Father Sergei Zhigulin, kidnapped in January by Chechen rebels, was released July 4 after 160 days in captivity. Fr. Anatoli Chistousov, dean of the Orthodox Church in Grozny, is thought to have died in captivity.
Fr. Zhigulin is the Church official in charge of contact with the Muslim community. He had gone to Chechnya as a personal envoy of Patriarch Alexei II on a mission to further church relief work.
Described as "emaciated and pale" with "festering wounds, inflicted by whips and rods," Father Zhigulin arrived unexpectedly at the Khankala hospital on the Russian military base outside Grozny, the Chechen capital.
Fr. Zhigulin said he had been tortured during interrogation by the Chechen separatist security service. He was accused of being an agent of the Federal Security Service (FSB), successor to the Soviet KGB.
Kazbek Makashev, a Chechen separatist official in charge of prisoner exchanges, formally apologized for the treatment and "humiliation" to which the priest was subjected. "As a Christian and a church official, I pardon my torturers," said Fr. Zhigulin after his release.
Here is part of his remarks to co-workers of the Department of External Affairs in Moscow as presented in Moscow July 10:
The first months were hard in all respects. We found ourselves in a double or even triple captivity -- even among our captives were many of those who did not like the Church and spoke openly against it. The only justification for me personally and for the whole Church was the fact that I shared with them their captivity and experienced the same difficulties and even more.
The hardest thing was to bury people. Many died. Nothing could be done to help those who were dying of hunger or strange illness. No medical assistance was given -- no bandages, no elementary pills, no ointments. At one base we buried nearly 40 people.
We saw Easter in under those terrible conditions. On Saturday night we managed to get some flour and made a few Easter cakes in mugs. On Bright Thursday, when I had not seen bread for three months, one of the guards quite suddenly gave me his flat cake. I had beseeched God to give me at least a piece of bread on that day so that I could share it with people.
For a month and a half we could not lie down because there was no room even to sit, let alone lie. Each sat for half the night and stood for another half. Rain flooded the dug-out -- the water was ankle deep. We were all soaked to the skin, no drying permitted. There was one small stove for 130 people.
The conditions we were in resembled the Middle Ages. Some guards could not communicate without lashes, batons. We were beaten for any reason at all. There were days of absolute hunger when we ate grass and washed it down with water from some turbid springs carrying mud after rain, after boiling it a little on a camp-fire. There were also better days. The last base sustained us more or less, though after a day or two people still died of dystrophy, severe dysentery and cholera. It is a miracle I survived.
I did not lose hope for a moment. Those were very hard days, especially when they tried to get a penitential confession. Already on the third day after interrogation started, a prosecutor came with a video-camera. He thought I was ready to give testimony against all and sundry -- our church leaders and myself and all, to testify that Russia has fallen so low and degraded that its Church and its servants have come to profess a satanic faith. When I told them there was our mission, there was our house in Grozny, there were people who fed your mothers and sisters hiding in the Daghestan land or coming over here for a piece of bread, and why didn't they check this all, they answered, "We don't need any help. Wolves need no help."
I am sure that Father Anatoli Chistousov is no more, though I think they will conceal it to the last. But I am sure that he did not disgrace himself in any way either. Being much weaker physically, he could not survive the beatings and hard conditions. He is absolutely a modern martyr. For all the time since Stalin's repression, for half a century, it is the first case of an openly repressive attitude to representatives of the Orthodox Church, to religious organizations in general, on the part of apparently non-state bodies, that is to say, people who do not pursue any purposeful policy, aimed at destruction or discredit of religion.
Though it is not a religious confrontation at all, of course. Most of them, even orthodox Muslims, would come to me -- fighters, even mercenaries from Pakistan. They would come to have a look at a Russian "mullah" and say something about their own faith. I cannot say there is interreligious hatred and that it will increase or that there are grounds for it. No and once again no, because plainly they themselves do not know their Islam.
On the first day when Father Anatoli and I were captured and driven to some ruined club at the Goiskoye village, we made our confession to each other. Later they brought us some bread and tea. We consecrated and broke that bread in a brief rite. When at the seminary, listening to the lives of church ascetics and people in general who suffered for the faith and the Church, I never thought we would have to remember all that at the end of the 20th century with its normal and comfortable living conditions. And he said to me, "Sasha, brother, just imagine how good it is to die for Christ." I said to him, "Do you think it is it possible today?" Indeed, people suffer but from utterly different afflictions, not violence or torture. It may be some spiritual suffering, but, just imagine, the end of the 20th century and you will suddenly remember the first centuries of Christianity. He is certainly a pride of the Church, since such purity is an incredible quality.
reprinted from In Communion (issue 6, October 1996); icon drawing by Fr. John Matusiak
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