Spies in the Vatican: The Soviet Union’s Cold War Against the Catholic Church. By John O. Koehler, Pegasus Books, 2009.
The USSR liked to talk as if it had an iron grasp on the minds and spirits of the people under communist control, but in truth the Soviet leadership was petrified of the continuing presence and power of religion in their subjects’ lives, especially the influence of the Catholic Church. Throughout the twentieth century, the Soviets strove to eradicate the influence of the Vatican, and crafted an immense espionage network to learn about the Church’s actions and plans to counteract communist authority.
Koehler dedicates Spies in the Vatican “to those who paid with their lives or suffered imprisonment for defending their religious beliefs against communist tyrants.” (v). The book opens with a disturbing recounting of Soviet Russia’s first persecutions against religion:
“Before dawn on Easter Sunday 1923, Monsignor Konstantin Budkiewicz kneeled on the steps leading to a row of cells at Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka Prison. A single bullet fired from a communist executioner’s Nagant revolver shattered the back of the 65-year-old Monsignor’s head. The Catholic Church in Russia had its first 20th-century martyr. His crime? Resisting religious persecution by the Bolsheviks, thus “committing a counterrevolutionary act.” The Monsignor was a defendant in the first major show trial in the Bolsheviks’ quest to destroy the Catholic Church in Russia. The chief target, Polish-born Archbishop Jan Cieplak, and more than a dozen priests were also convicted. The archbishop was sentenced to death as well, but was quietly exiled after intervention by the Holy See and a number of Western governments, winding up in Latvia and eventually in Rome… The others were given long sentences they served in Gulags, the communist concentration camps where many died. Four years earlier, after the Bolsheviks pledged to “liberate the toiling masses from religious prejudices and organize the broadest scientific, education, and anti-religious propaganda.” Archbishop Baron Edward von der Ropp of the Mogilev diocese was arrested on trumped-up charges of engaging in “illegal economic speculations.” He undoubtedly escaped a bullet in the head when the Bolshevik leadership decided to exchange him for Karl Radek, the Ukrainian-born Bolshevik confidant of Vladimir I. Lenin.” (1-2).
There are many other anecdotes of brutality and diplomacy in this book, although the vast majority of the narrative revolves around the cold war between the Church and the Soviets, including incidents such as one communist official giving his relative (who was a high-ranking churchman) a religious statuette containing a wireless transmitter listening device. The bug provided the communists with information for years until increased scrutiny in the wake of the failed assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II led to its discovery.
This book was made possible because many Soviet records have finally been made available to researchers. It is fortunate that so many files survived. This preservation is due in part to the fact that in the chaos after the abrupt and unexpected demise of the Soviet Union, large quantities of documents that might have been destroyed by the Soviets due to their embarrassing and incriminating content. Despite the massive amounts of time and effort the communists placed into crafting a spy network, the Soviets did not want their espionage efforts made known, due in part to the public relations back that would inevitably follow. With the breakdown of the communist government, there was no force to compel the destruction of the remaining documents. It is impossible to tell how many other revelations might be found in the remaining documents sprinkled throughout various former communist locales.
What is clear from an overview of the existing materials is the Soviet Union’s continuous fear of the Church’s power to subvert communist authority. For all of the oft-repeated usage of Marx’s “opiate of the massage” dictum, the Soviet authorities did not believe that religion would just fade away with the imposition of communism. Indeed, after studying the available evidence, the Soviets appear to have been deathly afraid that the Church would destroy them, and as later events would prove, this anxiety was justified. The communists sought to corrupt or recruit members of the clergy in order to gain more information about the Church’s actions. The Soviet spy network thrived by having contacts within the Church. In Poland, between ten and fifteen percent of the nation’s clergy were thought to have collaborated with the Soviets at some point, tempted by threats, bribes, or blackmail. (272). Even some high-level Church officials proved to be Soviet spies, but their traitorous activities were only revealed after the USSR fell and the long-hidden documents were released. Koehler writes:
“The efforts of East European communist governments and the Soviet regime to burrow their way into the inner workings of the highest level of the Church certainly were to be expected, as they viewed people’s loyalty to the Church certainly were to be expected, as they viewed people’s loyalty to the Church a direct betrayal of their loyalty to the Party and, therefore, “subversive activity” that had to be stopped. How well they succeeded, however, would not have been believed had the collapse of the regimes not occurred so rapidly that their intelligence services did not have sufficient time to destroy all of their explosive documents. Unfortunately, the documents obtained by me only date back to the late 1960’s and cover merely a bit over a decade. Nevertheless, had the East European communist bloc managed to hang tough and overcome its domestic difficulties, the opponents of democratic nations would have had valuable tools for managing their foreign policy.” (31)
Koehler believes that the USSR was so afraid of organized Catholicism that they may have considered assassination as a means of protecting their own position. On November 13, 1979, several high-ranking Soviet officials passed a decree on how the USSR ought to deal with the election of Pope John Paul II and the moral and spiritual authority he inspired in Catholics and even non-Catholics, especially in Soviet-controlled Poland. The decree read, “Use all possibilities available to the Soviet Union to prevent the new course of policies initiated by the Polish pope; if necessary with additional measures beyond disinformation and discreditation.” (88). Nine members of the Soviet Secretariat signed this KGB order, including Mikhail Gorbachev. Koehler theorizes that this order may have contributed to an assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, but he asserts that the truth of the matter cannot be determined for certain based on the available archival materials.
The penultimate chapter of the book ends with a quote from Pope John Paul II, where the pontiff declared, “The claim to build a world without God has been shown to be an illusion.” (264). For all the Soviet Union’s posturing about its own strength and indestructibility, faith and dedication to moral principles proved fatal to the regime. Koehler’s book is fascinating, althougth one is left with the distinct impression that there are many more stories left to be told about communist espionage and the Catholic Church’s role in the Cold War. This tale of espionage focuses on character, psychology, and politics, making it far more in the vein of John le Carré than Ian Fleming. The next time you hear someone doubt that religion is still relevant in the modern world, tell that person just how much the Soviet Union worried about the influence of the Church.
–Chris Chan
