“But if another voice were to speak? Not yours, Holiness, not officially, but a strong and persuasive voice, with your silent backing?”
He meant the maverick Father Gregor Rusakov, to whom the Patriarch had, with considerable moral courage, given his personal authority to preach.
Father Rusakov had been turned down in his youth by seminary after seminary. He was far too intelligent for the KGB’s taste and far too passionate. So he had withdrawn to a small monastery in Siberia and taken holy orders before becoming a wandering priest, with no parish, preaching where he could before moving on ahead of the secret police.
They caught him of course, and he got five years in a labor camp for anti-State utterances. In court he had refused the state’s paid-off defense counsel, defending himself with such brilliance that he forced the judges to admit they were raping the Soviet constitution.
Liberation under Gorbachev’s amnesty for priests showed he had lost none of his fire. He resumed preaching, but also castigated the bishops for their timidity and corruption, so offending most of them that they ran to Alexei to beg him to have the younger man locked up again.
In the robes of a parish priest Alexei II went to one of his rallies to listen. If only, he thought as he stood unrecognized in the crowd, I could turn all that fire, all that passion, all that oratory into the service of the Church.
The point was, Father Gregor packed them in. He talked the language of the people, in the syntax of the workers. He could pepper his sermon with barracks-room language learned in the labor camp; he could talk the language of the young, knew their pop idols by name and group, knew how hard it was for a housewife to make ends meet, knew how vodka could blunt the hardship.
At thirty-five he was celibate and ascetic but knew more of the sins of the flesh than any seminary could teach. Two popular teen magazines had even proposed him to their readers as a sex symbol.
So Alexei II did not run to the militia asking for an arrest. He invited the wild one to dinner. In the Daniovsky Monastery where they ate a frugal supper at a wooden table. Alexei served. They talked through the night. Alexei explained the task before him, the slow reform of a church too long the servant of dictatorship, trying to find its way back to a pastoral role among the one hundred forty million Christians of Russia.
By dawn he had his compact. Father Gregor agreed to urge his listeners to seek God in their homes and their work, but also to return to the church, flawed though it might be. The silent hand of the Patriarch enabled many things. A major TV station carried weekly coverage of Father Gregor’s hugely attended rallies, and his sermons were thus watched by millions whom he could never have addressed in the flesh. By the winter of 1999 this single priest was widely considered to be the most powerful orator in Russia, even including Igor Komarov.
The Patriarch was silent for a while. Finally he said, “I will speak with Father Gregor on the matter of the return of a czar.”
CHAPTER 15
AS ALWAYS IN LATE NOVEMBER, THE WIND BORE THE FIRST snows of winter whipping across Slavyansky Square, harbinger of the bitter chill to come.
The tubby priest bowed his head toward the wind and scurried through the outer gates, across the small yard, and into the warmth of All Saints of Kulishki, redolent of damp clothing and incense.
Once again he was watched from a parked car, and when the watchers were certain no one was tailing him, Colonel Grishin followed him inside.
“You called,” he said as they stood side by side away from the few worshipers, apparently contemplating the icons on the wall.
“Last night. There was a visitor. From England.”
“Not America? You are sure, not America?”
“No, Colonel. Just after ten His Holiness told me to receive a gentleman from England and let him in. He came with his interpreter, a much younger man. I let them in and escorted them to the study. Then I brought a tray of coffee.”
“What did they say?”
“When I was in the room, the elderly Englishman was apologizing that he spoke poor Russian. The younger man translated everything. Then the Patriarch told me to put the coffee down and dismissed me.”
“You listened at the door?”
“I tried to. But the younger Anglichanin seemed to have hung his scarf over the knob. It blocked my vision and most of what I could hear. Then someone came, the Cossack on his rounds, and I had to get away.”
“He mentioned his name, this elderly Englishman?”
“No, not while I was there. Perhaps when I was away making the coffee. Because of the scarf I could see nothing and hear very little. What I did hear did not make sense.”
“Try me, Father Maxim.”
“The Patriarch only raised his voice once. I heard him say ‘Bring back the czar?’ He seemed amazed. Then they dropped their voices.”
Colonel Grishin stood staring at the paintings of the Madonna holding her Child as if he had been slapped in the face. What he had heard might make no sense to the stupid priest, but it made sense to him.
With a constitutional monarch as head of state, there would be no post of president. The head of government would be the prime minister, leader of the government party but still subject to parliament, the Duma. That was a thousand miles from Igor Komarov’s scenario for a one-party dictatorship.
“His appearance?” he asked quietly.