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Keston's File in the Stasi Archives by Michael Bourdeaux
Karl-Marx-Allee! Well, it's not called that now,
of course, but at last I walked into a
former stronghold of the Stasi, the East German
KGB. This was a room in a tower block in the
centre of ex-communist Berlin. There, laid out
before me with typical German efficiency (and
pleasantness, I must add) was the Keston Stasi
file, 618 pages in six folders of unequal size. For
the next two days I was absorbed.
Two years earlier I discovered that Keston had a
file in the Stasi archives. To visit you have to
wait your turn; finally in June mine arrived.
Keston comes under Section XX of the archive
(contacts with organisations in capitalist
countries) subsection 4 (religious bodies). The
explanatory material told me that Section XX
had at optimum 461 employees, Section 4
("Counteracting Misuse of Churches") had 6
heads of department and 43 staff. Departments:
evangelical churches, catholic churches, sects,
church centres abroad, pacifist organisations,
special tasks. Keston's file is in the fourth.
Every page has been numbered by the German
government, which rescued most of the Stasi
archive after the Wall came down in November
1989. Therefore one can access any required
information by quoting section, file and page
number.
I quickly gained the impression that the file
entries are more notable for what they don't say
rather than for what they do. The general
impression is one of dull bureaucracy. From
beginning to end there wasn't one astonishing
revelation, no flights of imagination, no
revealing personal profiles, no competent
analysis of what we were really doing. Instead,
you can imagine rows of backroom boys (or,
more likely, girls) systematically perusing
newspapers and Keston publications, cutting and
pasting. There’s a huge amount of repetition,
much of it verbatim and in carbon - (or photo-)
copy of earlier entries. I didn't count, but I
estimate that under half of the total pages contain
new material, the rest being simply copies of
what they already had on file. Once they had
made up their mind what we were doing, the
Stasi repeated this doggedly from the 1970s
through to the last entry in February 1989.
The Stasi's analysis of Keston's raison d'etre is
based on an amazing misconception. Because we
began our work officially in 1969, they attribute
its genesis to the Soviet suppression of
the Prague Spring (they don't call it that) the
previous year. They repeat this endlessly,
without ever once hinting at the true motivation,
the impact of my study year in Moscow
(1959-1960), when I witnessed the persecution
of the church at first hand. Although this year is
noted in my 'biography', nothing is made of it.
They simply didn't know what "made Michael
Bourdeaux tick" and what led to my
establishing the 'Centre for the Study of
Religion and Communism' (as it was originally
called) in 1969.
Yes, they sent 'observers' to our AGMs who
reported back on proceedings. They photocopied
articles from the (mainly German) press. The
Stasi, it seems, didn't plant a mole in our midst.
They knew very little apart from what we
ourselves published. There was one hilarious
bureaucratic act: I visited East Berlin for a day
on 16 May 1982. They took away my passport to
scrutinise. Here in the file was a photograph of
all 60 pages of my passport of the time, complete
with three fingertips of the policeman who held
down the stiff pages for the camera. Oh yes!
They interrogated me and noted that I
"conducted myself politely", so they let me pass
through Checkpoint Charlie, even though they
had found two Russian Bibles in my bag.
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PRESS RELEASE
On 15 November 2005 President Adamkus of Lithuania awarded the founder and President of Keston Institute,
Canon Michael Bourdeaux, with the Cross of Officer of the Order of Vytautas the Great at the presidential
palace in Vilnius. This ceremony took place two days before an exhibition of Keston Institutes unique
collection of religious samizdat documents was opened at the Mavydas National Library in Vilnius.
At the opening on 17 November Cardinal Audrys Juozas Backis, Archbishop of Vilnius, spoke warmly about
the role played by Keston during the communist period in publicising the plight of his church. Canon
Bourdeaux in his speech emphasised how he had been inspired by the courage of Lithuanian Catholics who
had been the best organised and most widely supported of religious movements within the Soviet Union
struggling for religious freedom:
My experience of the faith of these men and women convinced me that there was no future for communism
in Lithuania and I was eventually (by 1984) convinced that the USSR itself was doomed.
My first visit to Lithuania in 1989 for the re-consecration of Vilnius Cathedral showed me that I was right.
In the 1970s and 1980s the Lithuanian Catholic movements samizdat publication, the Chronicle of the Lithuanian
Catholic Church, had been sent to Keston Institute where it had been translated and disseminated in the west.
The former editor of the Chronicle, now Archbishop Sigitas Tamkevicius of Kaunas, as well as Nijole Sadunaite,
now a Roman Catholic nun, who as a young woman had been imprisoned for her work helping to distribute the
Chronicle, were also present at the opening. Michael Bourdeaux turned all the information from the Chronicle
into a book, Land of Crosses, published 1979, whichreached Lithuania clandestinely.
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Atlas of Religious Life in Russia Today
Two out of three volumes, entitled An Atlas of Religious Life in Russia Today, have now been published in Russian by Keston Institute. This publication describes the religious make-up of each geographical area in the Russian Federation. Volume 1 covers all religious denominations and groups in Russia's various republics and krai (areas) and Volume 2 covers the oblasts - from the Amur oblast to the Nizhni Novgorod oblast - showing the interaction between religion and local politics, the number of monasteries, religious publications and educational institutions as well as a wealth of additional local detail. This new material is based on ground-breaking research.
Thirteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, less is known today about Russian believers than in communist times. With the publication of An Atlas of Religious Life in Russia Today which forms Part II of the ten-year project to produce an encyclopaedia of Religion in Russia Today, Keston Institute may well have grabbed a unique opportunity to research every aspect of religious belief in Russia before Putin's tightening grip on freedom of information stifles further research.
Atlas sovremennoi religioznoi zhizni Rossii, Michael Bourdeaux and Sergei Filatov (eds), Letnii Sad, Moscow, 2005, Vol. 1 620 pp.,2006, Vol. 2 686 pp. For copies, contact [sergeyfilatov@mtu-net.ru] Keston Institute or e-mail Letnii Sad on letsad@mail.ru.
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