These arrest photographs come from a 1952 secret police penal file on a group of 23 believers who were arrested in the Kiev region of Ukraine.
The file contains two versions of their arrest photographs taken by the MGB* officers. As the photos were being taken, the believers intentionally closed their eyes, turned their heads away, or sang while the officers tried to restrain them. Their gloved hands are clearly visible in the images. Police officers later tried to correct these “tainted” photographs by removing the evidence of their violent intervention from the prints, which one can see in the spruced-up copies with the hands of the policemen roughly shaded out. The handless photos were used in the formal documentation of the case, while the smaller-size, original photos with the hands were appended to the back of the arrest questionnaires.
[*The MGB was the Soviet Secret Police which later came to be called the KGB. This organization now calls itself the FSB.]
The MGB official's closing indictment charged the group with conducting anti-Soviet activity and propaganda as members of the “ecclesiastical-monarchist organization ‘the True Orthodox Church.’”
However, no one knew much about them. Their co-villagers described them as Stundists or Baptists and knew nothing more than the fact that, even though they displayed Orthodox icons, crosses and church books in their homes, they never went to the Orthodox Church** and did not recognize Orthodox priests**.
[**the meaning of this is: these Orthodox confessors, of the Russian Orthodox Catacomb Church, did not recognize the Soviet Church.]
The members of the group lived isolated lives; they rarely talked to their neighbours, avoided representatives of the Soviet authorities and never discussed their faith except to repeat the phrase: “God knows” (Бог знает).
All we know about them now is that they were poor peasants who gathered for prayer in secret in their homes, sometimes travelling between villages to pray together. They refused to enroll in local collective farms or to work at other state enterprises, never paid taxes or registered for other Soviet documents, and never used money (“the mark of the Beast”) or sent their children to public school.
The pre-trial review of the believers was brief: a mere three days of interrogations and then an additional night of twenty-two orchestrated confrontations between the arrestees and witnesses (conducted from 9pm until 4am).
During the review, the believers refused to answer questions, responding to everything by saying simply “God knows” or “I will only answer to the Judgment of God.” During the whole process they never stopped singing and praying. They continued when the police came for them, as their arrest photographs were being taken, during the interrogations that preceded their trial and even during the court hearing.
The case lasted for 9 days, between the arrests and the court hearing, with the final sentence of 25 years in labour camps [the Gulag] being handed down to most of the defendants.