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mayor and he brought along his apparatus from Sverdlovsk and they became the heads of
the Moscow city council and the police force; these were people we worked with. In the
Supreme Soviet itself the speaker after following Khasbulatov from Chechnya, was
Konstantin Lubenchenko, who was one of those first departees we brought to the United
States on a visit to our Congress. There was Andrei Sebentsov, who was chairman of the
Constitutional Drafting Committee and the Committee on Laws, that is, the vetting of
legal writing. Nikolai Fyodorov, from Chuvash, was the first Minister of Justice of
Russia. People like Igor Grazin, an Estonian, and Yuri Scherbak, from Ukraine, Andrei
Sakharov, who was a very close friend and his group, Sergei Kovalev, and there were a
whole group of lawyers who had been those who had defended the dissidents in the hard
times and had gone to the Parliament as legislators, they were a very key group in the
beginning. Many of them became judges in the constitutional court and the Supreme
Court, the key figures in legal education. These were people like Galina Starovoitova,
from St. Petersburg, who was murdered some years ago, who was a human rights activist,
and who was one of the first to bring attention to what was happening in Nagorno
Karabakh, and in Chechnya.
Then there were the orthodox priests, and the clerical hierarchy, metropolitan Pitirim in
Moscow, who was on the board of the International Foundation, and Kyril, who is a
possible successor, it is believed, to Patriarch of all Russia, Alexei.
Q: How did you see the church responding, because it has always been a creature of the
state, or at least that’s the common perception.
MILLER: Not for the babushka. The clergy was coopted by the KGB, or at least some of
it. The hierarchy made what they regarded as unavoidable accommodations in order to
survive. I went to Zagorsk a number of times.
Q: Zagorsk being the…
MILLER: Zagorsk is where the main seminary for the Orthodox Church I located, the
monastery of the trinity. The monastery which dates from the fourteenth century. One of
the fortified monastery towns that made up the “Golden Ring”, was officially a museum
in the Soviet time, but it was, in fact, a center for the deeply religious, as long as they
were in conformity with the state, which included, in many cases, active cooperation with
the security force, with KGB. In Soviet times coopted by the KGB didn’t exclude the
possibility of faith. That was a remarkable reality that I found. The liturgy wasn’t
affected, and for the Orthodox, as I’ve come to understand them, the liturgy is unchanging
and was unchanged. So if liturgy wasn’t interfered with, the Soviets hadn’t gotten to the
core of faith. The rest of it is human failing, but the purity of the received church
remained, is what the clergy maintains.
Q: You know, all the churches, including the Catholics, were going through profound
changes and the Orthodox had fallen to the straight line.
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