In the year 1975, with his neatly pressed suit, pink shirt and tie, Rotislaw Galetsky does not look like a fugitive. His ruddy features are suffused with a serenity that is rare for someone only 28 years old.
But Rotislaw Galetsky, an itinerant Reformed Seventh Day Adventist preacher, circulates among Soviet Christians who must worship underground because they have rejected the controls of the officially atheist state. He has distributed religious literature from hidden printing presses and collected complaints of religious persecution.
And this, Rotislaw Galetsky asserts has put him on the authorities most-wanted list. “The only thing that I am guilty of is that I want to serve God faithfully and will not accept this dictatorial system of coercion,” he said recently. “The agents of the KGB know that I transmit this literature which they have found with dissidents. If they catch me I think they would accuse me precisely of that.”
His calling allows him no permanent home. He said that he had not seen his wife and three children for many months. Yet like a New Testament apostle, he seems in perpetual joyful motion, spreading the Gospel to small congregations that gather together and fade afterwards into the texture of society.
Br. Galetsky declined to give details of the illegal Re-formed Adventists who are believed to number into the thousands, but he said that they flourished throughout the country. His description of other aspects of his boot-leg ministry provided an uncommon look as how illicit Christians lived in the Soviet Union 35 years ago.
An unpublished official report estimates that there are 30 million to 40 million religious believers out of a population of 258 million. Legal congregations are required to register with a Government watchdog agency, the Council on Religious Affairs, and accept constraints like not giving religious instruction to children. A militant minority, ranging from dissident Baptists to Pentecostals, has contended that their faith is none of the state’s business.
The Reformed Seventh Day Adventists, who observe a Saturday Sabbath and refuse military service, have in particular encountered reprisals from the state. Some have reported threats and attempts to take away their children. Others have been fined or harassed for unauthorized church services.
“Almost all the older members have spent time in prisons,” said Br. Galetsky. The Reformed Adventists’ white-bearded patriarch, Vladimir A. Shelko, 82 years old, has already served 23 years in jail and is being sought again by authorities.
Br. Galetsky credited his church’s survival to a “spiritual fitness” honed by continuous religious indoctrination that includes lessons on how to outwit secular authorities. “Our people live moral lives, but they have also been trained to preach and to stand up for their convictions,” he said.
The Reformed Adventists publish a variety of handsomely bound prayer books and manuals, complete with gilt titles. Br. Galetsky would not disclose how many illegal printing presses were working except to say confidently that “we can insure full availability of material to our congregations.”
One green-jacketed book includes a code of conduct for “resisting KGB searches and interrogation. Among its eight points, the code stresses belief in one’s innocence, readiness to suffer for the faith and awareness that in-forming on others is a grave sin. The code also calls for a “holy silence” on any questions from officials that amount to state interference in religious belief.
As for his congregations which are drawn largely from blue-collar and farm workers, Br. Galetsky explained that “the KGB says they are like mice—you can hear them but you can’t find them.” The soft-spoken minister first ran afoul of authorities at age 13, when he started cutting school in his native Ukraine to attend Sabbath worship. He recalled that village officials threatened to pack him off to a reform school with common criminals, but dropped the idea after “I said that I would be very happy to go there so I could speak to them about God.”
Pressure was put on his father to curb the boy’s religious tendencies. But when his father beat him, the boy said, “I didn’t cry out at all.”
An antireligious caricature of Br. Galetsky and his mother was posted outside their home in Voinin. Finally the harassment forced him to leave his family at the age of 15, and begin supporting himself.
The trials tempered his faith. Br. Galetsky said that he and some other Reformed Adventist ministers now traveled constantly among their congregations. “We are people who don’t need a warm place,” he explained. “In a 24- hour period, we can be on the move all the time.”
His circuit riding nearly ended in the southern Russian city of Voronezh. For 13 hours, a score of plainclothes agents and police besieged a house where Mr. Galetsky and several other Adventist ministers were preaching. Finally at midnight, he said, the older worshippers in the congregation rushed outside and created a diversion that let the ministers escape.
Such brushes with the K.G.B. seem to have made Br. Galetsky only more determined to continue his ministry. “From the age of 13 there have been occasions when God delivered me from their jaws,” he said. “It gladdens and strengthens us. We understand that if God allows it, it will be for our personal good.”
Rotislaw Galetsky