Word: kiev
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Metropolitan Filaret of Kiev, who presided, later explains in his elegant headquarters residence that the surviving 4,000 churches are "more or less enough," despite the overflow visible at the cathedral. Parish priests, he adds, get a minimum of 150 rubles ($225) a month, often more, and usually a free, furnished apartment, sufficient to enable them to get by comfortably in the Soviet Union...
...most affecting Orthodox display is in Oster, a 1,000-year-old town some 70 miles from Kiev. This is the diocese where Prince Vladimir proclaimed Christianity the state religion in A.D. 989. The bells of the Byzantine Church of the Resurrection are ringing. There is a red carpet. People offer flowers. Father Vladimir Shtepa, apologizing for his parish's lack of important icons, says: "The people are our treasure." The 5,000 parishioners are mostly farmers and seem old, though again some 30% are young. Shtepa professes a religious relativism: "The main principle of Christianity and Marxism...
...evening congregation in Kiev's Central Baptist Church wears citified clothes, and the singing is more sedate...
Dissenters reject all state control, including government-required registration. But one Protestant reports 200 Baptist or Pentecostal congregations have been registered in the U.S.S.R. over the past five years, about half of them Ukrainian. Dukhonchenko reckons there are only about 8,000 reformers left in Kiev, and only 18,000 across the Soviet Union...
Vins' former congregation seems to be flourishing. It has built and registered the biggest Protestant church in Kiev. Sunday attendance runs from 500 to 1,000. The congregation remains in dependent of the still suspect All-Union Council. A handful of parishioners are cleaning the church when our sleek black limousine arrives. It leads them to decide not to say who their leaders are, though they admit that all members who were imprisoned during the Vins days are back. Recalling the times when the congregation had to worship clandestinely in the woods beyond the city, an old woman remarks...