E.N. Tell me please a little about the people with whom it has happened for you to associate in life.

V.E. In this sense, Sergei Posad reared me in the Church. I had close acquaintances with church people who have passed through the whole suffering journey of the Russian Orthodox Church. Now the majority of them have already passed away. But, I found them not only in the living, but also in the strength still in good memory, in some church service etc.... For example, in the beginning of 1992, Archdeacon Sergie Boskin died. He was a witness who knew Metropolitan Sergie, one who helped to keep the Church working after the Patriarch died, and who knew his secretary, Sergie the Younger. This was a person who remembered the lively Patriarch Tikon and most importantly remembered the elderly of the Moscow region. A person who was also inclined to think that it was already the end and nothing good would ever happen. When I was insistent and said to him you yourself will see the rebirth of the Church, he listened to me with such a surprised kindness. And later when already my name became known to western radio stations (he listened to all of them), he with some happy bewilderment looked at me and only repeated: “My Goodness you are brave”. In any case, Archdeacon Sergie was a witness to the rebirth of the Chernigovskii Skit. He quickly went to serve there like a widowed archdeacon and introduced there the traditional monastic (skit) Divine Liturgy, that is being the active bearer that he was, he brought back Church tradition, in particular liturgical tradition. And the late Ekaterina Pavlovna Vasil’chikova, the shimonahinja (the strictest monastic order in Orthodoxy) Elizaveta, who was a spiritual offspring of Father (a monk) Porfirii, the helper of the monk Varnava, the Venerable (Saint) Varnava Gefismanskii, who found me herself, recognizing from general acquaintances that here is a person who gathers material about the monk Varnava. She called me and right away said, “I can die and then everything I know will leave with me. Come here to me.” And of course as soon as it was possible, I hurried to her and became her friend, a friend in her old age. I did not only write down everything that she wanted to report to me, I, as far as possible, grasped this living legend of church people belonging to a noble society so called “the survivors”, that is people who according to the logic of a totalitarian system were doomed for destruction, but they survived by the Providence of God. I touched the edge of the Moscow dissident formation. I was, truthfully, simply not disappointed, but having experience, I understood that nothing is completed in the Church with pride and that church activities are carried out with humility. Here, one only has to look at Jakynin, who had then still had not lost his priestly duty, and Victor Aksjuchits, and then I decided: long live Chistii pereylok [the Moscow Patriarchate].