On this day in 1980, Archpriest Dimitrii Dudko appeared on Soviet television with a public repentance. When I joined the Church in 1985, the following narrative was offered to accept: focus on your spiritual life and not on the troubling issues surrounding the history of the Russian Church in the twentieth century. The bishops of the Moscow Patriarchate were responsible for maintaining the balance between the state and the church, and it was neither the lay community’s nor the clergy's business to assess how successfully they were doing their job. Fr. Dimitrii Dudko (b. 1922) disregarded these unwritten guidelines. He became a champion of the Russian Church Abroad by talking about New Martyrs and Russianness. This course of action left Fr. Dimitrii with the following choices: to continue his independent ministry and possibly go to jail or exile, or to take a deal from the authorities. During the Summer 1980 Olympic Games, the Soviet Union was deeply involved in Afghanistan. Responding to this, “Western governments first considered the idea of boycotting the Moscow Olympics in response to the situation in Afghanistan at the December 20, 1979, meeting of NATO representatives, although, at that time, not many of the governments were interested in the proposal. The idea gained popularity, however, when Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov called for a boycott in early January. On January 14, 1980, the Carter Administration joined Sakharov by setting a deadline by which the Soviet Union must pull out of Afghanistan or face consequences including an international boycott of the games. When the deadline passed a month later without any change to the situation in Central Asia, Carter pushed U.S. allies to pull their Olympic teams from the upcoming games” (US Department of State Archive, “The Olympic Boycott 1980”). Considering dissidents, the “fifth column” of the West KGB cracked down on them, including Fr. Dimitrii Dudko. On June 20, 1980, after five months of prison isolation, he appeared on Soviet television, renouncing his past views and his past activities. TASS reported this on the same day. The Novosti Press Agency transmitted a statement from Fr. Dimitrii in radio broadcasts to foreign countries. The next day, Izvestia published the text. It was then reprinted by a number of the most significant Soviet newspapers. On June 21, 1980, Fr. Dmitri was allowed to return home. About three weeks later, Fr. Dimitrii wrote to Patriarch Pimen asking for forgiveness. On July 9, it appeared in the bulletin of the Moscow Patriarchate and then in the Zhurnal Moskovskoi Patriarkhii (The Journal of Moscow Patriarchate). Fr. Dimitrii’s statement began with an admission of breaching Soviet criminal law. He said that after his arrest, he initially insisted that he was fighting against godlessness, not against the Soviet state. Still, on reflection, he realized the following: “I was arrested not for believing in God, but for a crime.” Then Fr. Dimitrii described the stages of his “fall”: he tried to teach the bishops, reproaching them for pursuing the wrong policy, and this, they say, concealed the desire to bring the Church into conflict with the state. He said that he was not grateful enough for his “humane” release from prison in 1956 and published “slanderous” articles and books in the West. Fr. Dimitrii wrote that he tried to do everything his own way and not with the people of his country, which he loves, and worse, he was the source of information discrediting his country, which the sensation-hungry West picked up. Now he realized that the West was “amusing” him. Moreover, he realized he did not want to align himself with the Church he belongs to, forgetting that the Church does “the work that it needs.” All these considerations led Fr. Dmitrii to a categorical conclusion: “I renounce what I did; I regard my so-called fight against godlessness as a fight against Soviet power.” This transformation of Fr. Dimitrii became a revenge of the Soviet authorities against Sakharov and others they failed to dissuade. Ten years later, Fr. Dimitri explained his remorse statement: “My statement was drawn up from the phrases I said during interrogations. If I had compiled it myself, then I would express my position in my own way. Nevertheless, my heart lies in the words that I will do God’s work ‘as a son of the Orthodox Church and as a son of my Fatherland.’ This is the basis of my statement. Everything else is husk. But it was precisely the husk that my enemies paid attention to... I never set myself the goal of being a dissident either in relation to my country or in relation to my Church... I understood what a shame I was going to be, how difficult it would be to understand me, but I deliberately went for it” (Literaturnaia Rossia, January 19, 1990). This path of fidelity to his homeland took Fr. Dimitrii further. In his work Post-Mortal Meetings with Stalin, Dudko reconciles Stalin and Holy Tsar Nicholas on the grounds of preserving the Russian Empire. Fr. Dimitri Dudko passed away in 2004. Nowadays, his ideology is in trend, as is seen in the words of Patriarch Kirill said in 2011: “This year we remember the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In this regard, I prefer to talk about the collapse of historical Russia. So, many people ask the question: why did this happen? There are many economic, political, and socio-psychological answers. But among the reasons, undoubtedly, is the decline of national self-awareness, national pride, perception of the history of the Fatherland in its entirety, understanding of the enormous significance of the historical community of people... We must all take care of the growth of national self-awareness, the growth of national dignity, so that what happened in the early 1990s does not happen again. And so that no references to unsatisfactory governance or wrong ideology push people to destroy statehood. Because they aimed at the regime but ended up getting at historical Russia” ("Patriarkh Kirill nazval krushenie SSSR krusheniem istoricheskoi Rossii," Vzgliad, Delovaia Gazeta). Source: Monk Benjamin (Gomarteli), Letopis' tserkovnykh sobytii Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi nachinaia s 1917 goda. [Timeline of Church Events Beginning with 1917. Part VI:1972-1982]. |
