NBC AIRS SOVIET PROPAGANDA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00845R000100020005-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 3, 2010
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: March 1, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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Published by ACCURACY IN MEDIA, INC.
1275 K Street, N.W., Suite 1150
Washington, D.C. 20005 ? Telephone: [phone]
NBC AIRS SOVIET PROPAGANDA
Reed Irvine, Editor
The notion that people in the Soviet Union enjoy
freedom of religion and that religion is flourishing there
would seem to be an unlikely theme for an American
television program. While Americans have not been
kept fully abreast of the persecution of believers in the
Soviet union and the obstacles the state places in the
way of the practice of their faith, they are not totally
naive on this subject. However, on July 17 and 24, 1983,
NBC television aired a two-part series entitled "The
Church of the Russians" which shocked and outraged
those familiar with the true state of religion within the
Soviet Union today. This was presented as an "NBC
religious program" done in association with the
National Council of Churches. It was narrated by the
Rev. Bruce Rigdon, a Presbyterian who teaches at the
McCormick Theological Seminary in Illinois. Dr. Rigdon
was awarded a medal by the Russian Orthodox Church
for his work on this program. Despite the criticism that it
has generated, NBC has plans to air the program a second
time on June 24 and July 1 of this year.
Dr. Rigdon said that his program was intended "to
examine the life of the Russian Orthodox Church in the
Soviet Union," not to seek out "Baptists, Pentecostals or
other Protestants or Jews, dissidents or members of
unregistered churches." That meant that he set out to
present a view of the Russian Orthodox Church solely
through interviews with church officials in good
standing with Soviet officialdom and with Soviet
officials. By excluding the views of "dissenters," Rigdon
made sure that the NBC audience got no inkling of the
view of the dissenters in the Soviet Union and many
foreign observers that the official church leaders are
highly suspect. Evgeny Bresenden, the spokesman for
the Soviet Pentecostalists overseas has said that they
"are seen by believers in the USSR as betrayers ... and
as executors of the will of the atheists."
This view has been confirmed by a former high official of
the Communist regime in Poland, Zdzislaw Rurarz, who
resigned as Polish ambassador to Japan after martial law
was imposed in Poland in 1981. Amb. Rurarz had been in
the Polish foreign service for 25 years. He has told of
visiting Zagorsk, the Russian Orthodox holy city 44
miles outside Moscow in 1967. He was astonished by the
number of priests and the huge crowd of pilgrims that he
saw there, and he commented on this to his hosts, high
officials of the Soviet regime. They laughed and said of
the priests, "All of them are ours," meaning, of course,
that all of them were faithful servants of the ruling
Communist Party. The officials pointed out that there
were few if any young people in the crowd. Amb. Rurarz
believes one reason for this was because the young
people in the Soviet Union are sophisticated enough to
know that the Orthodox priests are fakes.
Amb. Rurarz says that the Orthodox seminaries in the
Soviet Union are controlled by the KGB. He says that the
Soviets tried to persuade the Polish Communists to take
over the operation of the Roman Catholic seminaries in
Poland, pointing out how successful this had been in
their own country. The Poles didn't follow this advice.
Amb. Rurarz says the Soviets control the seminarians by
insuring that those who are not sufficiently malleable are
not admitted.
The Rigdon View of the Church
Dr. Rigdon gave the NBC viewers an entirely different
picture of the church and the holy city of Zagorsk than
that provided by Amb. Rurarz. He points out that some
of the magnificent cathedrals are now museums, but he
says: "But other churches, as old or older, still proclaim
Christ throughout this communist capital and through-
out this land. Working churches, meaning those open for
worship, many destroyed by war and rebuilt ... some
of wood, some of stone, some simple, some ornate
reflecting many styles and periods of architecture ..."
are found. He says that "all the Orthodox churches are
held together, not by a pope, but by it common
faith ... and an unbroken tradition of worship." He
shows hundreds of priests and thousands of pilgrims
descending on Zagorsk to celebrate the Feast of
St. Sergius, Patron Saint of Russia. He describes the
epoch of St. Sergius in the 14th century as "a time of
enormous tribulation and difficulty in the history of the
Russian people." But the war of the Communists on the
church during the early years of the Revolution is
glossed over in two sentences. He says: "After the
revolution of 1917, Zagorsk was turned into it museum.
In recent years, almost all the churches have been
opened again for worship."
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Contrast this with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's descrip-
tion of the fate of the Orthodox Church under
communism in his Templeton lecture in 1983. He said:
"Orthodox churches were stripped of their valuables in
1922 at the instigation of Lenin and Trotsky. In
subsequent years, including both the Stalin and the
Khrushchev periods, tens of thousands of churches
were torn down or desecrated, leaving behind a
disfigured wasteland that bore no resemblance to
Russia such as it had stood for centuries. Entire districts
and cities of half a million inhabitants were left without
a single church." Solzhenitsyn also described the
martyrdom of the Orthodox clergy in the 1920s, pointing
out that two metropolitans were shot and Patriarch
Tikhon died under suspicious circumstances. He said:
"Scores of archbishops and bishops perished. Tens of
thousands of priests, monks, and nuns, pressured by the
Chekists to renounce the word of God, were tortured,
shot in cellars, sent to camps, exiled to the desolate
tundra of the far north, or turned out into the streets in
their old age without food or shelter .... For tens of
millions of laymen access to the Church was blocked,
and they were forbidden to bring up their children in the
faith: religious parents were wrenched from their
children and thrown into prison, while the children
were turned from the faith by threats and lies."
This course had been suddenly reversed during World
War II, when Stalin sought to marshal the support of the
people by enlisting the aid of the clergy. Anton
Antonov-Ovseyenko, the son of an Old Bolshevik hero
who was killed in one of Stalin's purges and who
himself spent many years in Stalin's prisons and
concentration camps, describes this reversal in his
book, The Time of Stalin, Portrait of a Tyranny. He says:
"The eradicator of faith, the tireless persecutor of
believers, the man who had sent a thousand priests to
their deaths, began trying to ingratiate himself with the
church. The Gensek (Stalin) not only brought great
many high-ranking clergymen back from the camps; he
also permitted the theological seminaries and an
academy to be opened and established a government
Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs. Under
the aegis of the NKVD (the secret police), of course. The
Criminal concluded a concordat with the church and set
up an administrative body in which priests stood on an
equal footing with agents of the secret police. This was
the creative and original way in which the Gensek
implemented Lenin's injunction on the separation of
church and state. Metropolitan Nikolai began referring
to the general secretary of the Bolshevik Party as the
Father of us all, Joseph Vissarionovich.'"
The intensive persecution of the church resumed under
Nikita Khrushchev, who closed down more than 7,500
Orthodox churches and over 5,000 Baptist churches.
Seminaries were closed on flimsy pretexts, and the anti-
religious struggle and persecution resumed with new
vigor. The French scholar, Pierre Sorlin, said in his 1968
book, The Soviet People and Their Society, "Disturb-
ances take place, as though by chance, in the middle of
important religious ceremonies; believers are virtually
denied access to the universities, trade unions, and
social services. Religious life tends to be confined to old
people, unemployed women, or very young children."
The Rev. Rigdon alluded to this renewed persecution in
this single sentence: "Some churches closed during the
Khrushchev era of the sixties have reopened." 'rhe' ad
truth is that the narrator of the NBC program displa~d
the same desire to conceal the recent history of the
Russian Orthodox Church as have the officials of that
church and their political masters, the people that the
Rev. Rigdon interviewed for his program.
Believers' Cries Ignored
Although Rigdon's program was produced in associa-
tion with the National Council of Churches, it made no
mention of the appeal made by a Russian Orthodox
priest, Fr. Gleb Yakunin, to the delegates of the 5th
Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Nairobi,
Kenya in 1975. Yakunin pointed out that as early as
1930, the official leaders of the Russian Orthodox
Church were acting as pawns for Stalin. He reminded
the WCC that the worldwide prayer movement for the
persecuted Russian church in 1930 was actually
denounced by the official leaders of that church, who
denied that any persecution was taking place and who
"lied before the whole world by stating that those who
appeared to be martyrs suffering for their faith were, in
reality, just political offenders." Fr. Yakunin observed
that in the very year that the Russian Orthodox Church
joined the World Council of Churches, 1961, with
governmental approval, there was an increasing wave
of anti-religious terror, marked by the closing of
churches, monasteries and schools. He charged that
over 10,000 Orthodox churches were closed from 1959
to 1965. Fr. Yakunin expressed his regret that the World
Council of Churches had failed to protest this
persecution, as it had failed to protest the persecution of
the Baptists, Pentecostalists and Jehovah's Witnesses.
Among the requests that Fr. Yakunin made of the WCC
was that efforts be made to bring to the attention of
Christians all over the world, using the mass media, the
plight of Christians suffering religious persecution, no
matter what their denomination might be. He urged that
a campaign be started to pressure the Soviet authorities
to free Vladimir Osipov, an Orthodox Christian and
editor, who had recently been sentenced to 8 years in
prison. He cited the arrest of Andrei Tverdokhlebov and
Sergei Kovalev who had been arrested for their
activities in defense of dissidents. He said they had done
much to acquaint the world with the courageous
struggle of the Baptist dissenters and the Lithuanian
Catholics and urged that they not be forgotten.
Fr. Yakunin noted that many Christians in the USSR
had been punished for attempting to print and distribute
Bibles and other religious literature. He asked if the
delegates knew that Soviet customs officials confiscate
and destroy Gospels seized from foreign visitors who
bring in more than one copy. Did they know that Bibles
are not available to ordinary readers in Soviet libraries
and that inmates of prisons and labor camps are not
allowed to own Gospels and spiritual literature? He
asked that everything possible be done to help the
Russian Christians meet the urgent need for Bibles.
Fr. Yakunin and Lev Regelson, who joined him in
signing the appeal to the WCC in 1975, were both
arrested in 1979 and tried. Their appeal to the WCC was
used as evidence against them in their trial.
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AIM Report
NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF
LL/ /v E.d ! zUL/z_t
LAST YEAR, ABC'S MOVIE, "'THE DAY AFTER," SHOULD HAVE WON AN AWARD AS THE OUT-
standing propaganda movie of the year. In the words of an ABC vice president, Alfred
Schneider, it graphically showed the core of the argument for the nuclear freeze, and
the nuclear freeze has been one of the prime goals of Soviet propaganda. AIM has
joined with four other ABC shareholders, Mr. and Mrs. James B. Sayler of Casper, Wyoming,
Carlisle Madson of Hopkins, Minn., and E. R. McChesney of San Antonio, Texas, to submit
a shareholder resolution asking ABC to investigate the production of this movie. The
idea is to try to find out how the movie came to be made, who was behind it, and what
their motives were. Nicholas Meyer, the director of the movie, has said that he was
told by ABC officials that he didn't have to worry about producing a movie that would
make money, nor did he have to worry about getting ratings. One is left to infer that
someone at ABC was willing to sink an estimated $8 million into this production for
the purpose of putting a message across, i.e., the core of the argument for the nuclear
freeze.
ABC HAS ASKED THE SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION TO CONCUR IN THEIR DECISION NOT
to include our resolution in the proxy material that will be sent to all ABC shareholders
on the grounds that it concerns the ordinary business of ABC. That is one of the arguments
commonly used to reject shareholder resolutions. We have submitted a five-page letter
to the SEC in which we argue that the resolution deals with an issue that transcends the
ordinary business of ABC and impinges on the welfare and security of all the American
people. We strongly contested ABC's assertion that it is false and misleading to suggest
that there is a danger that ABC's facilities may be used to disseminate Soviet propaganda.
Noting that the late Raymond Aron, the noted French writer, had said that the USSR operates
the most astonishing propaganda machine the world has ever known, we cited figures from
James L. Tyson's book, Target America, on the size of that machine.
WE THEN POINTED OUT TO THE SEC THAT STANISLAV LEVCHENKO, THE FORMER CHIEF OF KGB
active measures operations in Tokyo, has said that in 1975, shortly after the signing
of the Helsinki accords, a representative of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party made the following statement to the staff of the Soviet embassy in Tokyo:
By all overt and covert means, we shall manipulate public opinion of Western
countries as we like and drown out criticism of our military buildup. We have
the resources to create dozens of new organizations in the West and to reinforce
existing frontline organizations. Our glorious intelligence services will seize all
the new opportunities to operate on a much higher and wider scale, taking advantage
of the friendlier attitude toward the USSR. We shall turn public opinion in the
West, particularly in Western Europe, against the USA Everywhere we shall plant
seeds of mistrust against the main enemy. (John Barron, The KGB Today, p. 147)
WE SAID THAT IT WOULD BE THE HEIGHT OF FOLLY TO ASSUME THAT THE SOVIET UNION'S
"glorious intelligence services" would voluntarily abstain from making any effort to
penetrate and manipulate any mass media organ in the USA, including ABC. According
to KGB manuals, penetration of the mass media is a target second in priority only to
the penetration of our intelligence services.
IF PENETRATION IS THE SOVIET GOAL, WHAT DEFENSES HAVE OUR MEDIA ERECTED TO PROTECT
themselves? The answer is that they have no effective defense, and ABC in resisting our
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call for an investigation has shown that they are not even aware of the seriousness of
the problem. This suggests that they are naive, and being naive, they are all the
more vulnerable. In my letter I said:
If ABC's auditors found that several million dollars were missing and recommended
that an investigation be made to determine whether or not there had been any embezzle-
ment, ABC's management would not react, I trust, by charging that the auditors had
libeled them. (ABC had suggested that our resolution and supporting statement were
libelous). We believe that we have made a prima facie case that a great deal of
ABC money was put into a movie that was questionable from the point of view of the
normal objectives of the company and which was widely perceived to be promoting a
cause that corresponded with a major Soviet propaganda objective. All we are asking
is that management make an investigation to determine what lay behind this and report
to the shareholders.
I THINK THAT WE MADE A STRONG CASE, BUT THERE IS NO TELLING WHAT THE SEC WILL DECIDE.
We will keep you informed. I would like to urge that those of you who own stock in ABC,
CBS, RCA and The Washington Post plan to attend their annual shareholder meetings. If
you buy a few shares now, you will be eligible to attend. This is a unique opportunity to
question the heads of these companies and let them know what you think. The dates of the
meetings are: CBS--April 18; RCA (NBC)--May 1; Washington Post--May 11; and ABC--May 15.
AIM has beceived a substantial gift of RCA stock, and we will be happy to sell any AIM
member as little as a single share to qualify you to attend the RCA annual meeting.
ONE OF THE MOST BLATANT EXAMPLES OF THE USE OF OUR TELEVISION TO SPREAD SOVIET
disinformation and propaganda is discussed in this AIM Report. The culprit was NBC, and
this is a case that I plan to discuss at the RCA annual meeting. "The Church of the
Russians" was presented as part of NBC's religious programming, and we didn't become aware
of it until some time after it had been aired. However, it is still very timely, since
I understand NBC is planning to air it again this summer, and that is something that ought
to be protested.
ONE OF THE POINTS WE MAKE IN OUR ANALYSIS OF THE NBC PROGRAM IS THAT THE RUSSIAN
Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union has been taken over by the state and is being used
by the KGB to promote communist ends. There is additional information on this in John
Barron's 1974 book, KGB. He points out that a section of the KGB known as "the 5th
Directorate" clandestinely controls religion in the USSR. It seeks to ensure that the
churches serve Soviet policy ends. It places KGB officers in the church hierarchy and
staffs the Council on Religious Affairs. Through this Council it controls the assignment
of church personnel. AIM HAS PREPARED A RESEARCH REPORT ON THIS NBC PROGRAM. I RECOMMEND
IT TO THOSE INTERESTED IN MORE DETAILS. SEND $1.00 TO COVER MAILING COSTS.
THE COUPON IN THE FEBRUARY-A ISSUE OF THESE NOTES FOR ORDERING ADVANCE COPIES OF MY
book Media Mischief and Misdeeds and to pledge support for our project to reply to the PBS
history of Vietnam carried the wrong zip code. If yours was returned, please re-submit it.
TO: AIM, PO Box 28390, Washington, D. C. 20005
( )I want to order copies of Media Mischief and Misdeeds at the pre-publication price
of $5.00 each, a saving of $4.95. ( )Check enclosed; ( )Charge VISA/Mastercard
// Exp.
( )AIM should rebut the PBS TV history of Vietnam.
I would be willing to help this project with a tax-deductible contribution of $
NAME Phone No.
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~l of this was ignored by NBC. The Rev. Rigdon
included in his program an interview he had with
Archbishop Pitirim, who has headed the publishing
department of the Moscow Patriarchate for the past 20
years. The Archbishop proudly displayed a Bible, which
had gone through four editions, the latest being 50,000
copies. The Rev. Rigdon did not compare this modest
press run with the demand for Bibles among the
estimated 65 million Christians in the Soviet Union, nor
did he indicate that he had raised with the Archbishop
Fr. Yakunin's plea for a greatly increased supply of
Bibles. Nothing was said about the unavailability of
Bibles in libraries or about their prohibition in prisons
and labor camps.
Bruce Rigdon's interview with the Archbishop was a
perfect illustration of a statement made by Robert C.
DeCamara in his article, "Gulag Fodder: Christians in
the Soviet Union," published in the March 14, 1981
edition of Human Events. DeCamara had written:
"Every few years, major denominations are permitted a
token printing of Bibles-which are then presented to
foreign visitors to impress them with the USSR's
religious tolerance."
Control of the Religious Press
The NBC program gave the impression that the Church
is perfectly free to print whatever it chooses.
Rev. Rigdon asked Archbishop Pitirim, "In your
experience has the government made any attempt to
offer suggestions or to influence or even to control the
publishing department in any way?" The archbishop
replied: "Under our constitution, church and state are
separate. The state does not interfere with internal
church affairs. I have meetings with state organizations.
The first one is when I ask for paper for the next year.
The second point of encounter is my request for the
printing house .... So I meet with representatives of
state organizations only on technical matters. It is up to
us to decide the contents of any publication."
That seemingly satisfied the Rev. Rigdon, who showed
no awareness of the complaint of Vladimir Rusak, a
deacon in the Orthodox Church who had worked under
Archbishop Pitirim for many years. Rusak had written
a book on the history of the church since the Revolution,
which he completed in 1980. In a letter addressed to the
World Council of Churches dated July 1983, Rusak said:
"Having always regarded Archbishop Pitirim as my
spiritual father, I told him about this book as frankly as
in the confessional. It is difficult to describe what efforts
he has made since then to persuade me to destroy (!) the
manuscript. As I refused to do so, he dismissed me from
my post." Rusak was transferred to a church in Vitebsk,
but he ended up being exiled to a monastery after giving
a speech that bothered his superiors. He was
subsequently harassed by the KGB; his manuscript was
confiscated; and the KGB demanded assurances that the
book would never be published in the West and that he
would never touch upon the theme of the book again.
Rusak said that another high church official, Metro-
politan Filaret, who also figures in Rev. Rigdon's
program as a spokesman for peace, made the same
demands upon him as had the KGB, "employing
virtually the same words." Rusak said that Metro-
politan Filaret met with him 15 times after he had lost
his job and that at the final meeting he had told him that
"there are nameless forces above him against which he
is powerless to help me, no matter how much he would
like to do so."
Rusak observed "that any attempts by the clergy to
venture beyond the parameters sanctioned by the Soviet
authorities in depicting the history of the Russian
church are severely repressed, on occasion even with
the direct cooperation of the church leadership."
Concealing the Control
The Rev. Rigdon may not have seen Vladimir Rusak's
letter before his programs were aired, but he could not
have been ignorant of the confidential report of
V. Furov, Deputy Chairman of the Council on Religious
Affairs, written in 1975 and smuggled to the West in
1980. The Soviets denied the authenticity of the report,
but knowledgeable Western experts think that it rings
true. On Rigdon's program, Peter Markartsev, vice
chairman of the Council on Religious Affairs and Alexei
Buevsky, executive secretary of the External Relations
Department of the Moscow Patriarchate, are both
shown stating that the state does not interfere with the
church and vice versa. But the Furov report to the
Central Committee of the Communist Party stated flatly
that the six-member Synod, which with the patriarch
governs the Orthodox Church, is controlled by the
Council on Religious Affairs, a government agency. The
Council selects the Synod's permanent members. All
topics to be presented for discussion at the Synod are
first submitted to the Council for its approval. The
Council also approves the final decisions.
Furov wrote: "In exercising its constant and unrelenting
control over activities of the Synod, appropriate
officials of the Council conduct systematic work to
educate and enlighten the members of the Synod,
maintain confidential contacts with them, shape their
patriotic views and attitudes and exert necessary
influence on the entire episcopate through the members
of the Synod with their help."
The Furov report confirms Amb. Rurarz's assertion that
the seminaries are totally under the control of the state.
Furov wrote: ""The commissioners of the Council in close
cooperation with local authorities (the KGB) took steps
to prevent fanatics, extremists, and mentally ill
individuals from being admitted to theological schools."
In other words, those with strong religious beliefs were
kept out. But control is not limited to admissions, Furov
made clear. He said the Council helps choose the faculty
and administrators of the theological schools and edits
the textbooks "to safeguard the interests of the state."
He noted that all this enabled them "to influence future
clergymen in a specific way beneficial to us and to
expand their theoretical and practical knowledge in the
spirit of materialism." He added: "In our opinion, this
will undercut the religious and mystical ideals of the
future clergy and in conjunction with other objective
and subjective factors, it may bring them to understand
their own uselessness as clergymen."
They might be useless as clergymen, but the govern-
ment-trained priests were, in Furov's view, very useful
in handling foreign visitors such as the Rev. Rigdon. He
commended three priests who had handled a delegation
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from the U. S. National Council of Churches particularly
well. Furov said that the priests "adopted a patriotic
position and countered the slanderous tenor of some
questions posed by members of the National Council of
Churches in the USA, particularly Prof. Price and
Redigon (Rigdon?). Bishop Gedeon demonstrated with
examples of church activities in the Novosibirsk
province that the constitutional principle of freedom of
conscience is strictly observed in the USSR."
The Propaganda Value of the Church
This explains why the Soviet Union, which is still
militantly atheist in its official philosophy, is willing to
not only tolerate, but probably also to subsidize the
Russian Orthodox Church. Rigdon said on his NBC
program that all the expenses of the church are paid for
from the "rubles and kopecks of the faithful" that fill the
collection plates, adding, "This is a very wealthy
church." He would have us believe that those rubles and
kopecks paid for a $2 million overpass built by the
government to facilitate the travel of the pilgrims to
Zagorsk. He would also have us believe that the
government exercises no control over what the church
prints. One is about as credible as the other.
Vladimir Rusak in his letter to the World Council of
Churches described the role of the "official" church in
the Soviet Union this way: "One should not overlook the
fact that the aim of the Soviet authorities in using the
church is purely propagandistic. It helps increase the
political dividends reaped by the authorities on the
international scene and rationalizes the continued
existence of the church in a socialist state as the inter-
church and international activity of our church's
representatives is directed, first and foremost, to serve
the interests of the secular (i.e., Soviet, atheist) regime to
the detriment of the interests of the church and all the
faithful."
Lion on the job. Communist Party membership, Me
passport to advancement in many fields, is off limits to
believers.
Even the Rev. Billy Graham came back from the Soviet
Union impressed by the crowded churches that he had
seen. He and others who have been so impressed
probably did not realize that the Orthodox Church has
one church building for every 7,500 members and one
priest for every 3,500 members. The church has only
three seminaries and two theological academies, which
enroll about 800 students. The Furov report noted with
satisfaction that the church was unable to replenish the
ranks of its clergy, much less increase their number. But
in the NBC documentary a favorable propaganda
impact is achieved by focusing on the fact that seminary
enrollment has grown rather than on the fact that it is
grossly inadequate to provide the number of priests
required to serve the members of the church.
But the greatest service to Soviet propaganda is the use
of the Orthodox clergy as propagandists for the Soviet
"peace" campaign. There was a lot of this in the NBC
program, with Metropolitan Filaret, the priest who told
Vladimir Rusak that he couldn't help him because there
were "nameless forces above him against which he was
powerless" explaining that there was nothing political
about his peace activities. Filaret explained "that at the
moment the peacemaking cause of our church just
coincides with the foreign policy of our country." Bruce
Rigdon accepted that, expressing his own conviction
that "peacemaking" is one of the most fundamental and
passionate concerns of the Orthodox leadership.
Incredible as it may seem, the Soviet Union has
succeeded in converting its persecution and control of
the Russian Orthodox Church into a propaganda asset,
thanks to the naivete or the ideological bent of the
Rev. Bruce Rigdon, the National Council of Churches
and NBC.
The NBC program is a perfect illustration of how this
pays off for the Soviets. They are portrayed as
pluralistic and respectful of freedom of conscience, not
as Godless atheists intent upon crushing all religion.
With an interviewer who is impressed with the colorful
liturgy and the church art and architecture, it was easy
for the skilled Soviet propagandists to pass themselves
off as genuine pluralists. Peter Makartsev, the vice
chairman of the Council on Religious Affairs, insisted
that the policy of the Soviet government could not be
called "atheistic." He said: "The policy of the Soviet
government is aimed at providing opportunities for
believers and non-believers to exercise the freedom of
their conscience." The Rev. Rigdon was not shown
asking how this squared with the pervasive discrimina-
tion against believers in education, employment and the
strict controls on the exercise of their religious beliefs.
Evgeny Bresenden has pointed out that not one of the
many evangelical Christians in the Soviet Union is a
scientist or professor. He claims that the professions
and supervisory jobs are off limits to them "because
they are prevented from receiving education and
promotions." To get into a university, the student must
have passing grades in scientific atheism, and much of
the college curriculum is ideologically repugnant to
Christians. Many Christians have suffered discrimina-
What You Can Do
Rather than repeating the airing of this disgraceful
series next June and July, as it now plans, NBC should be
producing a program that tells the truth about religious
persecution and the manipulation of the Russian
Orthodox Church to serve the goals of government
policy. Write to Grant Tinker, Chairman, NBC, 30
Rockefeller Plaza, New York, N. Y. 10020. Send a copy
to Thornton Bradshaw, Chairman, RCA, at the same
address.
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