News- Russia

Negotiating from Weakness

As a new bill to restrict religious freedom was rushed through the Russian parliament, the lobbying efforts of Catholic representatives were mysteriously inconsistent and ultimately ineffective.

By Lawrence A. Uzzell

The bill's passage probably became inevitable at the end of August, when one of the key Catholic negotiators on the scene in effect agreed to sign a blank check.

Of the hundreds of Catholic institutions which have been founded or revived in Russia since the end of the Soviet era, only two--one parish in Moscow and one in St. Petersburg--can meet the "15-year test."

Of all the minority confessions, the Catholics should have considered themselves to be in the strongest negotiating position, the best equipped of all to mobilize international pressure for religious freedom.

The implication of the Pope's letter was twofold: that the Catholics would not fight vigorously for the religious freedom of believers other than Catholics; and that the Catholics could be satisfied with merely symbolic concessions.

Is Father Bartsevich is single-handedly responsible for the collapse in the Catholics' bargaining position? It seems unlikely that a 30-year-old priest would make such far-reaching decisions without guidance from above.

In late September Russia's President Boris Yeltsin signed a new law which turns that country's hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholics into second-class citizens. If fully and literally enforced, this measure will authorize the state to expel most Catholic priests and all Catholic monastic orders from Russia, close every Catholic educational institution, ban every Catholic periodical and radio program, and forbid Catholics to sell books or distribute tracts. Few observers expect such rigorous enforcement in practice, but the very existence of such powers will make it easier for Russia's bureaucrats to harass and intimidate Catholic believers. The slow, painful process of rebuilding Catholic parish life in Russia--including the recovery of czarist-era Catholic church buildings seized by the Soviet regime and still in the hands of the state--will now become even slower.

What is most striking about the story behind the new legislation is the fact that the Catholics themselves--or at least their representatives in negotiations with the Kremlin--consented to the restrictive new policy. Their consent was only partial and temporary, but it lasted long enough to enable the Kremlin to conduct a successful disinformation campaign, depicting the bill as a harmless "compromise" version of legislation which had been vetoed by Yeltsin in July.

In fact the core provisions of the July and September versions are almost identical, but by the time the truth caught up with the Kremlin's propaganda it was too late. In contrast to July--when the Vatican issued a strong public statement against the bill and the European Union protested quietly but firmly--in September the Europeans were passive, lulled by the false perception that the bill was not objectionable to Catholics or mainstream Protestants.

In retrospect, the bill's passage probably became inevitable at the end of August, when one of the key Catholic negotiators on the scene in effect agreed to sign a blank check. Father Victor Bartsevich, the young diocesan chancellor for Catholics in European Russia, let it be known that he found the latest "compromise" offer from the Yeltsin administration to be acceptable, despite the facts that: 1) Yeltsin's staff had still not given him a final draft of the bill in written form; and 2) the most recent version which he did have in his possession included elements which contradicted the terms of a compromise agreement which had been forged earlier during oral negotiations at the Kremlin. When Father Bartsevich made that supportive statement, Catholics became the first of the western Christian confessions in Russia to break from what had up to then been a united front against the bill.

On September 1 Russia's largest Protestant organization, the Baptist Union, likewise surrendered. On September 2 the increasingly isolated Pentecostals and Adventists also gave in. Along with the Catholics and Baptists, the leaders of these groups bowed to Kremlin pressure to sign what was in effect another blank check--a statement which was immediately publicized by the pro-Kremlin mass media as expressing the minority confessions' unanimous support for a bill which none of them had yet seen in its final form. Mysteriously, the minority religious leaders were not allowed to make or keep copies of this Kremlin-drafted statement; they later disputed the Kremlin's version of what it actually said.

After finally seeing the definitive text of the so-called "compromise" bill, the Catholic negotiators and the leaders of those three Protestant confessions issued their own joint statement repudiating the September 2 document, and calling on Yeltsin to reject the "compromise." But by the time these representatives of the "minority confessions" issued their September 11 joint statement, making it clear that they did not support the legislation, time was too short and the bill's momentum too powerful. By then Yeltsin had officially endorsed the new bill, thus making it his own personal proposal rather than simply a draft from his staff, and the legislation had been formally transmitted to the parliament. A week later the measure came up for a vote in parliament, and passed without any difficulty. The next week Yeltsin signed the bill into law.

The Kremlin's disinformation campaign was systematic and brazen. For example, more than a week after the minority confessions' unambiguous statement of September 11, spokesmen for the Yeltsin administration were still telling Western journalists that all the representatives of the different religious confessions which had taken part in the negotiations over the church-state legislation were in favor of the new bill.

But the representatives of the minority confessions, especially the negotiators for the Catholics and Baptists, share the blame for their own defeat. Even under the most charitable view of their actions, they showed extraordinary weakness and naiveté in their negotiating tactics. Although by the end of August they had ample evidence to show them that the Kremlin could not be trusted on this issue, the Catholics and Baptists specifically agreed to support the "compromise" bill discussed on September 1 without insisting that they must first review and approve the final text. In an oral agreement, they simply gave the Yeltsin administration's negotiators--at least one of whom had openly supported the harsh July bill and had lobbied within the administration in an effort to dissuade Yeltsin from using his veto--carte blanche to put the final touches on such crucial sections of the text as its "15-year rule."

Under this controversial rule a religious entity (such as a parish, diocese, seminary, or monastic order) which cannot prove that it has existed continuously in Russia throughout the 15 years since 1982 is to incur sweeping disadvantages such as the loss of rights to engage in publishing or educational activities. Of the hundreds of Catholic institutions which have been founded or revived in Russia since the new dawn of religious freedom, only the two which were legally allowed to exist during the Soviet period--one parish in Moscow and one in St. Petersburg--can meet this test. If strictly enforced, the 15-year rule will also hurt independent Protestant, as well as the dissident Orthodox congregations which refused to make the compromises needed to receive official state registration during the Brezhnev era.

The Catholics' weakness, demonstrated in the negotiators' willingness to yield ground on this and other points, is even more puzzling than that of their Protestant counterparts. Of all the minority confessions, the Catholics should have considered themselves to be in the strongest negotiating position, the best equipped of all to mobilize international pressure for religious freedom. But they were the first to surrender (although to be sure they were also the first to revoke their surrender in mid-September). How did it happen, and why?

First, the Catholics made it easy for the Kremlin to play tactics of "divide and rule." Last year the province of Sverdlovsk, about 1,000 miles east of Moscow, enacted a bill imposing harsh new regulations on so-called "missionary" activity, in one of dozens of provincial measures that were in effect forerunners of the new federal law. The Sverdlovsk legislation defined the term so broadly that virtually any committed lay member of any mainstream Christian confession could be classified as a "missionary" and required to register with the provincial authorities. The Catholics in Sverdlovsk lobbied against this bill until they were assured that their Church and parishioners would be specifically exempted; at that point they dropped their opposition.

If the Kremlin officials who were leading the charge for new restrictions on religion had somehow missed that episode, they could hardly avoid noticing that a June letter from Pope John Paul II, protesting the earlier version of the parliament's bill, focused mainly on the bill's failure to include the Catholics as one of the "traditional" religions of Russia which were specifically mentioned in the bill's preamble. (The "traditional" religions--Russian Orthodoxy, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism--were exempted from some of the bill's restrictions.)

The implication of the Pope's letter, whether intended or not, was twofold: that the Catholics would not fight vigorously for the religious freedom of believers other than Catholics; and that the Catholics could be satisfied with merely symbolic concessions in the preamble alone, without major changes in the bill's substantive sections such as the "15-year rule." The Kremlin proceeded to offer such symbolic concessions, and the Catholic negotiators on the scene in Moscow accepted them. When Father Bartsevich was later asked which differences between the July and September bills could specifically be traced to the Moscow Catholics' negotiating stance, he emphasized the preamble more than any other item.

Second, a tragic accident kept the Catholics' most uncompromising local cleric away from Moscow during the entire period during which the critical negotiations were being conducted. Archbishop Kondrusiewicz, the Moscow-based apostolic administrator for the Church in European Russia, spent the latter part of August and the early days of September in Belarus, visiting a sister who was mortally ill. On the first day of work after his return he wrote an open letter denouncing the new bill as unconstitutional and calling on Yeltsin to rewrite it--effectively commanding a 180-degree reversal of the policy pursued by Father Bartsevich in his absence. But again the change in policy came too late; by the end of the first week in September the political prospects for stopping the bill were much more remote than they had been even at the beginning of the month.

Can one then conclude that Father Bartsevich is single-handedly responsible for the collapse in the Catholics' bargaining position? This seems unlikely for several reasons, the most compelling of which is that a 30-year-old priest is not apt to make such far-reaching decisions without guidance from above.

Two bishops were in Moscow during all or part of this period: Archbishop John Bukovsky, the papal nuncio, and the head of the apostolic administration for Russia east of the Urals, Bishop Joseph Werth. There is no evidence that either objected to Father Bartsevich's conduct of the negotiations. According to two well-placed Catholic sources in Moscow, Archbishop Bukovsky reacted coolly to the uncompromising open letter sent by Archbishop Kondrusiewicz after the latter's return from Belarus.

Finally, all the decisions of this period took place against the background of the Vatican's frequently expressed desire for reconciliation with the Orthodox Church. According to one Moscow Catholic priest, the Vatican's Council for Christian Unity under Cardinal Edward Cassidy, is "very close to Metropolitan Kirill" of the Moscow Patriarchate. "Ninety-nine percent of Catholic priests here in Russia would disagree with its approach," he argued.

The Vatican has shown intense interest in arranging a face-to-face meeting between the Pope and Moscow Patriarch Aleksei II, which would be the first such meeting in history. It may not be a coincidence that just as Russia's religion bill was moving toward passage, Patriarch Aleksei publicly reopened the possibility of such a meeting--after having abruptly canceled plans for exactly such an encounter in August. Nevertheless both Archbishop Bukovsky and Father Bartsevich deny that they were acting on specific orders from the Vatican.

Much remains mysterious about the events of this period. Why did the Catholic negotiators in Moscow settle for vague, verbal assurances from secular officials that Russia's Catholic faithful would not have "problems" if the new bill were passed? Why did they not insist on written rulings, or at least letters of intent? Why did they not demand specific commitments on points such as the classification of Catholic institutions under the 15-year rule?

The restoration of state control over religious life in Russia is a threat to Orthodox, not just to Catholics. For example, the new law gives state officials authority to restrict the missionary activities of Orthodox believers as well as others. It increases the power of provincial bureaucracies which are often staffed by former officials of the old Council for Religious Affairs, the Soviet-era agency which suppressed Orthodox and Catholic alike. For this and other reasons, the most active opponents of the legislation included prominent Orthodox believers such as member of parliament Valeri Borshchov and theologian Father Veniamin Novik. (The latter, just back from a sabbatical in Rome, was fired from his post at the Orthodox seminary in St Petersburg specifically because he protested the legislation.)

It may be that even the most vigorous Catholic opposition could not have stopped this bill from becoming law. But the failure to mount such opposition has demoralized both Russia's Catholics and precisely those Orthodox toward whom Catholics should feel the most good will.

Lawrence A. Uzzell writes from Moscow for the Keston News Service.