Faith in Britain

disunity and to maximise confusion: 'They no longer beat us up and torture us,' he said, 'but they do everything within their power to thwart us.'

Ogorodnikov described the CDUR's objectives to me: 'Our Party is founded on the idea of Christian Democracy - on a Christian outlook. This is based on the evangelical principle: faith, freedom and the special Orthodox concept that each person is responsible for his own actions. Each person, for instance, is responsible for truth, not only those who are elected. Together we can fulfil this deep process.'

This emphasis on the role of each individual in seeing that truth prevails is not surprising in a society which has lived on a diet of lies and where everyone is under suspicion of being a collaborator.

He says that there is little legacy of early Christian Democracy in Russia, contemporaneous with the early development and growth of the movement in Western Europe. In the short period between the removal of the Tsar and the Marxist-Leninist Revolution there was a brief flowering of such thinking but after 1917 such possibilities ceased to exist.

Since his release in 1988, in an attempt to fill this vacuum, Ogorodnikov has spent much of his time working on samizdat - unofficial, underground - publications: 'There are now 720 different editions of samizdat just in the Russian Republic that we know of. Each week we publish two periodicals, the Bulletin of the Christian Community, and the Christian Democratic Messenger. We have now published our political programme, and documents from the Christian Democratic heritage from the West. We are about to publish the Christian Democratic programme from West Germany. All of these are published underground. We spend eighty per cent of our time making such publications.'

Ogorodnikov says: 'We are opposed to the totalitarian system in the Soviet Union.

Our society must work out stable democratic institutions which people can use to check power and to guarantee irreversible change. This can only be done if we deprive the Communist Party of their monopoly of power. A multi-party system will guarantee every group of people, and every person, the right to express their own outlook. We believe as Christians that we have to give answers to the very painful problems facing our suffering society.'

Ogorodnikov recognises that the Soviet Union is finished as a political entity and he supports the concept of a federation of autonomously governed states, and separation where that is desired by the people: 'We support the Lithuanians, and in the Ukraine self-determination, after a common vote, may well mean separation.'

His vision for Russia is 'a sovereign, free Russia. We want to liberate Russia and look after her interests. We seek a pluralistic democracy, based on law. We think that when Russia becomes free, and we have fulfilled some of our lofty aims, we