Witness Seminar, 1 — Transcript

the religious dimension of the twentieth century’s dominant conflict becomes established as a subgenre of Cold War studies, this witness seminar brings together key players in the religious Cold War to examine the challenges with which it presented the churches, churchmen and Christians in general either side of the EastWest divide.
Western political leaders sought to appropriate Christianity for their ideological struggle with Soviet communism, which, regardless of Marxist strictures regarding religion, had no hesitation in mobilising its own religious resources throughout the Soviet bloc. Hence the Cold War evolved into a politico-religious enterprise that vastly complicated the aspirations of the churches for an independent role in the international, as well as the domestic, arena.
It should never be forgotten that the Cold War represented an era in which peoples lived in fear of nuclear annihilation, yet the quest for peace, a traditional preserve of the churches, became a political minefield for clerics: a test of loyalty in the communist regimes, a suspect pursuit in the west. Whilst some churchmen advocated Christian-Marxist dialogue, others insisted on the absolute incompatibility of Christianity and Communism. Of those western churchmen who reached across the East-West divide, some saw hope and progress in the activities of the ‘official’ churches, while others saw only persecution and oppression and directed their support to the ‘underground’ churches. Whilst Orthodox churchmen in the East perceived a duty to ‘save’ their communist leaders, some rightwing Christians in the West felt an equal duty to destroy them.
As the multi-faceted role of the churches comes to be appreciated by contemporary scholars, the panel will recall their perceptions of the period and its impact on Christian aspirations and ecclesiastical relations. They will discuss their personal experiences, their different approaches and the disputes that divided them despite their common aims in the promotion of better East-West relations and the protection 1

of faith behind the Iron Curtain. Their lived knowledge and informed accounts of this important period will provide crucial insights into key questions, including the extent to which the churches contributed to the peaceful resolution of the Cold War. Their witness testimony will add immeasurably to understanding the conduct and nature of the religious Cold War and the legacy it bequeathed to the post-Cold War world.
Philip Walters: I’m Philip Walters. I used to be head of research at Keston College, the Keston Institute, and I specialise in the former Soviet Union. I am now the editor of the journal Religion, State and Society, which started life as Religion in Communist Lands.
Merrilyn Thomas (UCL): Thank you. My name is Merrilyn Thomas, and I am an honorary research fellow at UCL. I wrote my thesis on the role of the churches in East Germany in the 1960s, the Anglican churches and the Lutheran churches in East Germany. I have also written a book on the subject.
Dianne Kirby: And also a book on the Cold War.
MT: And on the Cold War, yes. The whole Cold War from beginning to end. A beginner’s guide, very useful.
Chimaroke Mgba: My name is Chimaroke Mgba. I am a Nigerian, and I specialise in democratisation and globalisation.
Serafim Florea (Kingston University): Good afternoon everyone. My name is Serafim Florea, and I am a graduate of international conflict management from Kingston University. My field of research is how political religion, carried both by governmental institutions and also by church institutions, influenced conflict around the world. By “conflict” I mean not only armed conflict but also Cold War conflict, which happens at various levels in terms of the forces involved, including banking and other kinds of things. At the moment I am involved with a registered charity which advances political study, which means looking at the whole but also not losing the connection with the elements that form the whole.
Xenia Dennen: Serafim is from Moldova.
Serafim Florea: I am from the Republic of Moldova, where we have a so-called frozen conflict following the Soviet Union split. This means that the Russians are occupying our Moldovian territory with their armies, and therefore our country is stuck between East and West.
Kirby: If you ask any questions or speak at all during the session, please identify yourself for the recording. Lucien?
Lucien Leustean (Birmingham): Hello, everybody. My name is Lucien Leustean. I was born in Romania, not very far from my colleague here, but I am currently a senior lecturer in Politics at Aston University in Birmingham. Why I am here, and why I am interested in the Soviet Union, first of all I edited a book on Eastern Christianity and the Cold War. Some of you may be familiar with that title. More recently, I have just 2

completed a project on the politics of religious bodies in the Soviet Union, the relationship between European institutions and churches. I’m very happy to be here.
John Pollard (Cambridge): Hello, my name is John Pollard, and I’m from the University of Cambridge. I’m a historian of the papacy in the twentieth century, Roman Catholicism and fascism. I am writing a book called The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914-58, and I have just spent three excruciating months trying to write a chapter on Pius XII and the Cold War. I think that tells you where I’m coming from.
Mario Kucera (London Met): Good afternoon, my name is Mario Kucera and I am a research student here under the kind supervision of Professor Hinds. My research subject is the European Union, but I find this topic of the Cold War and religion interesting.
Michael Kandiah: Hi, I’m Michael Kandiah. I am the director of the Witness Seminar programme, of which this session is part. Basically, my job is to collect oral histories like this and make them available on the web, and so forth. But I do have a Cold War connection. I have edited books and I have a number of publications on the Cold War, although in a very different area.
Judith Rowbotham: I’m Judith Rowbotham, and I am at Nottingham Trent University. I am an interdisciplinary scholar, working between the areas of history, law and criminology. I co-founded and run the network that Eric Hinds is part of, so I am experienced with this seminar chair, but I am particularly interested in this topic because I was an undergraduate at Lampeter in the ‘70s. I also come from a long line of Anglican clergy on both sides of my family, so I grew up with debates and then I went to Lampeter.
Kirby: Before the panel introduce themselves I have some announcements on how we’re going to proceed. This witness seminar will be recorded and transcribed, and speakers should keep in mind that they are on the record. No-one else attending the witness seminar should attempt to record it. If there is time there will be comments and questions from the audience. Most importantly, all speakers including those from the floor must identify themselves before making their comments. This is to ensure correct transcription and attribution. Each speaker, whether on the panel or from the floor, must be sure to sign the consent form which has been made available.
Before the transcript of the witness seminar is published the draft manuscript will be sent to each contributor, panellist or speaker from the floor. Each participant will have an opportunity to make amendments, corrections or deletions. The subsequent edited and corrected transcript of the witness seminar will be published. The recording of the witness seminar that will be made available will also be edited, principally to delete those portions of the utterances that speakers wish to have removed, but not those corrections relating to editing for sense and readability. The event will not operate under what is often called the Chatham House rule. Even though the transcript will be redacted where necessary, speakers will be attributed. The witness seminar is divided into two sessions, with a break in-between. I think we can now make a start.

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To begin, I welcome everybody to this inaugural seminar, launching the British part of what is actually a global research project called Christian World Community and the Cold War. Today’s event has been made possible by support from the LipmanMiliband Trust and the Phillips-Price Memorial Trust. Special thanks must go to Metropolitan University, especially Professor Geoff Hayes, to King’s College and Michael Kandiah, and to my own institution, the University of Ulster.
The aim of today’s event is to bring together scholars who are exploring the complex questions around the impact of the Cold War on churches and churchmen, with our panel who lived through and were a part of what has come to be termed the religious Cold War. We will have a break at about 2:15 and restart at about 2:40. Questions and contributions from the audience are welcome, as the concept behind the witness seminar is that of a conversation, primarily between our panellists, but involving us all.
Today’s event will focus on the challenge to and responses of the Christian community either side of the Iron Curtain to the East-West conflict, and the dilemmas with which the Cold War confronted the churches. Our panel, Xenia Dennen, Paul Oestreicher, John Arnold, Michael Bourdeaux and Werner Kraetschell, will begin by each giving a brief synopsis explaining how they came to be cold warriors for Christianity, as it were, and what they considered to be their key aims and objectives.
I’ll be traditional, and go with ladies first. Xenia, would you like to start?
Xenia Dennen: Actually, I feel that I am the one who is most unworthy to be here. I was really a sort of backroom girl, in that I got involved after finishing my course in Russian literature at Oxford. I met Michael Bourdeaux in 1966 and decided to work for him rather than be recruited by MI5, because I didn’t want to spend my life not being able to talk about what I was doing. My work and my course at Oxford had covered eighteenth and nineteenth century literature. I was really, really fascinated by what was going on among the churches in the Soviet Union. It was absolutely riveting. So I started working with Michael in February 1967, and was dealing with samizdat records, protests and trial records being brought to us, who knows by what routes, and I was translating them and writing about them. I got personally very involved with Christians who were having a hard time in the Soviet system. I was involved in the foundation of the Keston Institute in 1969, and in 1973 I founded and then edited for seven years the journal which Philip now edits, which in my day was called Religion in Communist Lands. And I wrote and edited, and then became a member of the council, and I am now chairman.
Kirby: Thank you. With the introduction to Keston, perhaps we should go to Michael next?
Michael Bourdeaux: I have often been struck by the fact that John Arnold and I have similar origins, in that we were both studying theology in the late 1950s. We were both extremely enthusiastic about ecumenical relations, and I truly believed that I would see a reunion between the Orthodox Church and the Anglican Church within my lifetime, poor deluded individual that I was. John spent a lot of time in East Germany, for various reasons. I was lucky enough to be selected in the first group of students ever to spend an academic year in the Soviet Union. I went there in September 1959, and from that point—almost from the first day—I experienced the 4

renewed persecution of the church under Khrushchev. You can date it precisely, because there was a journal called Science and Religion, Nauka i Religiia, the first issue of which exactly coincided with my arrival, and this became the flagship of the renewed persecution. My ecumenical contacts developed during that time. The Reverend Francis House came. He was head of a delegation from the World Council of Churches, and we had long discussions over Christmas about the situation of the church. Through him, my reports went back to Geneva.
However, when I returned to the UK in the summer of 1960 I found there was a widespread reluctance to believe that things had deteriorated so fast and so sharply in the Soviet Union. It seemed to me that there was a belief that all in the Church field was relatively well after 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev gave his speech denunciating Stalin. During subsequent visits to the Soviet Union I experienced the situation getting worse and worse. A group of Christians approached me and when I said, “What can I do to help?” they said, “Be our voice and speak for us”.
The only way to do that was to document the situation, and documents began in the form of samizdat self-published illegally circulating material. These documents began not only to circulate but eventually to pour out of the Soviet Union, and they were detailed and of an extremely high calibre. My work really began in a serious way before Keston College was founded by collecting those documents. However, before long it became obvious that there was huge tension within the area that I was studying and trying to write the truth about, not least because the Russian Orthodox Church joined the World Council of Churches at the New Delhi Assembly. John was there and went on to the Soviet Union afterwards, and that is his story.
John Arnold: That was in 1961.
MB: From that moment onwards the tendency was to believe the blander statements.
Eventually, the direct misinformation provided by the Russian Orthodox delegations went first of all to the permanent staff in Geneva and then to delegations all around the world. So it was an era, sadly, of conflict. And even the hard-based facts that we were concerned with were sometimes not believed, or if believed we were told that we were harming the situation of those in the Soviet Union who provided the information. Many times I was told that it would have been better if I had simply stopped. Is that enough? Have I had my time?
Kirby: Yes.
MB: I will come back to that in the second part.
Kirby: Paul, please could you introduce yourself?
Paul Oestreicher: My name is Paul Oestreicher. I was born in that part of Germany that later became the DDR, East Germany. I fled from there because of my Jewish grandparents and grew up in New Zealand. I’m an Anglican priest and a Quaker, and my academic studies, such as they are, were in politics. At the University of Bonn I did political research on the relationship of Christianity to Marxism, and published two books on that subject in the ‘60s of the last century. In 1964 I was invited by the British Council of Churches to be the first secretary of the committee concerned with 5

East-West relations, the East-West Relations Advisory Committee of the British Council of Churches. I was its secretary, and John Arnold became its chairman.
Basically, that Committee continued its work throughout the Cold War, and produced probably the first relatively popular book describing the situation in all the so-called socialist countries of Eastern Europe. The book was called Discretion and Valour, and it was a piece of public education on the subject.
I combined that professional work for the British Council of Churches with my own commitment to the peace movement. I was and remain the vice president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I saw my role very much as fighting the Cold War, by which I mean that the Cold War was my enemy, not taking sides in it. I saw myself in a diplomatic role, and astonishingly I was never approached by the security services of either side, although on both sides I was suspected of working for the security services of the other side. Luckily, I was never tempted to do either. I think that’s enough as an introduction.
Kirby: Thank you. John Arnold?
John Arnold: Thank you. I was going up to Cambridge to read modern languages in the early 1950s, which made it natural for me to volunteer to go on the Russian course, and eventually to qualify as an interpreter and be commissioned in the intelligence corps. Unlike Paul, who is a pacifist, I am actually a Cold Warrior. I was a soldier in the Cold War. Incidentally it was a very small unit, which included Michael Frayne and Alan Bennett, so I am used to having my wits sharpened by interlocutors, but that wasn’t a patch on having to sit between Paul and Michael for twenty-odd years on the East-West Relations Advisory Committee.
My first experience of religion behind the Iron Curtain was in Berlin in 1956, with a group of idealistic Christian students who were helping to rebuild Berlin with their bare hands as an act of reconciliation. The leader of our group was both a very good Christian and also a committed Communist. I learned from the start that for us, at least in Europe, it is not just black and white. We are not Manichees, we are Christians, and we learned to live with fifty shades of grey.
My wife, Anneliese, had been a student at the celebrated University of Halle, where she was arrested and imprisoned for being a Christian, which was providential for us because we met. Of course, she could not return to her family after she had escaped to the West, and for twenty years I was her only contact with her family. Meanwhile I had a career in the Church, and became in effect the ecumenical officer of the Church of England and chairman of the East-West Relations Advisory Committee of the British Council of Churches. This meant that I lived a double life, living together with Christians in Eastern Europe, and in the memorable phrase of our guru, Sir John Lawrence, seeing things from the point of view of the toad beneath the harrow. I also engaged in official contacts, both with Church and state.
My sympathies were of course with the humiliated and the insulted, but my work was in ecclesiastical diplomacy. I think that combination of official and unofficial engagement, which came together in the East-West Relations Advisory Committee, was in fact beneficial. Paul and Michael and I came from different standpoints, had different experience and different possibilities, but we had each other’s confidence, 6

and we could meet with about a dozen other experts and exchange views and produce the volume Discretion and Valour.
I had a couple of motivations for wanting to engage in this project, one of which is to counter the widespread misapprehension in the West. Practically no one in Britain had any idea of what it is actually like to live in a totalitarian state, and therefore they had black and white views of the people who did live there. A personal example, my own dear mother, who was a lovely person, when Anneliese and I got engaged and my mother heard something of her story she said, “Well, if she got arrested she must have done something wrong”. Oh, mother. Secondly, up until 1989 no reasonable person believed a word emanating from the German Democratic Republic. After 1989 they believed everything. This is deeply misleading. The Stasi archives are tainted by stupidity, cupidity and malice.
One simple example I can give is the attack made on Manfred Stolpe, the great, I would say saintly, general secretary of the East German Protestant Church through all those difficult years. When he stood for high office in the newly-united German Federal Republic, his opponents leaked material implying that he was a collaborator.
One or two of us got together and in typically English fashion wrote a letter to the Times about that, but there are other things which need a wider hearing. I am very grateful to Dianne and the rest of you for setting up this hearing. I want the truth to come out. May I tell one little anecdote? There are two Russian newspapers, and there are two Russian words for truth. The Russian for truth is pravda, and the Russian for the news is izvestia. It was commonly said that in the Truth there is no news, and in the News there is no truth. Thatcher and Reagan made a terrible mistake in 1989 in thinking that people in Eastern Europe had risen up because they wanted Western consumerism and capitalism. Nothing could be further from the truth. They wanted the truth. They were fed up with being consistently lied to.
Kirby: Thank you. We are also very fortunate in being joined this afternoon by someone from East Germany, the Reverend Werner Kraetschell. Do you want to say anything at this point?
PO: Perhaps I could introduce Werner, because I am responsible for him being here.
I’ve known Werner for many years, in fact in that crucial period when the Communist system was breaking down. He was a wonderful source of dispassionate analysis of what was happening, and was very largely used by the BBC at the time. He was dean of the East Berlin suburb of Pankow, which is where nearly all the Communist leaders lived. In fact, in the West it was often called the Pankow Republic.
In the East German churches there was a wide scale of response to the Communist system, ranging from outright opposition and rejection to almost total approbation.
You got both extremes; they were not typical but they existed. Werner is one of the very few people to have been a brilliant diplomat in the best Christian sense of the word, and understood nearly every side of every issue. He was a real support in his official position at the heart of the Communist system, geographically. He supported groups that were real opposition groups, holding his hand over them and saying, “Over my dead body, you are not going to touch them”. To do that, to have the capacity to save those who needed saving, he also had to be close to the Communist authorities. The most well known was the peace group in Pankow. Its Stasi file is one 7

of the most interesting you could imagine, and they were all considered very dangerous people. It is worth saying at this point that in East Germany the word “peace” was the Communist jargon for official policy. It was called our peace policy.
The only way to form dissident groups was also to call yourselves a peace group. That was the one thing which they could not forbid, but the peace groups meant peace in exactly the opposite way to the government. They were both using it ideologically.
The Pankow peace group was a profoundly dissident group, and without Werner it would not have survived. I think that is a good introduction to, simply, a Christian who still today lives in a street where nearly all his neighbours are former Communist officials, and they have remained his friends.
DK: Thank you. Now, down to some of the nitty-gritty of mixing scholarship with experience. Western archival sources show that Western secular policy makers, particularly in America, saw Christianity and the churches as natural allies and looked to mobilise their resources for political purposes, from anti-communist propaganda to actual acts of subversion, throughout the Soviet bloc. Archival research from the former Soviet bloc shows high levels of concern about the Western attempts to mobilise religion against the Communist regimes, as well as about its potential to destabilise and subvert. Soviet authorities in turn sought to use their churches and churchmen on their terms, as Paul has mentioned, particularly the peace movement, in response to what the West was doing. I wonder if you could discuss the extent to which you had a sense of being caught in the middle? Both sides were mobilising religion for political purposes. What did this do to the Christian agenda of unity?
Michael Bourdeaux: I don’t recognise this as part of my experience. I think I was very much in the forefront of certain aspects of events from 1960 onwards, because I had the key to unlocking the truth of what was going on in the Soviet Union as far as religion was concerned. Very few people outside the country had that key. I can lay my heart bare and say that I was never once, at any point, approached by any government, with I think one exception. In Norway in about 1970 I was once asked to come and talk to the Norwegian Parliament about Cold War issues concerning the church. The work of the Keston Institute was never used as an implement of the Cold War. Indeed, most of the church leaders whom I met in this country were quite distanced from that, and did not think in terms of the church being an instrument against Communism.
I can quote you something which is slightly amusing, although it wasn’t at the time.
When I started publishing my findings in the mid-1960s word got to me that the Foreign Office took exception to what I was writing, and called the idea that there was persecution the “Bourdeaux view” of religion in Russia. It was widely not believed, even in government circles. It actually took until David Owen’s day, a good ten years later in the mid-1970s, for that situation to change. From David Owen’s day I was actually an adviser to the Foreign Office, but it took a very long time. I just do not see a pattern of Church leaders, the Archbishop of Canterbury and so on, and leaders of the Church in America and elsewhere, ganging up and fighting the Cold War battle against communism.
Kirby: John?

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John Arnold: I would like to support what Michael has said. We had to think of three separate blocs. In the Soviet Union and its satellite states the churches were being instrumentalised, mainly in the cause of what was then called the peace policies of the Soviet Union, but also to spread the word about communism as a viable form of society. This was open and blatant, and we all understood it. For example, at meetings of the World Council of Churches, or the body with which I am more closely connected, the Conference of European Churches, churchmen from the East would tend to preface their remarks with what we called a passport speech. This was a declaration of loyalty which ensured they could return home safely and get a passport to come out again. This was quite transparent, and we lived with it as one of the rules of the game as it was being played in that period. Occasionally people overstepped the mark, and only discredited themselves.
There was a quite different phase in the United States of America. I do not know very much about it, but there I believe a combination of a kind of McCarthyite Catholicism and fundamentalist Protestantism did lead to what in theological terms is called a Manichean view of the world, seeing it as divided into black and white, the devilish and the godly. Some were even prepared to accept Armageddon if this would bring in the Rapture. This was not the case in Britain or in the British churches, which were our concern. They were perfectly alive to the nuances of the situation. Again, in my official position in the Church of England and in the British Council of Churches, I never came under any pressure from Foreign Office or Secret Service sources. I think if we can clear up this misapprehension, which may be around in the atmosphere, today will have been well spent.
PO: I think it is very important not to talk about the “Soviet bloc”. That came out very clearly in the book we published, Discretion and Valour. The differences within what I always call the so-called socialist countries of Eastern Europe were considerable. In the context of their relationship with religion, you faced quite distinctly different situations. There were two countries where in relative terms the Church remained free. One was East Germany and the other was Poland. It is often not understood in the West that the Church here remained relatively free and relatively unpersecuted. That does not mean that Christians didn’t have difficulties.
But the Church within its own terms was a factor in national policy and had a degree of power. In the Polish context, that power became so great that in the end the Church became the great political power, and together with the trade unions then toppled the system, supported by the Polish Pope.
I can give you a graphic example of this. I visited a Polish village and it happened to be the Feast of St Peter and St Paul. I came into the village and it was completely empty, there was no one around. I said to my chauffeur, “Where are the people?”. He replied, “It’s the Feast of St Peter and St Paul, of course they are all in church”. And so it turned out. When the service was over they spilled out into the street. I talked to the parish priest, and asked him, “Were all your people in church?”. And he said, “Well of course, except for the mayor, who has my dispensation”. In other words, the priest has power in the village, and that was reflected nationally.
In East Germany it was not as dramatic as that. The Church was always in difficulty, but for one thing West Germany was across the border, and everything that happened in East Germany was reflected in the West German media within twenty-four hours.
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So the East German government was very restricted in what it could do. It wanted to have a good image, and being relatively kind to the Church was part of having a good image. In the latter period of the communist system, the Church began to have the sort of influence that it had in Poland. The Church became organised, had congresses where it openly discussed issues of freedom, produced documents of great importance and, above all, saw to it that violence should not and could not be part of the situation.
The peaceful revolution, as people in East Germany call it, was very largely the product of the German Church’s influence, which grew exponentially in the last two or three years. It was quite extraordinary. That history has been documented in a doctoral thesis by Stephen Brown, who has done a wonderful job of documenting the Church’s political role in the collapse of communism.
DK: Werner, did you want to say something?
Werner Kraetschell: I ask for your understanding because of my poor English. I am not well trained in speaking English. I was born in 1940 in Berlin, and have very vivid memories of the hot war, not the Cold War. The bombing of Berlin was a trauma of my childhood, and I know what hot war was and is. Therefore I think that cold war is better than the hot war which was from ’39 to ’45. The meaning of the work of the churches behind the Iron Curtain was to bring into the cold atmosphere of the Cold War warm corners and rooms where you could touch or smell freedom. Therefore, my house in Berlin was always a meeting place of the opposition and of my friend Timothy Garton Ash. We had a lot of—[phone rings] Excuse me. That’s Tim.
DK: I hope he mentions this in the Guardian and gives us all a plug.
WK: As you must know, my houses were bugged by the security service. I read later in my Stasi file that secret microphones were installed in the whole house. In special situations we used to work with our clients or members of the opposition or suffering people or those whom it was necessary to help because of the danger of suicide, to bring them from East to West. In my position in the Church I had this opportunity because of my friends. The Ambassador of West Germany is the godfather of my daughter, who called a moment ago. This man could help, as could Manfred Stolpe, to bring thousands of East Germans to the West, normally all from prison.
The East German situation was that our work in the spirit of reconciliation was to bring the warmth of the Gospel into this cold society and this bad ideology. You had to be very creative, as many of us were who made those rooms and spaces for freedom. In those spaces it was not only the Christian opposition that came together but also the communists, because within the communistic bloc you found what we called the noble communists, those who also suffered under Stalin and who had very oppositional thoughts and ideas within the ideology. Therefore, there was a close link and dialogue between those noble communists and Christians. The noble communists were always a kind of provocation or challenge for the Christian faith, because they invariably ask indirectly about your hope for the world and about your vision. The communists always talk about utopia, and therefore I think the communists are a very good challenge for our theology. The theology of East German pastors and churches is very influenced by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It’s wonderful to know that this is where the German church of Bonhoeffer was when he was in London.

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PO: There is a plaque on this building to say so.
WK: This was the best preparation for our existence as theologians, that we had the chance to have a dialogue with the good side of the communistic dreams.
DK: I think this is probably a good point to bring in the factor of Christian-Marxist dialogue. Perhaps you could say something about that?
XD: I think we must make a clear distinction between Marxism and MarxismLeninism, which was established in Russia. Lenin was influenced not only by Marxism but by Jacobinism within Russian political thought and the ideas of Tkachev. So different from the Mensheviks, who were closer to Marxism, he wanted to control everything with a small professional group at the top. Everything was controlled from above, it was nothing to do with decisions coming up from below or anything to do with democracy. So I think we do need to be quite clear that what was established in the Soviet Union had, to my mind, nothing to do with Marxism. I am not a Marxist theorist and I do not have that specialised knowledge, but I do know from my studies of the Soviet Union what Marxism-Leninism was about. It was really difficult for a Christian to have a dialogue with Marxism-Leninism.
I was thinking about the situation in the Soviet Union during the ‘60s and ‘70s until the rise of Gorbachev, and I can’t imagine a situation where Christians could have a serious discussion with an idealist communist. I don’t know whether Michael and John would agree. I am not sure that any such idealists existed in the Soviet Union by the 1960s. I think all the ideals of the early years had disappeared, and they used the ideology for their own survival and the preservation of their own positions. I don’t know of any. For example, the Christian seminars set up by Alexander Ogorodnikov.
I can’t think of them having discussions with communists. They were under terrible pressure, and of course he was then put in prison and other members were put into prison psychiatric hospitals.
PO: As a political scientist, I say immediately that this is why I always refer to the socalled socialist countries.
XD: It had little to do with socialism.
PO: I never call them socialist; they were not. I totally agree with your analysis. But I would venture to say that they probably even existed within the system in Russia, although it was very hard in Russia to remain in the Party and not be murdered, if you were a communist dissident.
XD: Yes.
PO: It was very hard to survive in Russia after the terrible pogroms against communists as well as against Christians. But one thing I would like to comment on is, as Werner mentioned, the diplomacy at the highest level that John and I were involved with. There was a visit of the Archbishop of Canterbury, an official visit to East Germany. John has wonderfully told a story of that visit extensively, but just one bird’s eye view. We sat round a large table with a British delegation led by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the then president of the Council of Ministers of East 11

Germany, a man called Stoph. As Werner said, Christians could provide warmth where there was just a cold society, and the Archbishop echoed this so wonderfully.
The Communist politician made a classical speech. You knew what he was going to say before he said it, it was doctrinaire and straightforward and he constantly talked about peace. And when he had finished the Archbishop said, “Yes, we too want peace. But the peace you talk of is a very cold peace. We want a warm peace”. Just to echo that, it was precisely what the Church was able to do, to create pockets of dialogue, not open resistance but people debating issues. The synods were the only places in East Germany that were democratically run, where you could have an election and all the hands didn’t go up together. They debated with each other.
DK: John?
JA: John Arnold, Christian-Marxist dialogue. There is always a question about the compatibility of Christianity with Communism. Go back to Marx. Marx came from a long line of Lithuanian rabbis, and it is a little known fact that Marx was himself a Lutheran Christian and had been baptised. But I think that in his classical period, when he was writing his great works, he really was an atheist. His atheism comes from Feuerbach and his idea that religion is a projection. When in everyday discourse you hear people counting religion as a projection, that is Feuerbach reflected by Marx.
Marx himself really was an atheist and so was Lenin, and so there is a genuinely aggressive, even militant, atheistic streak in communism.
However, Christians have often attempted to make some kind of rapprochement, and in the years after the Second World War some Marxists did too. There was a Marxist here, James Klugmann, with whom one could have rational discourses, and there is a Frenchman, Roger Garaudy. What was not possible was to have open ChristianMarxist debate in the Soviet Union or in its satellite states, wherever the party was in power. But in the West there were debates. However, at the moment in 1968 at which the Red Army marched in its hobnailed boots into the salons of Ptague, which was the best centre of Christian-Marxist dialogue, that dialogue came to an end.
MB: Yes. I could date to the day the time when Christian-Marxist dialogue began in the Soviet Union on an official level. Unofficially, it did exist in the prison camps, because that is where dissident communists and dissident Christians mingled and spoke openly and freely. Readers of Solzhenitsyn will know that there is more freedom within the prison camp system, the gulag, than anywhere else. Communism and Christianity finally began an open dialogue on 28 April 1988. This was the day on which Mikhail Gorbachev invited some of the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church to the Kremlin for a reception. These are the words spoken by Gorbachev on that notable occasion: “Believers [religious believers] are Soviet people. They are workers and patriots, and they have the full right to express their convictions with dignity. Perestroika, democratisation and glasnost concern them as well in full measure and without any restrictions. This is especially true of ethics and morals, a domain where universal norms and customs are so helpful for our common cause.” XD: What was the date?
MB: That was the end of April 1988, and it was preparatory to the setting up of the celebration of the baptism of Prince Vladimir.
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XD: The watershed when Communist Party policy in the Soviet Union completely changed towards religion.
MB: I often quote that passage in lectures, and I say that in a certain sense it was a shame that Gorbachev didn’t last longer. It would have been very, very interesting to have seen the outworking of such a debate, although with hindsight it’s obvious that Christianity was going to win hands down.
JA: Could I put in one sentence? I missed out the central stage in what I was saying about Marx’s own thought. You can sum up Marx’s religious position by saying that his doctrine is the doctrine of the social prophets of the faith of his fathers, Amos, Micah and Isaiah, without God. It is the social teachings of the great sixth century and eighth century prophets which is the faith of Marx. I think the Russian thinker Berdyaev was right in correcting a then-prevalent view that communism had nothing to do with religion by characterising it as a Judeo-Christian heresy. It has some elements of the religious tradition but, by missing the thirst for God, at the same time that it is thirsting for justice and righteousness, it goes wrong.
PO: At this point I think it is worth bringing in the great attempt, and the only large organised attempt, to create a framework for public Christian presence in Eastern Europe. That was the attempt by Professor Josef Hromádka, who at the Amsterdam Assembly of the World Council of Churches, the first WCC assembly after the war, was the great counterpart to John Foster Dulles in the American delegation, who was openly and frankly anti-communist. Hromádka said, “In the light of Christian history, and the degree to which the churches have been part of the oppression of the working classes, we have to rethink our position and humbly, within communist societies, work together with the system as far as we in conscience can”. That led Hromádka and a group of other Christians, supported by a small minority of Christians from the West, to found the Christian Peace Conference in Prague.
The Russians were always present, as a powerful delegation led right from the start by—I deliberately say the great—Archbishop Nikodim of Leningrad. In a way, facing Nikodim I felt very inexperienced and young, until I realised that he was my age. A great Russian archbishop comes with all the nimbus that I didn’t have as a young Anglican priest, and yet we were counterparts to each other. That first great assembly in Prague was in 1961, but it really reached its pinnacle in 1964, when there was a great confrontation between me and Nikodim. A resolution was put to the assembly which was so one-sidedly pro-Soviet that I got up and challenged it. I said that everything in that resolution was true but it was only half the truth and the other half is omitted, and therefore it became a lie. I said that I could never vote for a resolution of that kind. I had come there for dialogue, and not for propaganda purposes.
Amazingly, I think possibly because Nikodim was also a good politician and realised that the mood of the assembly was perhaps against him, he got up and withdrew the motion. I know from background stories that he had to suffer for that. He was carpeted, as he sometimes was, but I got up in that assembly and embraced him and said, “We can differ and we can be brothers”. But I had to pay for it.
When the next assembly came I continued in this vein, saying that we cannot be a one-sided conference with integrity. The next assembly was in May 1968, and prior to 13

that assembly the general secretary of the Christian Peace Conference, Josef Ondra, came to London to see me, and this shows you the kinds of pressures these Christians were under. He said, “This is a very bitter mission for me because we have become good friends, but I tell you this, if I cannot persuade you to resign from the executive committee of the Christian Peace Conference I will lose my job. I have been told to sack you, and if I don’t succeed in that mission, it’s me that’s for the chop”. So of course I went. I thought he was far too valuable a go-between to sacrifice him for my sake, so I resigned.
That was in May 1968, and in August 1968 pretty well all the senior people from the West also resigned in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The president of the Christian Peace Conference, Josef Hromádka, was totally heartbroken, and within three months he was dead. People said that he never recovered from this shock. In other words, it was a valiant attempt but it didn’t work.
The Soviet pressure became so great that by ’68 the Christian Peace Conference had simply become a Christian mouthpiece of the World Peace Council, which was an international open Soviet support group. ’68 was a watershed for those of us who still had a residual belief that genuine reform was possible in Eastern Europe, and of course the attempt of Gorbachev to prove that it was came too late. By that time the system itself was no longer viable, particularly economically, and the whole thing collapsed.
DK: Werner?
Werner Kraetschell: I want to add to and stress Paul’s words by examples. You ask what the goal was of the churches in the Cold War. I can speak only for East Germany and for the conditions of life in this very poor German country, where we were imprisoned by a wall. We didn’t set the pace; the task of the churches was to make room for freedom, for free discussion, for dialogue, in all levels of society. And we worked for the young people who came to us and who had a lot of profit from these spaces of freedom. It inspired them to make the wall come down. It was not our merit.
We are not heroes, we were enablers, and that was the task of the church.
I would like to give some examples to illustrate the role of the churches and of our clergy. My friend was a leading figure, a Marxist communist, a noble communist. He was my brother-in-law, and we had a lot of contacts with other communists who were anti-communists in the power centres. He gave me a very new perspective. In my diocese I was the number one responsible for the relationship between the state and the territory of my diocese, twenty-four parishes and so on. My brother in law, Adolf Reisen, told me, “Dear Werner, you must imagine what your being in this world and sitting in front of a communistic functionary means for this man. He never had the impression of being a free man. He has to follow the party line. He is a functionary;
he has to function here, and not think by himself. And therefore, you are bringing a miracle in his cold world. You are vivid, you are spontaneous, you are authentic, you don’t ask for any line. And you must know that your influence is so strong you can’t imagine it”.
There was also the issue of the Stasi. You must know that my deputy was a collaborator. I had six collaborators who were trained and had to work against me.
But you are always successful if you love people. You must love the communists’ 14

good. That was my vow. Therefore, I made a visit on the holy night of ‘89, that famous year when the wall came down, to the successor of Erich Honecker, whose name is Egon Krenz. I had wonderful services in our Lutheran tradition and family.
Every Christmas I want to go to a cold corner of this world to bring the warmth of the Gospel and of Christ’s birth to any cold place. That year, I wanted to go to Egon Krenz, who lived not far from my church. I took a candle from the church service and went to him, and I didn’t know if he would tell me to go away, or what his reaction would be. He was so happy that I came, and we had a long talk of three hours on that holy night, a kind of confession from a communist leader. It is my duty not to speak about what was in this discussion, but I was very interested in the communistic functionary who tells you, “Oh, my comrades, they do not come again, but my pastor comes. You must know that I was baptised and confirmed”. Therefore you had a very new basis of hearing, and if there is some love of warmth in your way of acting, there is no enemy who is not impressed by this.
One last point, in 2005 in this spirit of love and understanding I invited the four leading generals and admirals of the West German army and the four leading generals and admirals of the East German army. The last Minister of Defence of East Germany, an admiral and a very interesting personality, told me, “I am very astonished that my comrade, an East German general, is a fellow churchman”. On this night of free discussion one side, the East Germans, were able to speak Russian fluently, while the West Germans spoke English fluently, because of where they were educated. It was very interesting, and I was interested to show that these military people were very hopeful that the idea of non-violence could work, because in ’89 in this famous month of November both sides were full of missiles and weapons that you can’t even imagine. One soldier could have made the whole thing explode, and therefore it is a merit of these generals from both sides. They had never met before, it was the first contact, and there was a new task for the Church. There was a request from the East German generals to the West Germans, “You have punished us after the unification of Germany, and we get a salary close to the social support of the state.
But our SS generals in the West and their families, they get the same money as the generals of your Western army. Is this just?”.
There is a new way of loving, of making war, of helping. My last point concerns the peace group in my parish, under the roof of our church as in other churches in the western diocese. There the idea of non-violence was very practical. Because of my position the state officials in our district had no chance to hinder this peace group, this opposition group. But they decided to send to every public meeting about twenty young people from the communist schools, young men of the security high school.
You could discover them very easily. Seventy per cent of this group were not members of the church, but I said that it is the work of the church and it is the tradition of these groups to sing songs. If this group of about ninety people in our parish house began to sing you could see that they were from the state, and if you asked, “What is your name?”, you always got the name “Lutz”, which is a German forename. So they got the nickname “Lutzies”, and they always had a command from the Party to disturb our meetings, or make a revolution or protest. Therefore in every meeting it was a wonderful exercise to prove non-violence by yourself. You had to communicate with those strangers, people who were in a spirit of enmity. You had to work with them in a peaceful way, and you learned by yourself not to take violence.
Therefore for ten years those groups in East Germany were trained in non-violence, 15

and this was a keyword of the success of the bringing down of the Berlin Wall.
Candles against sticks and tanks.
DK: At this point I would like to open the floor for questions before we have a break.
Does anyone have any questions for the panel on the areas we have addressed so far?
Alright. We will have a short break and return in ten minutes.

Session 2
Dianne Kirby: Welcome back everyone. One of the inspirations, if you will, for this bringing together of scholars and activists, for want of a better word, was that John and I were discussing my work in the archives and his experience. As he pointed out, archives can be misleading unless you have people who actually lived through the events of the time to put their bit in as well. What I want to do at this point is go back to the archives, because one of the factors that is coming out on both sides is the role of the Vatican. John Paul II himself, very famously, after the end of the Cold War actually regretted the demise of the “noble communists” and the truths of Marxism.
But if we go back to the early period, looking at Pius XII and his involvement, particularly with the Americans, it certainly did create a sense of anxiety throughout the Soviet Union, and subsequently the East European regimes, that there was a concerted attempt on the part of the West to use the churches. My own research here confirms what the panel were saying, which is that there were certainly attempts to resist and transcend cold war manipulation and divisions, certainly on the part of the ecumenical movement, and we also see the same with elements of the Catholic Church.
I think what is important here is that perceptions also matter. The evidence coming from the East European and Soviet archives is that they did believe that there was a movement against them, and that religion was dangerous, that it was a conduit for subversion. So for instance, although there has been an assumption that the Soviets responded favourably to Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, new scholarship shows that in fact the Soviets thought it was only a tactical shift in the efforts to battle communism. Interestingly, they saw links with the World Council of Churches as a means to fend off the Vatican threat to the Russian Orthodox Church, because of course the Russian Orthodox Church was also important in developing inter-Orthodox links. So there was this fear, and I wonder if you could address the fact that it must have had some impact, and have made some problems for what you were trying to do. As Paul pointed out while we were discussing these issues during the break, you all had massive Stasi files, and you seem to have been objects of suspicion. And, as was mentioned earlier, certainly Keston worried the Soviet authorities tremendously. Could we address that aspect, this fear and the extent to which it complicated the Christian witness, if you will?
PO: I think what you have just said is absolutely true. I believe that from the moment of the October Revolution in Russia the Soviet system was on the defensive, and at heart it never changed. It knew of its own economic weakness throughout, and it was terribly afraid of the capitalist West. Their protestations about peace were indeed propaganda, but they were also true. They were genuinely afraid, and many Soviet 16

policies, particularly those towards religion, were based on the assumption that religion was not a private matter of a person’s beliefs but a power structure, symbolised by the Vatican, that was out to destroy them. The evidence suggests that many people within the Vatican framework saw it that way themselves. They did use crusading language, that there was a great crusade on. It was a crusade of god against atheism, and I think fear was a huge motivation in the whole of the Soviet structures.
This of course meant that they had to almost kill their own economy by spending on military power to fend off the West. This was deeply ingrained, this idea that Britain, France and so on actually tried to invade the Soviet Union and destroy the revolution right from the moment it broke out. They never lost this deep feeling of the world being against them, and there was sufficient truth in that to make the fear real. People who are afraid also become aggressive, so there was also the aggressive element in Soviet communism, although I don’t think military conquest was ever part of their plan. I gather from historians that Soviet documents tend to prove this.
For example, the offer of Stalin to re-unify Germany and give up East Germany as a communist state, and let a unified, neutral Germany exist outside the communist sphere, was rejected by the West as a piece of communist propaganda and never taken seriously. The Soviet documents prove that Stalin was perfectly prepared to do that, in other words an Austrian solution to the whole of Germany, so that the whole situation with the Wall and all that would have been quite unnecessary.
That element is part of the Cold War history and the Church is only one factor in it, but I think psychologically the language of crusading hit home, and communists were afraid. Certainly, the Soviets did not have inner self-assurance. I think they had become cynics, and this is borne out by what Xenia said. They did not believe in the Marxist view of history that said they were inevitably going to win. They had lost that faith; they mouthed it but didn’t believe it. That came graphically home to me in a conversation over lunch with Oleg Gordievsky, the Soviet head of the KGB in London, who turned out to be a double agent and was working for Western intelligence at the same time, and who then came to live in Britain and wrote books and all sorts of things. But then I thought he was just an ordinary Russian diplomat with whom I had dealings as international secretary of the British Council of Churches. In the middle of the meal he said to me, “Do you know the difference between us Russians and the Americans?”, and I said, “Tell me, Oleg”. He said, “The Americans believe in their own propaganda”. Very subtle joke, but it was true.
DK: Could we take a question from the floor?
John Pollard: This is not really a question, more a comment, trying to illuminate some of the things which Paul Ostreicher has just said. The Vatican’s attitude towards the Soviet Union evolved over time, and it evolved quite dramatically. The interesting thing is that after the revolution the Vatican was convinced that this was the moment for the conversion of Russia. It was convinced that it could do business with the Bolshevik government; extraordinary, with the hindsight of history, but it is true. But of course, what the Vatican had forgotten was that the Catholic Church in Russia, apart from being very, very small, very marginal, was hopelessly associated and tainted by its relationship with Poland. Indeed, many of the clergy and bishops of the Catholic Church in Russia were Polish. They were always going to be in a very dangerous position, particularly after the defeat of the Red Army in front of Warsaw.
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The other point I wanted to make was that sometimes we actually do need to take Soviet ideology and Soviet propaganda at its face value. When I look at what happened to the Catholic Church—I am only looking at the Catholic Church in Eastern Europe and the countries that were overrun by the Red Army and then sovietised—it is very clear to me that the communists were quite right to see the Catholic Church as a very dangerous institution, simply because it was an institution.
It was deeply imbedded in the society of those countries in all sorts of different ways.
It had huge demographic and economic but above all institutional and legal strength.
For sovietisation to succeed after 1945 in those countries and for the revolution to be carried out, and let’s be very clear that that is what they were after, an institution like the Catholic Church had to be eliminated, or at least cut heavily down to size.
Whatever speculation we may make about the efficacy of godless atheism as a policy and the extent to which it was truly believed in by the Soviet elite, the fact was that the Catholic Church in particular but other Churches also were an impediment to Sovietisation after 1945.
John Arnold: Paul was kind enough to invite me to a meal with Oleg Gordievsky, because Gordievsky wanted to talk about the Christian faith and he needed interlocutors. In the middle of a very interesting, very profound Dostoyevskian conversation, somebody came uninvited from the Soviet embassy with a supposedlyvisiting professor to join in the conversation, and Gordievsky just got up and left. Do you remember that? It was a very interesting example of how seriously they took religion, compared with the neglect and scorn which we sometimes experienced from our own politicians. Marxism took Christianity much more seriously than capitalism has ever done.
I want to look back at a nuanced slight disagreement with Paul, which is perhaps along John Pollard’s line. I think that the communist threat had some elements of reality in it, and was not just a myth or a creation of Western propaganda, and it had three levels. The first is that I think there is an irreducibl