The senior leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church served as KGB agents and remains dependent on the security services to this day.

This was stated by Yevgeniy Savostyanov, former deputy head of Russia’s KGB, in an interview with the Vilnys channel.

According to Savostyanov, the Russian Orthodox Church had operated as an agent of the KGB since Stalin’s era.

“If we are talking about relations with the Soviet Union’s security services, these were relations between a handler and an agent.

This continued until Gorbachev’s perestroika, when formal cooperation was abolished, but informal ties remained, as did the compromising material held on Church officials. The hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church knew that compromising information existed about them and that they were ‘on file’. That is why they remain puppets in the hands of the security services,” Savostyanov said.

As we previously reported, Aleksey Uminskiy, former rector of the Church of the Life-Giving Trinity in Khokhly, Moscow, who now serves in Paris, revealed details of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) hierarchy’s cooperation with Soviet and Russian intelligence and security services. According to the priest, cooperation with state security agencies during the Soviet period was not occasional but pervasive.

As LF reported, the Russian Orthodox Church coordinates the persecution of anti-war clergy with Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). Evidence of this was published by religious studies scholar and former editor of the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, Sergey Chapnin, in his book Religious Communities Under Pressure: Documenting Religious Persecution in Russia, 2022–2026.