Re: Death of Zoya Krakhmalnikova, Russian Christian writer jailed by Bolsheviks

On Tue, 13 May 2008 09:43:15 +0200, Steve Hayes <hayesmstw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:

>Christian writer jailed for her beliefs by the Soviet 
>authorities

Zoya Krakhmalnikova: Exiled Russian Orthodox writer

Tuesday, 10 June 2008



http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/zoya-krakhmalnikova-exiled-russian-orthodox-writer-843574.html



Zoya Krakhmalnikova may have looked grandmotherly in her 
later years, her distinctive white hair making her easily 
identifiable at events in Moscow intellectual circles, but 
she was quietly determined in defending what she believed 
was right.


A convert in her early forties to Russian Orthodoxy, she 
went on to produce, by hand, an admired anthology of 
Orthodox spiritual writing that led to her work being banned 
from publication in the Soviet Union, and to a spell in 
prison. Freed from her sentence in July 1987 under Mikhail 
Gorbachev, she thought, spoke and wrote about the Russian 
Orthodox Church, chiding it for failing to break free of its 
Soviet heritage of submission and caution and failing to 
denounce nationalism and anti-Semitism.

Krakhmalnikova was born in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov in 
1929. Her parents split up soon after her birth, and she was 
initially brought up by her father. But on his arrest in 
1936 she was passed over to her mother. Despite her father's 
arrest, she was able to study at the prestigious Gorky 
Institute in Moscow, and graduated in 1954. She then worked 
in publi****ng, including at Molodaya Gvardiya and 
Literaturnaya Gazeta, and her literary criticism was 
published by leading journals and newspapers, including the 
famous Novy Mir. In 1967 she gained her doctorate on the 
Estonian writer Aadu Hint, an interesting choice for a 
Russian-speaking critic.

She converted to Orthodoxy and was baptised in 1971 by the 
dissident Moscow priest Fr Dmitri Dudko. Three years later, 
she was sacked from her job for writing samizdat articles on 
the revival of Orthodoxy in Brezhnev's Russia, some of which 
were republished in émigré journals. Krakhmalnikova was 
determined to bring Orthodoxy back into Russian culture at a 
time when Soviet atheism, materialism and persecution left 
no room for religion in the public sphere. She devoted her 
main energy to Nadezhda ("Hope"), a typewritten journal she 
founded in 1976 and circulated clandestinely. Unlike other 
samizdat editors, she boldly put her name to each issue.

The wide-ranging journal - which eschewed politics - 
included works by the church fathers, testimonies by 
bishops, priests and other Orthodox victims of the Soviet 
regime, pastoral addresses by the likes of Fr Dudko and some 
of her own writings. Krakhmalnikova managed to produce 10 
issues - which were soon republished abroad - before the KGB 
swooped. She was arrested in August 1982 at the family dacha 
near Moscow, in front of her daughter and baby grandson. She 
was held in Moscow's Lefortovo prison, where the KGB sent a 
journalist in an unsuccessful bid to get her to incriminate 
herself. She was sentenced the following April on charges of 
"anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" to one year's 
imprisonment, followed by five years' internal exile.

"The persecutors of Christian reading material have their 
own publi****ng houses, newspapers, television and radio 
stations - all means of producing countless quantities of 
atheist propaganda, full of hatred towards God and his 
believers," she mused. "How could the modest issues of 
Nadezhda produced in a tiny print-run possibly do them any 
harm?"

Having survived prison, Krakhmalnikova was sent into exile 
in the remote Altai region close to the border with China 
and Mongolia. Her husband, Feliks Svetov, was arrested in 
1985 for his samizdat writings and was exiled to the same 
area. Both were eventually freed amid Mikhail Gorbachev's 
reforms, although they were among only a handful of 
prisoners of conscience who refused to write appeals for 
clemency. Sadly, their marriage did not long survive their 
return to Moscow.

Back in the capital, Krakhmalnikova threw herself into 
public debates on the role of the Church in the much freer 
atmosphere under Gorbachev and then Boris Yeltsin. She 
condemned Orthodox bishops who refused to confess their 
guilt for collaborating with the KGB.

Krakhmalnikova wrote several novels and books of memoirs of 
her imprisonment. She also edited a collection of articles 
in 1994 on anti-Semitism in Russia, a growing problem as the 
country went through a search for new certainties and often 
turned its back on the values she held dear.

Felix Corley

Zoya Aleksandrovna Krakhmalnikova, writer and dissident: 
born Kharkov, Ukraine 14 January 1929; married Feliks Svetov 
(marriage dissolved, died 2002; one daughter); died Moscow 
17 April 2008.


-- 
The unworthy deacon,
Stephen Methodius Hayes
Contact: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/stevesig.htm
Orthodox mission pages: http://www.orthodoxy.faithweb.com/