no trust in the humanism of the Cheka. Andropov’s complaint that believers failed to trust the «humanism» of the KGB provides further evidence of his limited sense of the absurd. To illustrate the difficulties of the agent penetration among the ungrateful sectarians, he gave the example of «one candidate for recruitment, who had almost freed himself from errors with regard to the Cheka, and carried out particular assignments from an operational officer:»
…One day, however, he declared that meetings with his operational officer were sinful. He explained that the Lord God had appeared to him in a dream, had handcuffed him and asked: «Whose servant art thou?» Greatly shaken by dream, the potential recruit interpreted it as a warning from God and stopped meeting the Chekist.92
Mitrokhin cannot have been the only KGB officer who, as he listened to such speeches or read articles on operations against believers in the classified in-house journal KGB Sbornik, secretly admired their courage and their faith. No hint of that admiration, however, appeared in KGB reports.
By the 1960s the KGB leadership had reluctantly concluded that no amount of persecution would wipe out the sectarians altogether. A conference in March 1959 of senior KGB officers leading «the struggle against Jehovists [Jehovah's Witnesses]» concluded that the correct strategy was «to continue measures of repression with res of disruption.»93 The KGB set out to divide, demoralize and discredit the sectarians, as well as to arrest their most influential leaders on trumped-up charges.
In 1966 Pastors Georgi Vins and Gennadi Kryuchkov, the leaders of the Reform Baptists, probably the largest sectarian group, were jailed for three years. After their release, both went underground to continue their ministry. In 1974 Vins was caught and rearrested. Despite a major international campaign on his behalf, he was sentenced to a further ten years’ imprisonment, but was released in a «spy exchange» in 1979 and expelled to the United States. Pastor Kryuchkov remained at liberty until 1989, when he dramatically reappeared in public at an emotional Reform Baptist congress. His success in continuing a secret ministry for almost twenty years without being caught by the KGB remains one of the most astonishing achievements in the history of the Soviet religious underground.94
Remarkably, however, the KGB was even more concerned by Jehovah’s Witnesses, viewed with indifference or suspicion by most governments around the world, than by the Reform Baptists, whose heroic endurance of persecution attracted international sympathy. The head of the Second Chief Directorate, General Oleg Mikhailovich Gribanov, reported in 1962, «The most hostile of the sectarians are the Jehovists.»95 Since their emergence in the United States in the 1870s, no other Christian sect has spent so much of its energies on prophesying the end of the world. Though many of its detailed prophecies have been discredited and the Apocalypse has been repeatedly postponed, the basic millennarian message of Jehovah’s Witnesses has never varied: «The end is near. Christ will reveal himself shortly to bring destruction upon the nations and all who oppose is messianic kingdom.”96
In the course of the twentieth century Jehovah’s Witnesses have been persecuted by many authoritarian regimes. Thousands suffered martyrdom in the death camps of the Nazi Third Reich. No major intelligence agency, however, has been quite as concerned as the KGB by the «Jehovist conspiracy.» The Jehovist obsession of senior KGB officers was, perhaps, the supreme example of their lack of any sense of proportion when dealing with even the most insignificant forms of dissent.
Until the Second World War there had been no Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Soviet Union. The incorporation of eastern Poland, Lithuania and Moldavia in 1939-40, however, turned thousands of Witnesses into unwilling Soviet citizens.97 Many were deported to Siberia, accused of being «an American sect.»98 In 1968 the KGB put the total number of Jehovah’s Witnesses at about 20,000.» The fact that the Witnesses had originated in the United States and still had their world headquarters in Brooklyn was regarded as deeply suspicious by the Centre’s many conspiracy theorists.100 The almost surreal outrage of KGB analysts, as they denounced the Witnesses for describing the Soviet state (like states in general) as the work of the Devil, would not be out of place in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita:
The sect of the Jehovah’s Witnesses or Students of the Bible is a foreign invention. It is dangerous because it is actively engaged in drawing new members into the sect. . . The sectarians call Communists and the Komsomols «sons of the Devil.»
They demonstrate that the Soviet state is founded by Satan. Therefore one must not implement Soviet laws, or take part in elections, and they urge people to refuse to serve in the Soviet army. Jehovists extend assistance of all kind to their co-religionists who are in the [labor] camps or in internal exile, supplying them with money, food and clothing.101
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 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
Notes. The Penetration and Persecution of the Soviet Churches
91. k-1, 146. The KGB estimate may have been too low. Published estimates for 1990, admittedly at a time when active persecution had almost ceased, were significantly higher; see Ramet (ed.), Religious Policy in the Soviet Union, pp. 355-6.
92. k-1, 73.
93. k-1, 146.
94. Ellis (ed.), Three Generations of Suffering; Bourdeaux, Gorbachev, Glasnost & the Gospel, p. 121.
95. k-1, 214.
96. Penton, Apocalypse Delayed.
97. k-1, 241.
98. Recollections of one of the deportees, Vasili Kalin, cited by James Meek, «Cult-busters Fight ‘Sim of e Witness,’ » Guardian (February 12, 1999).
99. k-1, 91.
100. Among the evidence ignored by the KGB conspiracy theorists who saw the Jehovah’s Witnesses as vehicles for American ideological subversion was the fact that, from the First World War to the war in Vietnam, they consistently represented the largest group of Americans imprisoned for conscientious objection. In 1918 their leaders were imprisoned for contravening the American Espionage Act, though their sentences were overturned on appeal. Penton, Apocalypse Delayed, pp. 55-6, 142. Sadly, some of the conspiracy theories survived the collapse of the Soviet system.
101. k-1,241. In reality, Jehovah’s Witnesses behave in many ways as model citizens. Since 1962 they have been instructed to obey all human laws not directly in conflict with those of God. Penton, Apocalypse Delayed, p. 140.
102. Antic, «The Spread of Modern Cults in the USSR,» pp. 257-8.
103. k-1, 92.
104. k-1, 91. There is no reference in the files noted by Mitrokhin to any successful KGB penetration either of the Jehovah’s Witnesses» Brooklyn headquarters or of its west European offices.
105. k-1, 91.
106. k-1, 73.
107. Antic, «The Spread of Modern Cults in the USSR,» p. 259.
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