UK Press Features

Whispers in the woods of eastern Europe provoke nuclear panic

The Times – November 24, 2003

One of the oddest cases to cross David Blunkett’s desk began as a whispering campaign in the remote forests of ex-Soviet northeastern Europe.

Was the struggling evangelist community that met to pray in a small-town cinema every week indulging in orgies? Did the pastor, a foreigner in his thirties, exercise hypnotic control over his flock? And could it be true that defectors from the group would be cursed?

For most of the Nineties, local tongues wagged pleasurably over the malicious gossip. Then the national media got hold of it. Wobbly snatched footage showing Pastor Teimuraz Edjibia apparently snarling was plastered over TV screens. Spooky music played. Newspaper articles fearfully liked the group to Aum Shinrikyo, the sect that released poison gas into the Tokyo metro in 1995. Another dangerous cult, broadcasters declared as the millennium approached; perhaps even a Doomsday sect. Edjibia’s residence permit was withdrawn. The State Security Department (the ex-KGB) began agonizing publicly about whether his group might be a danger to the country – and to the world.

For Visaginas is not just any small town. Its remote location in Lithuania, one of ten states that will join the European Union next May, belies its sinister significance. Visaginas is the service town of the Ignalina nuclear plant – a clunky Soviet pile built on Chernobyl lines. A sixth of its 30,000 Rusisan-speakers work there; Ignalina’s chimneys can be seen from every 1970s skyscraper. Where better, some speculated, for fanatics planning Armageddon to strike?

“It got so I was scared to go out and buy a loaf of bread,” the short, perky Edjibia recalls now, smiling ruefully. “No wonder. They’d been told I was about to blow up the world. People were shaking their fists and yelling, ‘Get the hell out of here! Go back to where you came from!’” Edjibia couldn’t take his wife and four children to his native Georgia, another ex-Soviet republic, where evangelical Christians are barely tolerated. He decided to head West. At an emotional farewell meeting many of his congregation chose to follow. In December 1999 they set off into the unknown, leaving a country in media uproar at the “dangerous sect’s mystery disappearance”. They ended up in Liverpool, and their asylum claims have been in the works ever since.

THE PEOPLE who welcome me into a shabby but respectable Liverpool sitting room and ply me with Nescafe don’t look like Doomsday fanatics.

Vadim Polevoi, the ruddy-faced deacon, used to be an estate agent. Alexei Rotchenkov, a burly father of three, blushes as he says that Pastor Edjibia’s preaching turned him from a heroin addict into a responsible paterfamilias. As their shyness fades, they indignantly bring out photocopies of one libelous article after another. When, later, the house fills with blonde children in red blazers, Edjibia ruffles their hair affectionately. “How anyone could think we would blow up the world when we spend so much time bringing children into it is a mystery,” he muses.

These gentle families are clearly no more loony nuclear villains than Mikhail Gorbachev is a striptease artiste. So how did they come to be labeled as dangerous fanatics? I went to Visaginas to find out.

THE SCIENTISTS who work in Visaginas worry. They worry about being Russian-speaking foreigners, left behind by the Soviet collapse in what has become a new country. And they worry about where they will work when the reactor shuts down (due by 2009). All that worry has focused every mind on God. The only buildings still going up in the concrete-and-brick landscape are churches. Sundays are full of rosaries, candles and the sound of hymns strummed on the guitar.

At first, all that marked Teimur Edjibia’s group out was its visibility: street meetings, lakeside baptisms. It was only in 1999 that something darker crept in, the group says: bullying by the State Security Service (“You know what that means,” Edjibia adds darkly, “Kay-Gee-Bee”).

In 1999, State Security Department high-ups inexplicably turned up to help decide whether Edjibia should get permanent residence – a low-level decision. He was turned down and told to leave.

“There were threats,” Edjibia adds. “A woman from the Migration Service came up to me at the shops and hissed, ‘You stop irritating the State Security Department. These things aren’t jokes.’” Next, the town prosecutor told Edjibia that he had got someone secretly to film prayer meetings, and was asking psychologists to examine the tapes. The half-dozen congregants who had low-grade jobs at the nuclear power plant were also hauled in for chats with the State Security Department. One was threatened with the sack unless he informed on Edjibia.

When the media turned nasty, also in 1999, the group assumed that the Department was behind that too – a quiet chat with a journalist here, poison in a listening ear there.

We can’t know if that was true. But the State Security Department went out of its way to brief me. As soon as my plane touched down, I was hurried off to see a nice young man in a sports jacket. It was after office hours. No problem; he met me in a bar.

His job was monitoring problem religious groups. He didn’t know much about Edjibia’s followers – but he did want me to be sure that they were a bad lot. “It was natural for us to watch them, although they were never persecuted,” he said. “They were operating near a Strategic Object. We don’t have any actual evidence against them, but in theory they could have done untold damage. Frankly, we’re delighted to see the back of them.” He laughed and left.

To Westerners, KGB persecution stories sound like paranoid fantasies, but people brought up in the former Soviet bloc (which includes eight of the 10 EU entrants) know more than we do about authoritarian rule, whispered denunciations and manipulation of public opinion. Their instincts are not always wrong.

The end of 1999 was a turning point in Lithuanian history. The country had spent a decade begging to be allowed into the EU. But it didn’t want to pay the price Brussels demanded – closing Ignalina. This is Lithuania’s one source of cheap energy. Lithuanians are proud of it (they think it is safe, and that Western fears of another Chernobyl are hysterical). On December 10, 1999, the Lithuanian Government finally braved the anger of voters. It promised to shut the plant and immediately began EU accession negotiations. It can have done the Government’s case for closure no harm that the threat from dangerous Doomsday fanatics had been so widely publicized immediately beforehand.

What, and who, began the Doomsday talk remains a mystery. In Visaginas there were none of the horse’s mouth revelations I’d expected. A guilty, shifty look came over many faces when the “sect” was mentioned. No one knew the names of the ex-congregation members still working at the plant. A tight-lipped woman at the Migration Service refused to divulge the reason for kicking Edjibia out. A few people did smack their lips over lurid culty stories about orgies, girls in trances, curses, frenzies and extortion. But every story turned out to be hearsay. “I as good as saw it myself,” one informant said solemnly. “The caretaker told me.”

Only a few people had a good word to say for Teimuraz Edjibia. But they were the ones who had actually known him.

“What the papers said was outrageous,” said Zhenya Fyodorov, the stocky, articulate owner of a car-repair firm. He met his wife at Edjibia’s prayer meetings. “Teimuraz was a delicate man. But those reports took everything out of context to make him look bad. That fitted in nicely with the politics, when ministers needed to say they not only had a dangerous station but even sects trying to blow it up. It’s obvious that Teimuraz was the victim of political intrigue.”

Lena Lebyodkina, who once lent Edjibia’s family a flat, looked doubtful when I asked if the group could return to Lithuania now. “I don’t know. They’ve sold their flats – what would they come back to? And they became so notorious that they’d have a lot to live down.”

Still, Edjibia & Co may have to go back. Their asylum hopes are fading. The Home Office sees Lithuania as a safe, white-list country that respects human rights and has a law guaranteeing freedom of worship – so not a priority for asylum requests. “None of their adjudicators has doubted their sincerity and honesty,” says their lawyer, Peter Simm. “The position is more, ‘We believe you, but legally this doesn’t constitute interference with your human rights’.”

If their claims fail, they fear being sent back to Lithuania – at least until it joins the EU next may. After that, as Europeans, they can legally return and live in England. But the effect of even a few months away from their new life would be negative for children who, after three years in English schools, have half-forgotten their Russian and never knew Lithuanian. Most can only write in English.

The Home Secretary has not answered a plea for mercy. Deportation may begin at any time.

My last memory of Visaginas is of Lena Lebyodkina, calling down the stairs: “If you see them in England, wish them luck.” Caught between two hostile bureaucracies, they will need it.

ENDS