Long since the Moscow Patriarchate defrocked Father Gleb Yakunin, a Moscow priest who, as an elected deputy in 1990, had privileged access to the KGB archives and discovered that the collaboration between some bishops and the state security agencies had been worse than even he had imagined. The Church has never properly investigated this, clearly because so many of the bishops, not least the Patriarch, rose to power with the say-so of state authority.
Sometimes it is the local bishop who acts as an agent of secular power. Father Sergei Taratukhin was imprisoned in the 1980s as a Soviet-era dissident. In prison he became a believer, trained for the priesthood and became chaplain in Penal Colony No10, near Chita in eastern Siberia. He served there seven years, befriending an inmate, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, condemned by a Moscow court in 2005 for financial misdemeanours in a trial widely seen as politically motivated.
Taratukhin became convinced that Khodorkovsky was a political prisoner and campaigned for him. Bishop Yevstafy, his diocesan, intervened and removed him to a remote parish. Taratukhin objected, so his bishop defrocked him. Now the priest has appeared abjectly contrite on TV, in a scene reminiscent of clergy who recanted their anti-Soviet activities in former days. The bishop has offered him forgiveness and partial reinstatement – he now organises rubbish collection and shovels snow from the paths around Chita’s new cathedral.
Michael Bourdeaux Putin and the Patriarchs
