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Revolutionary spirit

More than a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russians are building a belief in God. But not every religion is on the official list.

By VANESSA GEZARI
Published November 6, 2005

	[Getty Images]
	Religious icons at a flea market in Moscow. Despite an outpouring of interest in faith, the Russian government still officially recognizes only four religions: Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and Russian Orthodoxy, which leaves out Protestantism
	Times photo - Vanessa Gezari
	Protesters from Emmanuel Church clap and sing on Tverskaya Street in central Moscow. Dozens of members from the Protestant congregation have been arrested since they began protesting in May against a government decision to stop them from building a church. "If we were the Orthodox church, we would have no problem," says Yuri Popov, an Emmanuel pastor.

MOSCOW - The men come early. They wear black jackets or, in Shmul Ginzburg's case, a faded gray suit. He is old and his wife is gone. No one mentions the spots on his lapel, the dust on his . He comes every morning. That is the important thing.

In the sanctuary, they switch off their cell phones. The guy with the "I love Europe" bumper sticker on his briefcase unfurls a white prayer shawl. At the front of the room, a man murmurs: Yitgadal v'yitkadash sh'may rabbah.

This is the prayer for the dead, a mourner's plea for peace. For most of Ginzburg's 83 years, God was officially dead in Russia. Ginzburg barely knew him and didn't miss him; he was a dentist, too busy examining teeth to explore the shadowy reaches of faith. Now his daily trips to the synagogue give him a feeling he struggles to describe.

"It's a kind of warmth I can't even explain," he says. "It's like a second home."

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a wave of religious fervor swept Russia.

People packed Russian Orthodox churches and Catholic Christmas Eve services. Billy Graham preached in the Olympic stadium, Jimmy Swaggart preached on TV and Korean missionaries and Hare Krishnas sought converts on street corners.

Fourteen years later, that carnival of faith has given way to innumerable private struggles in wooden pews and theater seats and homes in darkness.

Russians are learning about Passover and a personal relationship with God, and the place where consciousness ends and the spirit begins to move you. They call God a destination, an authority, a refuge, a sacrifice, a figment of the imagination, but everyone agrees that he is not what he was. He is a song on Sunday mornings, a sidewalk argument, a whisper, a joke. He is part of the conversation.

Sometimes the conversation is political.

President Vladimir Putin visited Israel and spoke at the opening of a Jewish community center in Moscow. After decades of repression, Jews start schools, train rabbis and reclaim synagogues with government support. For the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union, more Jews are returning to Russia than leaving.

"For 70 years we were cut off with no oxygen," says Rabbi Avraham Berkowitz, executive director of the Federation of Jewish Communities of the former Soviet states. "You're resuscitating a community in a coma."

Not every community breathes so easily. On a recent Sunday, protesters from Emmanuel Church, a Protestant congregation in Moscow, stand on a busy sidewalk, chanting and clapping beneath a banner that reads "God Bless Russia." They want to build a church, but they say the government won't let them.

A 1997 law recognizes four traditional Russian religions: Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and Russian Orthodoxy. Most everyone else - including Protestants - has to fight for standing. And many Russians are still adamantly secular; 18-year-old Sergei Bogomolov is one of them.

Bogomolov is the leader of the boys who hawk bottled water, chewing gum and cigarettes along this section of Tverskaya Street. In his spare time, he studies medicine.

"I have no time to think about religion," he says. "My head is full of other things."

He gets in front of the protesters, waving his arms and shouting, "We don't know what you stand for, but we're with you!"

"When your life here stops, you'll meet God," an Emmanuel pastor tells him.

"No! I don't believe in it," Bogomolov says. "I won't believe it until I see it. I want actions, not words."

For action, turn back the clock a few hours. Get on the white bus with the sign in the window that reads "Good News."

"Is your heart hot today?" a woman asks a packed auditorium in north-central Moscow. "Is it burning for God?"

People are on their feet, swaying, jumping, clapping. In the front row, Vladimir Krakhotko, who is 34 and owns an information technology company, raises his hand to catch the spirit. He was brought up Russian Orthodox, but he'll tell you he never felt this way in his old church.

"Religion is not what I get here," he says.

What he gets is inspiration, a feeling that makes him close his eyes and tilt his head back as he sings along: "I have been raised to a new life."

Rick Renner, an evangelical minister from Tulsa, Okla., started this church five years ago. Now 1,500 people come to Sunday services in a rented 19th century auditorium with gold ceilings and Christian books piled on cheap metal shelves downstairs; 250 more worship in another building across town.

On this day, Pastor Renner is away in America, so a third-generation minister whose father and grandfather were jailed for leading evangelical churches in Ukraine gets onstage with a microphone. He is talking about total commitment to God.

Vladimir Krakhotko knows about commitment. He started coming to Good News four years ago. His gray slacks and blue silk tie declare him a man of the world, but his devotion is almost mystical. He prays from 4 to 8 a.m. every day, before work.

At first, he says, everything distracts you. You have to stop looking around, stop thinking about what you have to do that day.

"In this state, if a man has never been in it before, he's afraid because he has nothing to pray about," Krakhotko says. "All the words disappear, not a single thought. But it must be this way because in this place, everything which is the thing of human beings stops existing and the only thing existing is God."

Joining a church like Good News can be lonely. Krakhotko's wife doesn't come. He doesn't want to pressure her.

"I told her a lot about God," he says. "She doesn't want to receive it."

Krakhotko joins hands with Natalya Mikhaylenko, a woman in a polka-dot dress with a bulging stomach. She prays for her unborn baby. Her husband prays for good luck at work. A woman in Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses stuffs cash into a velvet bag held open by an usher.

"Precious Father God, we worship you with finances," a man onstage says. "We ask you to receive this from us, Lord. Asking you to visit your people today, healing people, giving people jobs, places to live, delivering people from drug addiction. Giving people a chance to come here without being ashamed."

At the Jewish community center around the corner from Good News, shame is a memory.

Anyone passing on the street can hear the machines shoveling earth, the metallic clang of builders' tools. A Jewish school opened here last month, and they're building a medical center, a sports complex and a Jewish museum that they say will be the biggest in Europe. High school students from all over Russia will come to learn about Judaism and the Holocaust.

This in a region where for decades, Jews were confined to the margins of society. They were forbidden to live in major cities. The Soviets turned their synagogues into theaters, warehouses, chocolate factories and stadiums, and covered their ritual baths in cement.

On a recent morning, Rabbi Berkowitz, director of the federation, stands before the library windows in the community center, looking out at a crumbling, nondescript Soviet-era building across the street. It used to be KGB offices. Now it houses the Federal Security Service or FSB, the KGB's successor agency.

"They used to haunt the Jewish community and see that we weren't able to practice or live," Berkowitz says. "This is the real victory: over the Communist regime that opposed religious faith."

He pauses.

"It's not that we escaped and rebuilt it somewhere else. We rebuilt it right in front of them."

For Shmul Ginzburg, the old man who comes daily to pray, the social and political rhythms of the new Russia matter less than the personal quest to understand a God who was, for decades, a cipher.

When he was a boy, Ginzburg's parents practiced their faith in private. They didn't teach their kids the prayers. He was curious, and sometimes he would ask, but the answers were plain, even to a child.

"Lenin and the authorities said, "There is no God, there is no religion,' " he says. "They ruined everything and they forbade everything."

In his Jewish neighborhood in Belarus, a non-Jewish family milked the cows on the Sabbath. Ginzburg went off to fight the Germans. He married, studied dentistry, worked. He liked the idea of communism, but after a while, he stopped believing in it.

"It doesn't work, because people are different, and one is honest and another is not," he says. "It's unreal, and you can't put it into practice."

He says he doesn't have any problems that religion can solve, except that he is alone. His wife and son are dead. His daughter, a doctor, lives in another part of the city. He has a lot of time on his hands. Too much.

On a recent morning in the synagogue, he opens the wooden desk in front of him and takes out a prayer book.

He lifts his shawl from a yellow plastic bag and wraps it around his shoulders. He puts his glasses on, takes them off, cleans them with the corner of the shawl. He stares down at the ancient language on the page as if, just by looking, he could make sense of it.

He didn't learn Hebrew as a boy and he doesn't know many words. But some words come easily. He says them in Russian. They are words the Soviets never wanted to hear.

"When I come here every day there comes an idea that somebody rules us."

-- Vanessa Gezari can be reached at 727 893-8803 or vgezari@sptimes.com Times researchers Cathy Wos and Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report.

[Last modified November 3, 2005, 12:08:03]