The word "dissident" is usually associated with Soviet human rights activists who wrote letters, printed samizdat, and were summoned for interrogation. Inside the church, it sounds different. A church dissident does not leave the fold; he continues to conduct services, hear confessions, and baptize, but he argues with those who manage church life. That is why his conflict is always twofold: on one hand, a question of faith and practice; on the other, of a priest's or bishop's right to speak in the name of the Gospel without permission from his superiors.
The earliest of the article's subjects, Gleb Yakunin, was a follower of Alexander Men, a priest whose lectures and books circulated in samizdat in the late Soviet period. Yakunin became the author of an open letter to Patriarch Alexy I. For this he received five years in the camps and two and a half years of exile in Yakutia. He was amnestied in 1987 and rehabilitated four years after that. In the 1990s Yakunin became a deputy, but in 1993 he was defrocked.
Defrocking in Orthodox practice means exclusion from the clergy, a ban on performing sacraments and serving. It is one of the harshest measures of church court, and for a priest it often marks the end of his entire former life. Yakunin responded with a step of his own: in 2000, together with associates, he founded the Apostolic Orthodox Church. According to its own data, it has communities in eight regions of Russia, including Moscow and St. Petersburg. Yakunin died in 2014.
A Bishop from the Northeast
Bishop Diomid had headed the Anadyr-Chukotka diocese since 2000. Anadyr is in the northeast of Russia, and a diocese of that scale, with vast distances and tiny parishes, lives by its own rules and rarely finds itself at the center of church debates. In 2007 Diomid signed an appeal sharply criticizing the patriarchate. In 2008 he was removed from the administration of the diocese and subsequently defrocked.
The article conveys his position in a single phrase that the publication quotes as his words:
"The church has been in heresy for 100 and 200 years"
The phrase sounds radical even against the backdrop of other texts about church criticism, because it calls into question not individual decisions but the continuity of church tradition. It is precisely such statements that are perceived in church circles as the most serious challenge, since they touch not discipline but the very understanding of where the boundary of faith lies.
A Voice from the Theological School
Andrei Kuraev is known as one of the most widely read Orthodox publicists and preachers in the Russian-language internet. His story began within the educational system: in 2013 he was dismissed from the theological academy where he taught. After that the conflict unfolded in the space of ministry. In the spring of 2020 Kuraev was banned from serving, and in December of that same year a church court defrocked him.
In Vernikov's article three fates are reduced to a single formula: each of the subjects believed that fidelity to the Gospel requires speaking aloud about what the church hierarchy prefers to keep silent. The differences between them are obvious. Yakunin spoke in an era of state pressure and camps, Diomid addressed a diocese on the periphery of the country, Kuraev argued in the public space, where the audience is measured not by parish but by followers. What remains common is the very gap between a priest's personal conviction and the rules prescribed for him.
The last in this story was the decision of the church court in December 2020 that defrocked Andrei Kuraev. A few months after that decision, his name was included among the three figures MBK Media wrote about as Orthodox dissidents.
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