Part 7: Selections from Three Orthodox Christian Priests from Latvia

This week we meet Fr George Benigsen, a renowned figure in our diocese, who began his ministry in Latvia. Our seventh installment from ‘Three Orthodox Christian Priests from Latvia’ will provide an overall chronology of Fr George’s life as well as his recollections from the Soviet occupation of Latvia.

Chronology of the Life of Fr. George Benigsen

1915 – Born in Kazan, Russia on April 27. The family fled to Siberia ahead of the advancing Red Army. In 1921 they moved to Smolensk, then in 1924 to Dvinsk [Daugavpils], Latvia, where he attended grammar school and high school.

1937 – Married Elena Ivanovna Kraubner from Estonia. Ordained to the deaconate in the same year by Metropolitan Augustin and assigned to the Nativity of Christ Cathedral in Riga. Enrolled as a student at the Theological Faculty of the University of Riga. Taught religion in primary schools in Riga.

1941 – Ordained to the priesthood on June 6 by Metropolitan Sergei Voskresensky.

1941–1944 – Served in the Orthodox mission to Pskov at Holy Trinity Cathedral and the cemetery church of the Holy Martyr Demetrios. Organized a school for 200 students and an orphanage for 40 children.

1944–1948 – Fled with family to Germany, serving briefly in Berlin under Metropolitan Seraphim (Lade), then fled with a group of clergy and laity to the south of Germany in 1945. Served in the refugee camps. In 1947, appointed to St. Seraphim Church at the Home of Mercy in Munich.

1950 – Arrived in New York on November 10 by airplane.

1951–1960 – Assigned first to St. John the Baptist Church in Berkeley, California, then in December 1951 as dean of Holy Trinity Cathedral in San Francisco.

1960–1964 – Transferred to Transfiguration Church in Denver, Colorado. Taught Russian at the University of Colorado, also enrolled as a student in Russian studies and earned a Masters degree in 1962.

1964–1968 – Assigned as chaplain for students of the University of California, Berkeley. In 1965 organized the Russian language program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

1968–1970 – Served as dean of the Holy Protection Cathedral in New York, then as dean of SS. Peter and Paul Cathedral in Montreal, Canada.

1970–1980 – Appointed to St. Nicholas Church in Saratoga, California. Chancellor of the Diocese of San Francisco and the West. Director of the Summer Language Institute at U.C. Santa Cruz. In 1980, returned as dean of Holy Trinity Cathedral in San Francisco.

1981 – Retired. Served at Holy Assumption Monastery in Calistoga, California. From 1983–1991 produced a weekly religious broadcast to Russia for Radio Liberty.

1993 – Fell asleep in the Lord on August 6.

The Occupations of Latvia

Q: Fr. George, please tell me about the bishop in Riga, Metropolitan Sergius Voskresensky.

GB: Metropolitan Sergius came from Moscow. His title was Metropolitan of Vilnius and Exarch of the Baltic States of the Patriarchate of Moscow. In July 1940, the Baltic States — Latvia in particular — were occupied by the Red Army, by the Soviets, and annexed to the Soviet Union. This was the beginning of the recent events that took place. Before that, the Latvian Orthodox Church was an autonomous church under the Patriarchate of Constantinople.
Metropolitan Sergius arrived after the occupation. I don’t remember the exact date, probably in the early spring 1941. Talks took place about the eventual possibility of the Orthodox Church in Latvia going under the omophorian of the Patriarchate of Moscow. Metropolitan Augustin [Peterson] was the head of the Church at that time. He and the metropolitan of Estonia went to Moscow and participated in meetings with the members of the Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church — at that time very few bishops. And we were received into the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Moscow. After that Metropolitan Sergius was appointed by locum tenens Metropolitan Sergius Stragorodsky of Moscow to be the exarch of the Baltic States. His headquarters were in Riga.

Q: Before he came to Riga as exarch, had Metropolitan Sergius been to Latvia, or was this his first time?

GB: He came for a very short visit, probably a month before that. He came just to introduce himself to the church and to be seen and to do some investigation about what was going on in the church. This was when we met him for the first time. We really did not know what to think of him.

Q: Can you say something about your impressions of the metropolitan?

GB: I must say personally that I liked him from the very beginning. Quite a few people suspected him as they do with everything that is Moscow. They suspected him of collaboration, and so on and so forth. I wouldn’t exclude the possibility that there were some contacts, because if you are living in a totalitarian state, unless you go to the secret police, the secret police comes to you, and from then on it becomes who is exploiting whom: you the police, or the police you. There were things like that.
From the very beginning, when he was finally appointed metropolitan and exarch of Latvia and settled in Riga, he still continued to be under suspicion by quite a few of the local people. Gradually he started winning his influence and he was greatly liked. One of the reasons was because of his liturgical activities. He served all the time. We had an akathist service every Tuesday and every Thursday in Riga. Every Tuesday in a parish, every Thursday in the cathedral. Attendance was huge. And he would always serve himself. So he served everything. Since the church became so important for spiritual and personal survival, he really became the church, and he was the head of the church. There was no doubt about it.
He was one of the best practical liturgists that I have seen. He was basically a very liturgical bishop. I must say that in my whole experience, which is relatively long — 52 years since ordination — I haven’t seen a bishop celebrating as wonderfully and with as much artistic inspiration as he did. He was an excellent celebrant. Since he was for quite some time at the very center of the Russian Church in Moscow, he was able to see and to collect a number of positive mannerisms of bishops, because every bishop is slightly different in his services and every bishop has a different approach and different ways and manners of serving. And if you collect all these things you may produce a rather nice bouquet of liturgical flowers, which he did.
He had a very strong tenor voice. He sang very well, and in the cathedral in Riga when I still was a deacon — I was a deacon almost for the whole year of the Soviet occupation until June 6 — we had a very nice staff of clergy. The metropolitan had an excellent second tenor voice. We had a psalm reader who had an excellent first tenor. We had a young deacon who had an alto voice who could sing one octave higher. I was a baritone. Protodeacon Melnikov second bass. The metropolitan liked the clergy to sing, so for instance every Vigil when he would stand on his platform in the middle of the cathedral to anoint people with the blessed oil, the choir would be singing the canon. All of us would stand in a semi-circle around him and together with him we would sing the katavasia. Thesamething would happen during Holy Week. We would sing “The Wise Thief” and things like that, all of us. He trained us and sang with us and we really knew that he liked singing. We also had excellent choral singing in the cathedral, first class choral singing.
Especially during the Soviet occupation, spiritual life and church life were flourishing. Although people were disappearing and sent to concentration camps and arrested (every day you would find out somebody else who had disappeared), at the same time, the response of church life was really very impressive.

Q: During the Soviet occupation in Latvia there were acts of terror and a mood of terror to everything. How did Metropolitan Sergius react to this?

GB: He was tremendously experienced. After all he came from the heart of the whole thing, where he had to manipulate all his preceding life, and he told me frankly about it. During a journey to Estonia, he finally opened up and told me that everything was quite different from what he was originally trying to propagate to all of us. But he was very experienced. Here are just a couple of illustrations.
He took over the Latvian Synod and made me the secretary of the exarchate, so we had offices in the small synodal building that was left to us at that time. A couple of months later, a Soviet bureaucrat came and told me that the Latvian Synod owes to the government some amount of money, a pretty sizable amount, in taxes or whatever else, I don’t remember what it was. So he said, ‘I came to collect it.’ I did not know what to do, so I said, ‘Would you please sit down and wait for a moment.’ I wanted to make a call to explain to the metropolitan what I heard from that man. The metropolitan said, ‘Get him to my office.’ They came to the metropolitan’s office and the metropolitan said, ‘You know, there is a decree published by the Soviet occupational forces that church organizations are not responsible for the debts of their predecessors.’ The man said, ‘No, I haven’t seen it in any of the newspapers.’ Metropolitan Sergius got up, and he was a pretty imposing figure. And he said, ‘So what do you want? Do you want me, a Moscow priest’ — and he used the term pop instead of priest — ‘to explain to you, a Soviet functionary, that decrees concerning the church are never published in the Soviet newspapers?’ He raised his voice, and he became very red and very angry. And the man was not Soviet, the man was Latvian. So he collected all his papers and left.
The second incident: I was deacon of the cathedral, and since the university was closed and the teaching of religion was out, I devoted most of my time to the cathedral, and I was also made responsible for all the economy of the cathedral, candles and things like that. So once I was in the cathedral when the metropolitan came, and he wanted to see me. The cathedral had a large vestibule. On one side of the vestibule was the cathedral nave, and on the other side of the vestibule there were cathedral offices, and the metropolitan wanted to see some ledgers or something like that. So he sat down in his office, and I went to the cathedral for the books, to the nave of the cathedral. When I was going through the nave I saw two hooligan-like young men standing in front of our bulletin board, laughing and ridiculing something, in their headgear, and one of them lit his cigarette. I was still very innocent in those situations, so I went straight to the metropolitan and I said, ‘Look at what these men are doing.’ So he went out of the office, approached these two young men from their back so they didn’t see him. He took both of them by the collars (he was physically a strong man), and took them to the exit. There were steps going down, I think about 12 steps at least. And they didn’t know what to do. They were also not quite experienced. They wanted to do some vandalism. He knocked their heads together and threw them down! I was scared! I said, ‘Vladyka, what have you done? What will happen next?’ He said, ‘Father, don’t worry. You need to know the Soviet legislation that says that this is not the church’s property, it’s public property, and no hooliganism is allowed on public property. If they go and complain, we are completely protected.’
A third time: It was in Tallinn, Estonia, and we were walking together, and we passed some Red Army soldiers. I was in civilian clothes, but the metropolitan was wearing his cassock. The soldiers started ridiculing us. And he became quite angry. He took out his passport, approached them and showed them his passport, that he was a resident of Moscow, and gave them a very strong speech. They kind of quieted down.
So you see, this showed to me that he really knew how to manipulate. When he was accused of having some kind of contact with the NKVD
(presently KGB), I wouldn’t exclude this possibility, because probably you couldn’t do without contact, but again it depended on who used whom. And I think that quite possibly because of his contact, only two clergy were arrested and exiled, no one else. All of us probably would have been arrested in a short time, even he would have been, because as far as I know the Germans found the lists containing the next ones to be sent to the concentration camps, and all of us were on those lists.
The fear was everywhere, and the metropolitan was also to some extent a victim of the same fears. He was always afraid. When I suggested that I would like to be ordained a priest and he asked me why, I said, ‘Because I think that sooner or later I will finally be sent to some concentration camp, and it would be much better for me to be there as a priest than as a deacon.’ He immediately agreed to ordain me a priest. So he knew that it was inevitably possible at least.
He also had a secretary by the name of Dimitri Ishevski who, strangely enough, was a White Russian émigré, Russian Church in Exile, I think from Berlin, a church activist who kind of popped up and attached himself to the metropolitan and became the metropolitan’s personal secretary. He was a very smooth operator, not a very pleasant man, but really operated in a very smooth way. But the end was very interesting, because the metropolitan told me that just before the German occupation, he was working in his office or in his quarters, I don’t remember, and the secret police people came for a search and asked him to show them his brief case. Fortunately the metropolitan was able to open this brief case before they came, and in it he found photographs of Hitler’s festivities in Nürenberg that were put there by Dimitri Ishevski without his knowledge. Fortunately he had taken them out and destroyed them, because this would have been reason enough for him to be arrested. Ishevski disappeared at the time of the occupation. It’s possible that he was arrested. It’s possible that he was executed by the Soviets, but interestingly enough, quite some time later, I remember having come to Riga for my first visit from Pskov — probably six, seven, eight months later. I got a call from a secret police officer, who wanted to speak with me, and asked me to come to his office. I was slightly afraid because of my “Jewish” background. But it was not about that. He asked me as many details as I knew about Ishevski. And he told me that he thought that Ishevski was a Soviet agent still existing in German-occupied territory. And he was around the metropolitan. The metropolitan was aware of this problem. The metropolitan was constantly aware of all those things. It was difficult for him.
It was probably much more difficult for us because we were not exposed as much as he was. We constantly saw people disappearing; your own relatives were disappearing. I lost several, and there was not a family that I knew that didn’t have some members who would be sent to a concentration camp, executed, or something like that. This is why the Germans were met as real liberators. I don’t think that anywhere, at anytime in world history were occupational forces met with joy equal to what the Germans saw in the Eastern European territories.
I told you that we opened the cathedral on the day of the occupation, and I sold one year’s supply of candles in one day. It was July 1 and everybody sang Khristos Voskrese. It was a real Easter. No one really gave thought to what was going to happen next. The important thing was that the diabolical thing that happened to us for one whole year was finally over.

Q: Did Archbishop Augustin Peterson go into retirement when Metropolitan Sergius was stationed in Riga?

GB: Metropolitan Sergius visited first as a kind of inspector general from the Patriarchate of Moscow, and he talked with the respective people about the possibility of reuniting with the Patriarchate. Metropolitan Augustin was very much against him. He was anti-communist. He was my religion teacher when I was in grammar school in Dvinsk, Latvia. He was a garrison priest, a chaplain in Dvinsk. So I knew him, and I knew his wife, a very nice Russian woman who had died earlier.
In the 1930s Latvia became a very nationalistic country. Any kind of parliamentary system was out. The new president, Karlis Ulmanis, was a graduate from an agricultural school in Iowa, and he had his own agrarian party. So this was the political time when Archbishop John Pommer was either assassinated or killed or something else happened to him. It is still not clear what happened. And Metropolitan Augustin was chosen [to replace him] because he was very pro-Latvian.

Q: Would you characterize the relationship between Metropolitan Sergius and Metropolitan Augustin as frictional?

GB: Not very deeply frictional, but I told you about Metropolitan Sergius being arrested by the Germans. With the best available information, the Germans were informed by Metropolitan Augustin’s group. I also went through a personal tribulation because of that, and this is partially why I was late in joining the mission to Pskov. I was supposed to go with the original group, but I wasn’t given a travel permit by the respective German organizations. The German secret police received their report. I found out later that it came from Metropolitan Augustin’s group, claiming that I was neither Russian nor Latvian, I was simply a Jew, a Jew who besides everything else has been baptized later on, because originally I was supposed to be circumcised in a synagogue and so on. In those times the charge that you were a Jew was a very risky proposition: Unless you were able to prove that it was not true, you had only one way, which would lead to the ghetto and finally to some kind of oven. So, I was called by a Gestapo equivalent, probably the Gestapo in Riga. Fortunately I had the death certificates of my paternal grandfather and grandmother, which in Latvian times indicated a nationality, and it said Russian. So I was able to convince them that the whole thing was really false and unreasonable. And they gave me a hint where it came from. So my reputation was restored and I was given the proper permit and I joined [the mission in Pskov]. But this is unfortunately to what extent these people were able to malfunction.

Q: The German occupation came about a year after the Russian?

GB: It came on July 1, 1941. Before that, the Soviet occupation took the very ugly forms of concentrated Stalinism. At that time I was still a deacon. I was ordained a deacon in 1937 by Metropolitan Augustin and served at the cathedral in Riga. I replaced Fr. Nikolajs Vieglais as a matter of fact. I was ordained a deacon, and immediately after that he was ordained a priest. It was still in 1937, so I served in what was still a free, democratic Latvia.
When the Soviets occupied us, it became clearer and clearer that sooner or later all of us probably would have to go, as the Russians used to say, “to the places not too far removed,” namely Siberia. For quite some time I wanted to become a priest, but since by that time events took a very ugly form, I approached Metropolitan Sergius. And by that time I was secretary of the exarchate. I was personally pretty close to Metropolitan Sergius.
I still cherish his memory very highly. There is his picture, by the way
[points to photograph in his office]. So I approached him, and told him that I would like him to ordain me a priest. He asked me why. I said, ‘As you know Vladyka, there is an inevitable proposition for a number of us to be sent to concentration camps,’ and so on, ‘and I think I would be able to do more good being a priest than a deacon.’ He agreed, and thus on June 6, 1941, the day of Pentecost, at Holy Trinity Convent in Riga, where Fr. Nikolajs Vieglais was a priest by that time, I was ordained a priest.
On July 1, the Germans entered. Metropolitan Sergius was arrested.

Q: He was arrested by the Germans?

GB: Yes. It was still in July, very soon after the Germans entered Riga. I think there was some kind of denunciation from some nationalistic Latvian circles that he was, according to what they stated, an agent of the NKVD.(At that time the KGB did not exist yet, or the acronym did not exist yet; it was still the NKVD.)
The last days of the Soviet occupation, we — by we I mean my wife and me, Metropolitan Sergius, and Fr. Kyrill Zaits who was dean of the cathedral at that time and later became the head of the mission —, because of circumstances, since it was relatively dangerous to circulate around too much, stayed in the basement of the cathedral for about five days until the Soviet occupation was exchanged by the German occupation. At that time there was a telephone call, and the caller asked in Russian whether he could speak with “citizen” Voskresensky, Dimitri Nikolaiovich or whatever his patronymic was. I went to the metropolitan and he said, ‘Better tell him that I am not here.’ So then I asked the metropolitan what was going on. He said, ‘I know who it was. They want me to go back to Russia.’ And he said, ‘You know, Fr. George, I would like to ask your advice. I would be able to go to the Soviet Union, to Moscow, anytime. I have my mother there and my former parishioners and everything else. What should I do?’ I was young and daring, and I told him, ‘Vladyka, if you want to have my sincere advice, I would suggest you stay.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because,’ I said, ‘you know that people were so suspicious about you and about your relations with the government,’ and so on, ‘and if you would leave, this suspicion would become a lasting memory of you. So I would suggest that you stay.’ He said, ‘Fine, I will stay.’ So this was his decision. He stayed even though later on he was assassinated in 1943, and in all probability I think he was assassinated by the Soviets, although the Soviets try to blame the Germans, but I think that he was assassinated by the Soviets. So this is how it happened.
And so we stayed there, and on one particular day, one particular morning, everything was suddenly quiet in Riga. I decided to go to the main door of the cathedral and to open it slightly. When I opened it there was a small group of Latvian “freedom fighters” walking by the cathedral. And there was a friend of mine who is still living in Syracuse, New York, who Fr. Nikolajs knows quite well, Mr. Radvil, who was heading this little group. He saw me. He saluted me. And this was the change of the system. The Soviets left. The Germans came. The Soviets left in complete confusion and complete collapse.
We were able to open the cathedral, and it was like Easter Day in July, because people started crowding into the cathedral. I was in charge of the business part of the cathedral — money, candles, and so on. And I was able to accumulate one year’s supply of candles. They were all bought out in one day! People were coming then because the joy was unbelievable.

Q: Was the only attempt that the Soviets made to take Metropolitan Voskresensky with them just this phone call? They didn’t try to arrest him?

GB: No force was used, not really. He made a free decision, which was a risky decision to make, but he did not know, I did not know, no one knew except for God, what would happen. So he stayed.

Q: How old was he at that time?

GB: Forty three. He was a pretty young man. When he got out of prison — it was a short arrest, just a few days — he already had some agreement with the German occupational forces for a mission to be sent to the regions of Russia occupied by the Germans, namely from Pskov to Leningrad, more or less. The dean of the cathedral, Fr. John Janson, and I signed a kind of promise that we would keep an eye on him, and he was released this way.

Q: Did he ever tell you what happened during those few days in prison?

GB: Not much. To the best of my knowledge and recollection, he spoke with a number of people, and evidently the Germans had enough translators who were able to translate for him. Probably he came across a good man who believed him and trusted him and was able to introduce him to somebody on a higher echelon, probably a sizable man, a general of some kind, with whom the metropolitan was able to start a conversation about the necessity and possibility of sending a mission to Russia.
And so it was announced that the church had been given permission to send a mission to Pskov.

Q: Can you explain how it was announced, or in what way the news came out?

GB: To the priests. I think it was personal, by telephone basically.

Q: Did Metropolitan Sergius himself call?

GB: No, because I was his secretary. There were other personal connections. These were not only priests who were from Riga. There were also some priests from the province, and still the word got around quite quickly. It did not take much time, after all, the Germans started the Latvian occupation on July 1. The mission was sent August 19, quite quickly! It was organized by that time. Also a blitzkrieg in a sense!
I think about 15 priests immediately signed up to go, really not knowing what was awaiting them, because this was the place which only a few days ago was under complete Soviet domination, and at that time it went under German occupation. We did not know what was going to happen. But about 15 of us signed up to be sent to the mission to Russia.
On August 19, the day of Transfiguration according to the Julian calendar, the mission went to Pskov.

Q: In your estimation, how did Metropolitan Sergius come up with the idea of the mission?

GB: I don’t know, because it happened to him while he was jailed. I had not heard anything before that. You see, Metropolitan Sergius was quite certain that in all probability the Germans would finally take Leningrad. When I was sent to Pskov I had a letter from him to Metropolitan Alexei of Leningrad (who later became the patriarch of all Russia), because he was quite certain, everybody was certain, the Germans were certain, and history was certain, since the Germans were standing on the very boundaries of Leningrad. So at that time Metropolitan Sergius, I think, was pretty certain that this was the beginning of the end of communism. In other words, I think he was really hoping that what is happening right now would have happened in 1941, only there was a great delay. He really thought that this was the beginning of the end. He was very strongly anti-communist, no doubt about it.

The metropolitan was able to convince the Germans that the mission would give more credence to our church existence, because after all there was no church that would be recognized as canonical and legal except the Patriarchate of Moscow, so these were the ties. Somehow he was able to get through to the Germans about it. The Russian Church in Exile did very little in this whole situation. They tried, but they did not do much. Although I don’t think they were completely unable to send somebody. At that time we would have welcomed anyone who would have liked to come and work. The only things that we gained from them were some liturgical books, because they were producing liturgical books in Church Slavonic, so some of them were sent to us not by them, but by a number of people, but otherwise we didn’t have any relations with them. I would say that the basic public opinion in the knowledgeable part of the church in occupied Russia undoubtedly was pro-Moscow and anti-Belgrade or Berlin, White Russian émigré’s church, or whatever one wants to call it.

Q: You mean in the Pskov region and the German-occupied territories?

GB: Yes. And our region was very huge, because one of our parishes was at the last street car station of Leningrad. And this is between us and Leningrad. On the other side, we had everything from the extreme north to the extreme south, so the whole eastern front was our territory.

Q: You mentioned that Metropolitan Sergius was quite close to the locum tenens Metropolitan Sergius.

GB: In a sense he was his disciple.

Q: And I also read that he was close with —

GB: Nicholai Yarushevich, who then became exarch of Ukraine, and who also become the Head of the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Patriarchate of Moscow. He died a mysterious death. Some suspected that he might have been poisoned by the Soviets because he started expressing himself too freely. Metropolitan Sergius had a very high opinion of him. He always told us that if we would ever be able to come close to him, to make contact with him. At the beginning he was very happy that Metropolitan Nicholai was made exarch of the Ukraine. On the other hand he was unhappy because he hoped that he would remain. You know, he was near Leningrad, and he thought him to be a much better contact for us than Metropolitan Alexei of Leningrad, later Patriarch Alexei. But we literally had his letters in our pocket to Metropolitan Alexei, because it was so absolutely certain that Leningrad would fall, and we would go straight there with the messages from Metropolitan Sergius.

Q: Metropolitan Sergius envisioned a political change and was still loyal to the Moscow Church.

GB: Until the very end. On his letterhead, on his seal, on everything else, the Patriarchate of Moscow was always there, in German, in Russian, in Latvian, it was always there. He remained very faithful to the very end. He was truly very faithful to the whole idea of the Patriarchate. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Matushka Ludmilla Chillo stated that Metropolitan Sergius told her that when the Germans pressured him to separate from the Patriarchate of Moscow, he told them ‘absolutely not, and I’ll never change my mind.’)
Interestingly, somehow the Patriarchate of Moscow and Metropolitan Sergius the elder, who was locum tenens and patriarch at that time, I don’t know how, but they neither suspended nor excommunicated him, even though there were definitely voices insisting on that, because Metropolitan Sergius was on the political radar at that time. On that side he was nothing else but a collaborator with the Germans. There were some things said against him, but nothing officially was undertaken on that side. On Metropolitan Sergius’s side, he never gave up.

Q: You mentioned that in Riga it took some time for the people to accept the metropolitan. Can you give some examples of how he won the people over?

GB: One of the main things, the final victory, was the fact that he refused to be evacuated. And I did my best to let people know about it through my own private channels. People found out. This was the final test, a real final ID for him. He couldn’t really be an agent or anything else if he decided to stay with us and not go there. But I think that he was also winning them earlier than that, even during the Soviet occupation.
No one knew what to expect from the new occupational force, but I think most people, myself included, thought that there couldn’t be anything worse than the experience that we had just had, which was true. When someone asks who was better, Stalin or Hitler, I tell them, I can tell you who was worse, but not who was better!
Now Germans were Germans. At the beginning it was a kind of an Aryan type of an army — blond, blue eyed, very disciplined, very orderly, not unlike the Soviets. About two weeks later they were followed by the Gestapo and all their police organizations. And the darkness started that was the very beginning of Jewish extermination. One morning it was felt very strongly, almost metaphysically, that something had happened in the city of Riga. And on that morning we found out that this was the first time that they killed 10,000 Jews on the outskirts of the city. And it went on and on and on.

Q: Was there a large Jewish population in Riga?

GB: Yes. A couple of months after the Germans occupied us, maybe even earlier, at the very beginning, it was a sunny day, but the sun did not shine properly, somehow there was a general feeling of something depressing. The next day we found out that the first 10,000 Jews had been executed at the outskirts of the city. I baptized at least one family just for the reason of trying to save them. It did not work, because they found out and they died in the concentration camp.
I have one thing from those times. [opens a box] This is a communion set for the sick. There was an antique shop in Riga, owned and run by Russian Jews from Pskov. And I was still a deacon. I frequented this particular place because they had some interesting things, some of them semi-religious or religious in nature. Once I came there and I saw this cross [lays out cross on table]. It wasn’t expensive. No Slavonic initials, a Latin cross in a sense but somehow not quite Latin, because the feet are separate. But I liked it; evidently it was a nice piece of craftsmanship, so I bought it. I also saw this little communion set, and it was so nice, so compact. I didn’t see any others anywhere. [displays set] This is for the communion, this is the chalice, and this is for the wine, and this is the spoon. It’s so compact and so handy. I think Riga was already under Soviet occupation. And I told the shop owner, “I would be interested in acquiring that set, only I don’t have money right now.” And he sent it to me from the ghetto. So evidently when he was arrested and sent to the ghetto, he was able to take some things with him, and this was among those things. And there was a Russian friend who visited the ghetto and saw some of them, so she brought this set to me and said that he would probably like to have some money because they were in a miserable situation there. And I gladly got money and sent the money to him. This is an interesting connection.
But the Jewish persecutions were a self-condemnation for the system. This killed them first of all in the Americans’ eyes. Also, I think that they signed their own condemnation by this mass philosophical, ideological persecution. But somehow the world is forgetting that the Jews were not the only choice for German cruelties and German execution. Russian prisoners of war were among the darkest and most painful and most terrifying examples.
At the beginning of the German advance, Red Army soldiers and officers went to the German side in millions. There were so many of them that the Germans were not able to escort them. They even used planes to get them onto our side of the front lines. In Riga we had a military camp, which under normal conditions would house about 5,000 Latvian soldiers. It was not a Latvian camp anymore under German occupation, rather, it was a camp for 45,000 Soviet POWs! Once we got permission to serve there. I was a priest, but I sang. There was a group of us from the cathedral who sang and Fr. Kyrill Zaits celebrated the Liturgy. There was a makeshift altar, everything necessary. We sang, and there was a sea of faces, faces not alive, those that they show you in the photographs from some Jewish concentration camps, emaciated, hungry, almost inhuman faces, a sea of faces like that. They were pushing to us small pieces of paper with the names of their relatives for us to pray for. There was a kind of commotion, not without some fighting going on, because the German guards were killing those prisoners of war who tried to escape. In the meantime, during the Liturgy, when the time for communion came, for the first time in my life and forever I understood that this is really bread, because they came to communion not only for spiritual hunger but also for physical hunger. And whatever particles were left on the discus9 while Fr. Kyrill Zaits was giving communion — we were all standing with our backs to the altar table —, all small particles, crumbs of bread were stolen from the discus by these men!
Such was their hunger, such was the German treatment of Russian prisoners of war. They were treated like worst possible enemies. When they were taken out, they were trying to steal from garbage cans whenever possible, really terrible. Speaking about German extermination, the Russian extermination was not any less active. This was nothing else but an effort to exterminate the Russian living force, namely men. And this was done everywhere. It was done in Germany, and those millions are not counted. While six million Jews is a terrible figure, it should be also compared with at least, in my opinion, 20 million others who were exterminated by the Germans.

Q: How did Metropolitan Sergius react to it?

GB: I had left already for Pskov. I think he was probably horrified. I would presume so, knowing him well enough. But I don’t have any personal recollections of that.
The irony of the whole thing was that I had several friends among Jews of Russian cultural background living in Latvia. And some of them were highly cultured, Jews who considered themselves Jewish by their racial background, but Russians by their cultural background. Some of them were university professors, writers, and so on. Now these poor people did not want to believe that a nation of Goethe and Schiller and everything else could be as cruel as the anti-German propaganda was trying to picture them. At the very last moment, having tasted all the bitterness of Soviet occupation, they decided to stay, only at night to get evacuated to the Soviet Union. All of them died in the concentration camps. But all these things show you the terrible contradictions and the compromise and dichotomy that existed in those conditions, where black and white don’t exist anymore, but it was some gray area in which you don’t know about anything else.

Q: The time frame is so compact.

GB: It’s like rapid movement. To finish one important thing about the Russian prisoners of war, these were naturally kept not only in Latvia, but also in the occupied areas of Russia. And especially in the beginning, and also during the whole two and a half years, you would sometimes see trucks, sometimes large sleighs, with horses and everything, being dragged through the city, covered in a very casual way with some tarpaulin or something like that, with frozen feet, hands, and heads protruding. And these were Russian prisoners of war who either died or were killed in German prisons. And they were taken through the cities on purpose, to frighten the local population. The local population was really frightened, and therefore everybody who was able ran to the forest and joined the partisans against the Germans. So in this way the Germans were producing the force opposing them, really digging their own graves, in a sense. And at the same time, when General Vlasov, the Russian liberation army, and his first marching battalion appeared in the city of Pskov, those former Soviet soldiers and officers who joined the Russian liberation army under the German force, again had to make a choice to die in the POW camps or to fight (at least it was promised to fight) against the communists. And they were given all the Russian uniforms and Russian flags that you see now quite openly on the streets of Moscow, that white, blue and red, which is the Russian national flag. We, the mission, gave the flag to that particular battalion, which they accepted from us very thankfully. It was 1943 when this battalion would be marching through the streets of Pskov, singing Russian folk march songs, and the population just ran mad with joy and enthusiasm and everything else. At the same time, some of them had already joined the partisans, some of their sons were already partisans, and so the confusion was unbelievable, all these sentiments were completely and fully mixed up.

Q: Fr. George, can you say anything more about Metropolitan Sergius?

GB: When he came to the Baltic States, he was not unlike all Soviet bishops who used to come to the West and do some propaganda for the Soviet Union. So when he came with all his vestments, with all his nice riassa and panagias and crosses and miters and everything else, which were definitely from the reserves of Old Russia, he was very careful in what he said. One had to be very careful, because these were very dangerous times. People would ask him, ‘Vladyka, how are things in Russia?’ He would tell them, ‘Just look at me. Do I look famished? Do I look unhappy? Things are fine in Russia. Everything is okay. There is freedom,’ and whatever else, the usual propaganda.
A few months later — I was secretary of the exarchate at that time —, he called me to his office and said, ‘Fr. George, why don’t you order train tickets for the two of us to Tallinn.’ He said, ‘The time has come for me to go to Tallinn because the Orthodox Church of Estonia has to be formally received into the Patriarchate of Moscow, and I need to go there myself and to see the metropolitan and see their synod and talk with them.’ So he said, ‘Make a reservation for two sleeping compartments, and when you arrange it, try to get two compartments at the very end of the car, the last one and the one before the last one.’ I didn’t ask him any questions. ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘whatever you want me to do.’ And I had a friend who was working for train sleeping arrangements in Riga, so I went to him and he arranged it for me. Then the metropolitan told me, ‘We’ll go together.’
We went together to the railroad station, got into those compartments, and he said, ‘Father, I will be in the very last one, and you go to the next one. When you finish unpacking, come to me, and lock the door of your compartment’ — it was possible because they gave you keys — ‘and come to my compartment,’ which I did. So he said, ‘Sit down.’ We had some coffee or something to drink and something to eat. He said, ‘Now, Fr. George, I was able to read your character more or less; I know who you are. And therefore, as difficult as it is, I think the time has come for me to share with you the truth about our life in Soviet Russia.’ He said, ‘Everything that I was saying to the people is complete lies. I had to do it, because otherwise you know the consequences.’ He said, ‘So I have to tell you sincerely what is happening.’ He was very close to the late locum tenens, later Patriarch, Sergius. He was like his spiritual son. He said, ‘Vladyka Sergius was arrested several times. No one knows it except for us. I spent some time in Lubyanka.’ Lubyanka is the famous, or infamous, prison in Moscow. And he said, ‘We are really walking on a very tight rope there all the time, and it depends who can really use who: they us, or we them. So there is constant manipulation and a very dangerous cat-mouse play. Who is winning is difficult to say.’
There was another interesting episode. There was a priest in Estonia, a friend, Alexander Osipov, who we considered to be a very gifted priest, one of those young, talented, outspoken, spiritual, liturgically-minded priests, a member of the Russian Christian Student Movement, so one of our brothers. And when the metropolitan was in Tallinn, Fr. Alexander Osipov asked me to organize a meeting between him and the metropolitan. And so I asked the metropolitan and told him my personal opinions about
Fr. Alexander, how much we cherished and loved him and valued him very highly. And I said, ‘He is very anxious to meet you. Would you would be able to receive him?’ He said, ‘Yes, of course.’ So the meeting was organized, and Fr. Alexander spent a half hour with the metropolitan, not more than that. I wasn’t there. And Fr. Alexander left and said goodbye to me. I went to the metropolitan and looked at him, expecting his positive reaction. He looked at me sadly and said, ‘Fr. George, I will have to say to you something that will shock you and make you unhappy. This priest, as much as you like him, belongs to that sort of priests who are giving up their priesthood quite easily in our conditions.’ And I thought, ‘My goodness, what a rash judgment.’ In my heart I got angry at the metropolitan. How could he be so simplistic and just condemn a priest?
But as it turned out, after the end of the Soviet occupation, Fr. Alexander Osipov went to Leningrad, was appointed a professor of the Leningrad Theological Seminary, and finally declared himself a full atheist. He denied his priesthood, and became an active propagandist of atheism in the Soviet Union, especially against those with a priestly background. I was a priest, I knew all those people in the Russian Christian Student Movement. He even mentioned names of priests who were fooling us and telling us things that don’t really exist about God, the church, and so on. So the metropolitan was right. It was a real foresight. As a matter of fact, Alexander Osipov finally died a very painful, long and difficult death of cancer.

Q: Was the meeting with Fr. Alexander before the mission to Pskov?

GB: Oh yes. It was still under Soviet occupation. We were going to Tallinn for him to take over. The Estonian Orthodox Church already had, as had the Latvian Church, submitted to the Patriarchate of Moscow. But still technically it was not taken over. And this was the trip for him to preside over the synod and to sign the papers, and to tell the church that we are now part of the Patriarchate of Moscow. So he had all of his meetings and everything else there. We were going on the train, he telling me all of those things, and for the first time I heard from him quite openly about all of the terror that he lived through and what he said he will have to expect because he will not be able to avoid it.

Q: You also mentioned that he also told you about spending time in prison. Was it during this conversation?

GB: Yes. He told me about the prophecy that he will die or will be shot at the age of 43, or in the year 1943.
Continuing to reminisce about what was going on, he said, ‘Once when I was sitting in the jail, and the jail was crowded, I was sitting on the upper platform where people were sleeping. An old man sat next to me. And somehow he recognized the priest in me, although I was not in riassa.He said, “Father, are you a priest?” I said, “Yes, I am a priest.” It was pretty dark there, I don’t immediately remember his face, but he said to me, “You know, I can see the future.” He told me that either in ’43 or at the age of 43, I would die of a bullet.’
In 1943 he died of the bullet. (EDITOR’S NOTE: The metropolitan was killed on April 29, 1944. Metropolitan Sergius also told Matushka Ludmilla Chillo about the prophecy in prison. She related this version of the story: Priests and bishops were kept separated from others in the prison. Each day one person would be chosen to be killed. One day Sergius, then an archimandrite, said to a man, ‘Perhaps today I’ll be taken.’ The man replied that that day he would not be taken, but in 1946 he would be killed by gunshots.)
The conversation in the train to Tallinn was the first time that the metropolitan was very open and he told me everything. So we went to Estonia and he did what he had to do. From then on I knew what was really going on.
And you know, about the Soviet experience, it’s a very easy proposition to accuse others sitting someplace else, but if you were in those conditions, and if you really knew what is going on and knew all the danger — and the danger was absolutely imminent, absolutely unavoidable, and very real — of being arrested, being executed, or being sent to a concentration camp (it was not only a danger, it was simply an inevitable proposition), then you looked at other people — the bishops or whoever else — from a different point of view. First of all, everybody had his own healthy and God-given instinct for self-preservation, if nothing else. Voluntary martyrdom was never appreciated by the early churches. And, while one was trying to save his own life, one was also trying to do everything possible to help others somehow, which was very difficult in those conditions. It was very demonic.
And then finally you began to feel as if you knew the sense of isolation. You had friends in the West, but they were kind of phantoms by that time. You didn’t know what was going on anywhere else, you saw out of this weird reality of your own life, which was bad. I would say that it was very bad, but I wouldn’t stop there, because I would say that on the other hand, the worse things were, the more important some other things have become, such as friendship, such as faithfulness, such as the church, faith, and so on. So there were some very bright and light-filled recollections from those times. If it was a friendship, it was a friendship. If it was trust, it was trust. So usually in times of darkness, light has its own compensations.
Speaking about the church, unless they would suspect something anti-government, subversive, or anything like that, they did not do anything to the church. Not yet. It was difficult to say what would happen in the future. It was a guessing game because we didn’t know. It ended early enough for us to know what Hitler would have done if he would have survived for a number of years. But they did not persecute the church. In Russia, German hopes were shattered because they had hoped that Stalin would have done everything for them, that the church wouldn’t exist anymore. But they found out that not only did the church exist, but the church was quite ready and willing to be reborn very quickly and very rapidly.

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