Father Gleb Yakunin obituary

Michael Bourdeaux

Incredible as it may seem, there were three times as many churches open in the Soviet Union on the day that Stalin died in 1953 as when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. The reason for this was simple: Stalin allowed churches to reopen during the second world war; Nikita Khrushchev systematically closed them between 1959 and 1964. The man who first exposed the enormity of this persecution was Father Gleb Yakunin, who has died aged 80.

In 1965, with a colleague, Father Nikolai Eshliman, he wrote two lengthy and detailed open letters, one to the Soviet government, the other to Patriarch Alexy I, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, setting out the nature of the anti-religious campaign in precise detail and furnished with hundreds of examples. They wrote: “The mass closure of churches, a campaign instigated from above, has created an atmosphere of anti-religious fanaticism which has led to the barbaric destruction of a large number of superb and unique works of art.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/30/father-gleb-yakunin