Martyrs and Confessors

Ecumenical Review, The, July, 2000 by Olivier Clement

Out of all those condemned I mention a few names from the fatal year 1980 ...

In January, Tatiana Chtchipkova, the leader of the free seminary in Smolensk, was sentenced to three years in a labour camp. She was a professor specializing in Old French and had earlier been dismissed and stripped of all her university degrees.

In April, Vladimir Porech, director of the free seminary in Leningrad, was sentenced to five years in a hard labour camp followed by three years of internal exile. He had been born in 1949 into a family of communist teachers, and he also was a specialist in romance languages. He had begun to translate Maritain. In the course of his trial he hardly spoke of himself, but almost only about the church, making it clear that he and his friends were engaged in a purely spiritual, non-violent exercise. The court sessions took place shortly after Easter, and the Easter atmosphere finally broke into the courtroom when his friends, who had been forced out into the corridor, began to chant the hymn "Christ is risen from the dead ..."

In August, Fr Gleb Yakunin was sentenced to five years in a hard labour camp and five years of internal exile. During his trial he appeared calm and steady, speaking of himself only to admit his responsibilities and in particular to say that he was "happy to suffer for Christ".

Also in August, Alexander Ogorodnikov, director of the free seminary in Moscow, was sentenced to six years in a hard labour camp and five years of internal exile. He had been born in 1950 into a communist family and had thoroughly studied Marxism, without finding satisfactory answers. Then, during his studies at the Moscow Institute of Cinematography, Pasolini's film The Gospel According to Saint Matthew had made a deep impression on him.

Yet again in August, Tatiana Vellkanova was sentenced to four years in a hard labour camp and five years of internal exile. She was 48 years of age, a mathematician specializing in computer science, but she had given up her scientific work to be free to serve, preferring to become a nursing auxiliary in a hospital. From 1970 she was involved in defending human rights, attending tirelessly to the needs of prisoners of conscience and their families. She responded to her judges with silence and irony, and after sentence had been passed simply said, "The farce is over. Good!"

Under Andropov, the general conditions of imprisonment in the camps worsened. Inmates were allowed to receive parcels only after completing half their sentence. The parcels could contain only dried foodstuffs, since malnutrition was part of the punitive regime, as has been stated in the publications of Amnesty International. The prisoners, at least in the special camps and in the hard labour camps, were given work targets impossible to meet, which made it possible for them to be punished by reducing their food intake to 1300 calories per day without vitamins. Believers in the camps were subjected to harsher conditions than the other inmates. Their Bibles and their prayer books were confiscated and their baptismal crosses seized. They were forbidden to meet for prayer, particularly on Sundays and feast days. With the connivance of the guards they were left to the mercy of common criminals, who robbed them, made them their slaves and sometimes killed them. The guards, for the least offence or purely arbitrarily, would place them in solitary confinement in a cold, damp, concrete cell, where they had to sleep on the ground without blankets. Their diet there was 1300 calories every other day. The cell would be deliberately flooded, sometimes by blocking the sewer, so that sewage would flow in. The only thing to do then was to remain seated on a kind of concrete pillar which served as a stool. "Our sole witnesses," wrote one of these confessors, "were the dark walls and the mocking guards, but also the merciful Christ ..."