Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev. Photo: Novaya Gazeta

Swiss Newspapers Reveal that the Patriarch of Russian Orthodox Was a KGB Spy 

He was known by the nickname Mikhaylov and worked as a Soviet agent in the decade of the ‘70s.

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Joachin Meisner Hertz

(ZENIT News / Berne, 07.02.2023).- Two Swiss newspapers, the Sonntagszeitung and Le Matin Dimanche, were able to access declassified archives that show that in the decade of the ‘70s, Kirill, the current Patriarch of Moscow, was a spy of the Communist KGB. 

The research reveals that in 1971 the then young Russian cleric worked as a representative of the Russian Orthodox Church in the World Council of Churches in Geneva. He was 24 years old and worked, contemporaneously, for the KGB.

Thirty-seven records are kept in Switzerland for Gundyaev — the name then used by the Russian Patriarch –, which span the period 1969 to 1989. The majority of them refer to requests for a Swiss visa. Two of them describe him as a Soviet functionary and in virtue of that fact, he was the object of measures against him, although those measures aren’t specified.  

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