Soviets see Hare Krishna as C.I.A. plot

Press, 5 August 1983, Page 17

Soviets see Hare Krishna as C.I.A. plot

From

SERGE SCHMEMANN,

“New York

Times,” in Moscow

Although no sightings have been reported yet of saffron-robed youths chanting rapturously in Soviet streets, the Hare Krishna movement seems to have made sufficient inroads into the Soviet Union to alarm the authorities.

A major Soviet daily newspaper reported last year on the break-up of a Krishna chapter in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk and conviction of its leader for “parasitism.” The paper treated the movement as a kind of misguided idealism imported from the west that was deplorable because it lured people away from socially useful lives.

That warning apparently went unheeded, because “Nedelya,” the week-end supplement of “Izvestia,” has issued a far more alarmed and threatening report on the doings of the sect.

The journal reported the trial of leaders of a Krishna group in Moscow. Although the date, sentences, and charges were not specified, the authors of the article, Vadim Kassis and Leonid Kolosov, described the Krishna organisation in the Soviet Union as a deliberate American “division" whose victims became mentally warped and whose American leader was nothing less than an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency. Soviet opposition to a new manifestation of religion is hardly surprising, and the attempt to brand the newly imported sect as somehow subversive recalled similar assaults on Christian denominations introduced from the West, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Pentecostals.

Only recently, a young American woman working as a governess for American diplomats in Moscow was expelled after she was caught at an gathering” of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Soviet press subsequently accused her of having a “link” to the C.I.A.

However, the attack on the Krishna sect stands out from the usual flow of anti-religious propaganda because the spread of the movement has been almost unnoticed by Westerners in Russia. One possible explanation for the official concern gleaned from the press reports is that the movement seems to have taken root among the Soviet equivalent of a middle class — the better educated, urbanised, privileged youths. Earlier Christian sects had traditionally

found followers among less-edu-cated rural people. The Krishna members identified in “Nedelya” included engineers, technicians, a budding athlete, and others with higher education. This young intelligentsia has shown increasing fascination in recent years with a whole range of ideas outside Soviet ideology, from exotic Eastern philosophies to extrasensory perception or faith healing, without reports of heavy resistance from the Sta(e.

The Hare Krishna movement, however, appears to set off elemental anxieties in the Kremlin. After harrowing accounts of young people destroyed by the movement, ‘Nedelya” said: “This, then, is the ‘lnternational Society for Krishna Consciousness,’ a pseudo-Hindu mystic-religious sect, having a distinct anti-Communist character. “The Krishna ‘movement’ calls for an escape from reality, since all existence is only illusion. Thus, a person need not be interested in the fruit of his work, he must abandon socially useful activities, he has no fatherland, no family, no close ones, only an all-embracing love for God.”

Accompanying the article was a photograph of Krishna members in full regalia on a Western street, with a caption terming them “mindless.” The Krishna sect was founded in the United States in 1966 by an Indian ascetic, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, calling on adherents to turn all their worldly possessions over to the society and accept whatever duties were assigned by the guru. The shaven-headed youths in flowing robes with whitish smears on their foreheads, chanting and beating out rhythms on drums, have become a familiar sight on New York streets.

Two months ago, the daughter of Walter Reuther, the late Labour leader, and the great-grandson of Henry Ford, opened a Detroit mansion as a showpiece of the movement.

“Nedelya,” however, did not dwell much on the Western manifestations of the sect, focusing instead on the Moscow chapter headed by Vladimir Kritsky, aged 32, and Sergei Kurkin, aged 19, the defendants at the trial, who were accused of recruiting new members.