A Publication of the ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN LAITY
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| Volume 6 Number 27 - Tuesday, July 6th, 2004 |
A Publication of the ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN LAITY |
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Speak no ill of the deadINNOCENT
OF TREACHERY: IN MEMORIAL OF FATHER DIMITRY DUDKO
by
Alexander Soldatov Portal-credo.ru site, 2 July 2004 - After metropolitans Antony Bloom and Pitirim Nechaev, who personified soviet Orthodoxy crippled by bolshevism and "sergianism," Fr Dimitry Dudko left for a different world. The former idol of the dissident intelligentsia and former "prisoner of conscience," who ended his days as the "spiritual director" of the extremist "Zavtra" newspaper and a cleric of a remote village church almost 100 kilometers from Moscow, died on 28 June at the age of eighty-three. He was a peasant's son and was distinguished by his simplicity and accessibility. However he was a star and many of his extravagant acts cannot be explained other than as ambition for fame. To achieve this Fr Dimitry wrote dozens of novels, which nobody knows, and open letters to Brezhnev and Carter, which did not reach their addressees, and he dreamed up an all-union antialcohol campaign a year before Gorbachev came to power. Father Dimitry Dudko passed into history with a very contradictory reputation. His name became known to soviet people, to "all progressive humanity," after his shameful "televised repentance," shown on all soviet television channels just on the eve of the 1980 Olympiad. Dressed in a fine suit from the "Bolshevik" factory, the gray-bearded priest informed the world of how he received assignments from foreign intelligence services and assumed for himself the task of overthrowing the soviet state, of which he "sincerely repented." Thousands of his spiritual children knew well that Fr Dimitry never had done anything of the kind; his sermons were devoted only to questions of Christian morals and the word "atheism" was the only "political" term he used. The radiant dream of a "peaceful Christian enlightenment" of the Soviet Union that was beginning to rot, which Fr Dimitry sowed in the romantic hearts of his followers, seemed to have been cancelled and disgraced by Fr Dimitry himself. Many of his "spiritual children" have not even recovered from the blow to this very day. However Fr Dimitry's "repentance" was not completely surprising. It had been prepared to a great extent by the experience of the preceding life of the "all-Russian pastor." He came to the church after the war and a serious wound. In the first postwar years the "construction" of the new church devised by Comrade Stalin in the crucial 1943, when the contours of the postwar world were being drawn, was in full swing. The demobilized Dima Dudko entered theological and pastoral courses that had begun in the Novodevichy monastery by the direct order of the soviet leader. His theological education, however, was completed only in 1956 because the state decided to make an example of him by punishing the seminarian for publication of harmless verses, the first of his literary attempts, in newspapers that were issued in occupied territory. Thus simultaneously with his theological education Fr Dimitry received a camp education. His first place of ministry was the Transfiguration [Preobrazhenskii] cathedral that was torn down in 1961 to make way for the "Preobrazhenskaia Square" metro station. The beginning priest was trained in preaching by Metropolitan Nikolai Yarushevich, one of the three participants in the meeting with Stalin on a September night in 1943. The soviet state willingly published, mainly for "foreign use," collections of Metropolitan Nikolai's sermons "in defense of peace." Father Dimitry's sermons developed in the same style. After the destruction of the cathedral, which shook up the young priest, he was located in the neighboring cemetery church that became the site of the birth of his fame. After Saturday vespers he conducted informal conversations with parishioners, answering any questions which they posed for him in notes. The conversations dragged on late into the night and hundreds of people flocked to them, who were not the traditional elderly church folk but artists, engineers, and hippies. In an endless stream, western reporters and diplomats went to the Transfiguration Cemetery, some of whom even accepted baptism at Fr Dimitry's hands. The foreigners' attention guaranteed for a time a certain "immunity" for the energetic pastor. But in the end the authorities found a pretext for transferring him to a remote village parish, where an automobile accident was arranged, as the result of which Fr Dimitry underwent "hospitalization" in a psychiatric institution. His spiritual children liberated him from that place, but soon occurred his official arrest, for publication in the West of collections of sermons and literary works. Church leadership acted in synch with the soviet leadership. Fr Dimitry was retired and banned from clerical ministry. So that his notorious "repentance" was directed not only to the state but also to his own church hierarchy. "He repented both to God and to Satan," commented one of the Moscow priests of that time about this action. After his release Fr Dimitry was deprived of his former fame. His name became known again only at the beginning of the 1990s, when he addressed angry accusations to the "dermocrats." Soon the "Den" newspaper (now known as "Zavtra"} triumphantly introduced to a stunned public the former dissident and antisoviet in the capacity of its "spiritual director." "I never spoke against the soviet state," Fr Dimitry confessed. Under the circumstances of the collapse of soviet values, he addressed them as a zealous supporter, even to the point of calling for enlisting Stalin in the canon of saints. In one edition of Zavtra Fr Dimitry wrote: "The time has now come to rehabilitate Stalin. The entire nation, ripped off and deceived, now is sighing: if Stalin were here there would not be such a disaster. But this rehabilitation, as it appears from a human point of view, appears to me as a priest from a spiritual one. I want to recall that our patriarchs, especially Sergius and Alexis, called Stalin a divinely ordained ruler. Indeed, Stalin was given to us by God; he created such a powerful state that cannot be destroyed completely, however hard they try."
It is hard to agree with Fr Dimitry from a
Christian point of view. But he spoke sincerely,
in keeping with his faith. Sincerity is an
extremely rare quality in modern life, and even
more so in contemporary church circles where
everything depends on the "will of the
hierarchy." So that, despite the grotesqueness of
his views, this man was worthy of respect. He
lived in an epoch that broke many people. It even
broke him, but did not deprive him of his
sincerity. It is hard to convict a sincere man of
treachery. That is what those spiritual children
who have remained loyal to him to the end think.
(tr. by PDS) |
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