R.I.P.:

Dmitry Dudko, 82; Priest, Critic of Soviet Atheism (Mary Rourke, July 3, 2004, LA Times)

Russian Orthodox priest Dmitry Dudko, an outspoken critic of Soviet atheism who spent eight years in a Siberian labor camp in the 1950s, died Monday in Moscow, the Moscow Patriarchate announced. He was 82.

"Father Dudko was a leader in the field of religious rights in Russia. He gave people hope," Father Victor Potapov, rector of St. John the Baptist Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Washington, said Friday. Potapov, a member of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, interviewed Dudko several times in the 1970s and '80s for a "Voice of America" radio program he hosts.

Dudko's regular sermons and newsletters about Christianity, considered propaganda by the Soviet state, made him a mentor for many Soviet dissidents in the 1970s, including the late physicist Andrei Sakharov, Potapov recalled. [...]

"I do not oppose Soviet power as the [security police] would have me believe. I have simply seen clearly the impasse that the world faces without Christ."