Pray for it: religious freedom in Russia.

Five years ago on the occasion of the first visit of a Soviet head of state to the Vatican, Mikhail Gorbachev promised Pope John Paul 11 that his policy of perestroika or reconstruction would entail a new era of religious freedom in the Soviet Union. There was a great irony in this, for 1988 was the year in which Nikita Khrushchev had promised to display "the last living priest." Gorbachev kept his promise; in 1990 he signed a new statute that protected religious freedom in the Soviet Union. That represented major progress alter seven decades of Communist rule that did its level best to impose atheism as the official state religion and to eliminate all exercise of other religious convictions. Shortly thereafter the Russian Federation adopted its own statute, which was even more protective of religious freedom. With the collapse of the Soviet Union it is this statute that now governs in Russia.

Recently, however, word has drifted westward that changes were being contemplated in this important statute. For example, an article last month in Isvestia blasted the creation of a new Experts' Consultative Council on religious matters. Melropolitan Kirill of Smolensk condemned the draft outright, while the apostolic administrator of the Catholic church in Russia. Thadeus Kondrusiewicz, took more focused aim at new provisions requiring registration of religious associations with the council and regular reporting of their activities.

As it turned out, I was one of several legal scholars lucky enough to receive an official invitation lot a consultation on this statute from V.S. Polosin, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet's, Committee for Freedom of Conscience, Religion, Mercy, and Charity. Who could be against freedom of conscience, religion, mercy, and charity? And who could decline an invitation to join such eminent constitulional scholars as Harold Berman of Emory, Jesse Choper of UC-Berkeley, Robert Destro of Catholic University, Cole Durham of Brigham Young, Douglas Laycock of Texas, and James Wood of Baylot for conversations about these vital matters?

The answer to the second question proved easier than the answer to the first. I read the briefing book prepared by the sponsor of the American delegation, the International Academy for Freedom of Religion and Belief, and packed my bags for Moscow. But the issues of religious liberty that we were asked 10 comment upon were subtle, and it was by no means clear as 10 who was trying to promote religious freedom and who was trying to control it, if not stifle it. Life can be complicated anywhere. but in Russia--as any reader of Dostoevski knows--it is more so.

I suppose it might be thought ungracious for a guest to wonder why he had been invited at all. Aware of the Russians' famous ability at chess, however, I did let the thought cross my mind that somebody might be interested in using us as pawns in a domestic struggle far more convoluted than met a lawyer's eye scanning a draft statute for legal difficulties. I guess that's the post-cold-war version of the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you?'

In the very week in March in which Russia was experiencing its latest constitutional crisis--which ended with two votes that rejected both the impeachment of President Boris Yeltsin for his attempt to expand the powers of the presidency and an effort to remove his archrival, Ruslan Khasbulatov, as chairman of the Supreme Soviet--a group of legal scholars and religious leaders from the United States met for three days with our Russian counterparts. The setting, ironically enough, was a villa outside of Moscow that used to serve as a retreat for the Central Committee of the Communist party. In these days of glasnost, frank and candid exchange of views within Russia has replaced domination and control of all expression of thought by central agencies of government. We certainly witnessed that kind of frankness and candor among our Russian counterparts.

But glasnost does not mean the disappearance of a bureaucracy as vast and vicious as the KGB without a bang, a whimper, or a trace in a newly reconstructed Russia. Indeed, some of our counterparts at the three-day consultation illustrated this very difficulty. The head of the Russian delegation was Dr. Youri Rozenbaum, a legal scholar who has specialized in church-Mate relations. He refused to disclose the identity of any of the Russian delegation before we arrived. and he insisted on chairing each of our eight sessions. As it turns out, Rozenbaum's secretive and controlling style is long studied. More than a disinterested scholar, he has had a checkered career both in and out of favor with the KGB operatives who infiltrated the Council of Religious Affairs, the notorious agency of the Communist regime that did as much to stifle as to protect religious freedom.

It is no accident, as my Marxist friends used to say, that Rozenbaum chairs the newly formed Experts' Consultative Council recently established by Khasbulatov. So far, the nine experts named to the council--shall we call them "friends of Youri"?--are what Michael Bourdeaux of the Keston Research Institute at Oxford describes with British understatement as "reemerging officials of the former Communist state, not one of whom has any known religious commitment." The Ministry of Security (former KGB) will have an ex officio member on the council.

It was this panel of experts that issued the draft statute on religious freedom that we were asked to review. In one section of the draft, state bodies are given the "right to receive essential information from religious associations and attend events sponsored by religious associations." Another section imposes a complicated duty on religious associations to register with the council mentioned above.

The repugnance of Baptists to the licensing of preaching in colonial Virginia is at the core of the American commitment to free exercise of religion. Against the historical context not of colonial Virginia, but of a decades-long attempt to suppress religion by governmental access to minute details of the activities of religious bodies in Russia, it is understandable that Russian religious leaders rang alarm bells at these provisions in the draft statute, which confers on the council the power to suspend religious bodies that do not conform 10 the law. Alter three intense days of conversations, Rozenbaum casually announced that the draft statute had been withdrawn. No need to worry, at least until the next draft comes out.

If our meeting helped to bring this result to pass, it was a success for that reason alone. We will have greater cause to rejoice if a truly representative Consultative Council does not waste energy erecting Potemkin villages to display to Westerners, but is empowered to protect the free exercise of religion fully in Russia. That goal is not coterminous with issuing legal documents purporting to protect "religious freedom" as an abstraction. It is how these documents are construed by those in power that will matter in the long run. Many among the intelligentsia--both here and in Russia--purport to defend "religious freedom" in principle, but staunchly oppose religion and its exercise by religious believers. For that reason there are serious issues that remain unresolved in Russia, including the recovery of church property confiscated after the revolution of 1917. For example, Catholics in Moscow have no house of worship other than a small church attached to the French embassy. And educators are baffled about how to teach about religion in the state schools without promoting a particular faith.

Our meeting not only identified these problems, but also elicited a commitment 10 work toward their resolution. The hope that these goals can be achieved is not illusory; ardent religious believers--including Adventists, Baptists, Buddhists, Catholics, Jews, Old Believers, Orthodox, and Pentecostals--have been invited to serve as representatives on the council and to advise the committee of the Supreme Soviet mentioned above.

After our formal sessions on the proposed draft statute were completed, several of us met informally with members of various religious bodies. It was moving to learn firsthand of the survival of religious faith from those who had suffered incredible persecution at the hands of their government, including dissident Orthodox priests such as Georgi Edelstein and Gleb Yakunin--who wear the scars of their years in the gulags--and Orthodox Jews with whom I prayed in the snow on Shabbat because they have no synagogue within which to meet.

The most significant meeting throughout this week of extraordinary experiences was an audience that five members of the American delegation--including the ecumenical officer of the Orthodox church in America, the Very Reverend Leonid Kishkovsky--had with the patriarch of Moscow, His Holiness Alexis II. The patriarch committed to us that he supports the principle of religious freedom, including equality of access by different religious groups within Russia, none of whom should suffer at the hands of the state. Neither does the Orthodox church seek a preferred or established position in a newly reconstructed state. Decades of the subversion of the church by the state would seem to counsel against that. And the patriarch described in painful detail the attempts of the state to destroy the Orthodox church in Russia, from the notorious five-year plan of Stalin in 1932 to Khrushchev's promise to eliminate Orthodox priests by 1988.

I recalled a bond of suffering between my people and his, going back to the period of the Penal Laws that imposed severe criminal penalties and civil sanctions on Catholics in England and Ireland from the Tudor period down to our own century. Remaining faithful under such circumstances as the Irish and the Russians have experienced is not easy, so I pledged the patriarch the constant support of my prayers for him and for the church in Russia. He thought this was the most important gilt an American jurist could bring to Moscow.