Among the KGB generals directing the coup, a frisson of fear and righteous indignation must have taken hold. How dare Aleksey Ridiger, the very man they had put into power, speak out against them! The position of patriarch was on the KGB’s nomenklatura list, meaning that the generals had the privilege of signing off on the occupant. And by 1991, Ridiger had been their man for thirty-three years. According to researchers at the Keston Institute in Oxford, who looked at all available documents, Ridiger had been “recruited by the Estonian KGB on 28 February 1958, just days after his 29th birthday.” In February 1988, “exactly thirty years after his recruitment as an agent, Aleksy was given an award (gramota) by the KGB in recognition of his long service to them.” After handing him their equivalent of a thirty-year pin, surely they had a right to expect some gratitude. And if just now their drozd (“thrush” was his code name) did not want to sing the right tune from his gilded cage, then all he had to do was say nothing and go about his business of presiding at liturgies and other harmless religious services. His silence would give consent.

But Aleksy would not keep silent. Shortly after midnight on August 21, 1991, a column of tanks approached the barricades around the White House. Two young men were shot dead. Tank treads crushed another youth. Crowds swarmed the vehicles and set an armored personnel carrier on fire. Aleksy learned of this within moments, and now took a daring, virtually inconceivable step. At 1:30 a.m., only an hour after this carnage, and minutes before the order was expected for the general assault to storm the White House and seize Boris Yeltsin and the parliamentarians, he sent an extraordinary “address” (obrashchenie) to all “fellow-citizens.” It was broadcast at 1:42 a.m. on national television and radio.

The patriarch began by addressing his listeners as “Brothers and Sisters.” These were the same words Joseph Stalin, the former Russian Orthodox seminary student Joseph Dzugashvili, used when, two weeks after the German invasion of June 22, 1941, he called upon the Soviet citizenry to rise up and repel the invader. Now the patriarch appealed to his brothers and sisters to rise up and prevent civil war:

The delicate civil peace of our society has been rent asunder. According to the latest information, open armed conflict and loss of life have begun [i.e., the death of three young men trying to block the tanks]. In these circumstances, my duty as Patriarch is to warn everybody for whom the word of the Church is dear and carries weight: Every person who raises arms against his neighbor, against unarmed civilians, will be taking upon his soul a very profound sin which will separate him from the Church and from God. It is appropriate to shed more tears and say more prayers for such people than for their victims.

May God protect you from the terrible sin of fratricide. I solemnly warn all my fellow-citizens:
The Church does not condone and cannot condone unlawful and violent acts and the shedding of blood.
I ask all of you, my dear ones, to do everything possible to prevent the flame of civil war from bursting forth.
Cease at once!
I ask soldiers and their officers to remember that no one can set a price on human life and pay it [i.e., that price].
I ask the Most Holy Mother of God, the Protector of our city, at this time of the Feast of the Transfiguration, not to withdraw Her protection from us, but to preserve all of us.
O Mother of God (Mater Bozhia), help us to reconcile ourselves to one another, to the truth, and to God! Aleksy II, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia.

The first of his interventions had been simply an announcement, but the address was both more personal and more magisterial. Once again there is the light touch on the theme of lawlessness, “the Church . . . cannot condone unlawful and violent acts.” But there is more. The patriarch does not claim to speak “infallibly” as has the pope in Rome since the nineteenth century, but liturgical language has its own sonorous power, and Aleksy was cloaking himself in the aura of his position and the righteousness of his cause.

And by 1:42 a.m. of August 21, even the KGB’s own Praetorian Guard, the elite Alpha Unit of two hundred professionally trained killers, was leery of taking orders from the coup junta. As recounted earlier, on the afternoon of August 19 it had refused a direct order to storm the Parliament Building. Although this action did not occur on the public stage, it is highly likely that Aleksy, with his close contacts in the military, was apprised of it immediately. The refusal of the Alpha Unit to obey this command has puzzled Western Sovietologists, who paid virtually no attention to the fact that in January 1991 the patriarch had taken a very strong, public stand against Alpha’s storming of the television station in Vilnius, Lithuania, at 2:00 a.m. More than twenty of the defenders died. Aleksy’s response was forthright:

The use of military force in Lithuania is a huge political mistake, or in church language, a sin. I ask Russians who are living in Lithuania not to consider these tragic days as “days of victory.” . . . As for those soldiers who are currently in Lithuanian cities, I want to remind you of the words John the Baptist used when replying to the soldiers who came to him for advice: “Rob no one by violence or by false accusation.” (Luke 3:14)

One Western diplomat stationed in Moscow at the time, however, did take surprised notice of Aleksy’s open condemnation of the bloodshed. When the national newspaper Izvestia carried the patriarch’s words all over the country, British embassy officials realized that the party’s ability to declare media silence was cracking. Sir Rodric Braithwaite, then the ambassador to the USSR, sensed that real change was in the air:

Such language from the traditionally sycophantic Orthodox Church was an unprecedented appeal to very profound Russian instincts. . . . for the first time since the October Revolution, a major Soviet crisis was conducted in the full glare of public opinion. No one could claim that he did not know what the issues were. A demonstration called by Moscow News on 20 January [i.e., of 1991] was attended by up to half a million people. Later estimates put the figure at 100,000—still a very large number.

Party oligarchs were furious that Muscovites (Russians!) had turned out in thousands to support the perennially recalcitrant Lithuanians. They did not appreciate the irony that, in terms of their own ideology, this displayed “fraternal support” for another Socialist people. They also did not enjoy the spectacle of their man Aleksey Ridiger, only six months after his enthronement, breaking ranks with them. Thus, by August 1991 Aleksy had already demonstrated he was not afraid to oppose state authority, including Gorbachev himself, the same man whose hide he was now trying to save. In his January condemnation of the Alpha Unit’s bloodshed in Vilnius, he used the highly charged language of John the Baptist and addressed soldiers of the Red Army as if face to face (“I want to remind you . . .”), speaking without the intermediary of the party.

Now, only eight months after the violence in Vilnius, he again spoke directly to soldiers and their officers. In his dramatic address, he warned that anyone who took up arms against innocent civilians was taking upon his soul a profound sin, which would “separate himself from the Church and from God.” The threat of excommunication has not deterred Western armies for some time. But the patriarch was not appealing to a Western army. Instead, as Ambassador Braithwaite had recognized earlier, the patriarch knew precisely how to appeal to the “very profound Russian instincts” of the Red Army.

In hindsight, Aleksy’s address to his “Brothers and Sisters!” was arguably the final nail in the coup’s coffin. The immediate context was tense and fluid. By 1:42 a.m. on August 21, the young men in the tanks ringing the Parliament Building had themselves become the targets of believers pressing the New Testament on them. This itself was new to the Soviet Union, because the possession of the Bible in the Russian language had been deliberately restricted. But the Russian Bible Society had recently been reestablished— fortunately, four thousand new copies of the New Testament in vernacular Russian were available. Two thousand were distributed to the defenders. Even more importantly, two thousand new copies were pressed upon the tankers. Priests had been performing baptisms in Red Square. The Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers (Komitety soldatskikh materei), an important organization of more than fifty thousand mothers of serving Red Army officers and soldiers, had already issued a public plea calling on “all soldiers and seamen not to allow themselves to be turned into murderers and not to carry out criminal orders."

If Aleksy’s interventions were important in the failure of the coup, then some might discern an additional element of meaning in an otherwise enigmatic statement by the current Russian president, Vladimir Putin. He is on record as having denied that a true popular revolution, that is, a revolution from below, took place August 19–21, 1991: “Let’s proceed from reality. Democracy in Russia was in fact issued from above.” Putin’s words have generally been interpreted to mean quite simply that it was Gorbachev who put into place opportunities for people to take charge of their own political destiny without facing immediate and certain arrest and execution. Kremlinologists, more eager to suggest that all statements are opaque, might conjecture that Putin’s remark was a rueful accolade from one former KGB agent (Putin) to another (Ridiger). But Russian believers would be more likely to interpret Putin’s “from above” in a spiritual rather than a political sense. Putin has certainly been ostentatious in his own profession of Russian Orthodoxy and has let it be known that he maintains a priest as his spiritual guide.

Western political scientists and historians, overwhelmingly secular in their outlook, rarely saw the hand of God active in human affairs of the twentieth century. They consider the claims of Russian Orthodox believers ludicrous. For them the demise of the Soviet Union is a matter for roundtable discussions that focus on Marxism-Leninism, Gorbachev’s policies, and the measurable impact of nascent capitalism, privatization, and commercialization on a lumbering Soviet economy. Indeed, in 2004 the Slavic Review, the premier journal of the field, devoted an entire issue to the discussion of the fall of the Soviet Union without once mentioning either the Russian Orthodox Church or the patriarch. Right-wing Republicans claim that the collapse of the Soviet regime was nothing less than a victory over Communism won directly by Ronald Reagan—a view that Russians themselves find both risible and insulting.

No one would deny that Gorbachev’s reforms, particularly the withdrawal of terror as the means of controlling the Russian and the East European populations, put into motion a chain of events that led people to think and to behave very differently than they had for the previous seventy years. But to deal with the question of the collapse of the August coup without mentioning the role played by the patriarch’s interventions and the activities of priests and believers of the Orthodox Church around the Russian White House is to ignore facts on the ground.

I think your slap at the late Pope John Paul II at the end of your post is inappropriate. He was hardly a "secret weapon" of anyone else. He did have a lot of influence in Eastern Europe, by giving nonviolent encouragement to the people, especially in Poland.

Ever since, I have been both frustrated and amused by people who keep trying to tell everyone that religion and nationalism had nothing to do with the fall of Communism.

Fr. Serge