Rev. Dmitry Dudko

The Rev. Dmitry Dudko, a Russian Orthodox priest who spent years in prison for anti-Soviet activity but in his later years praised Stalin and grew close to nationalists who dreamed of restoring the Soviet Union, died Monday in Moscow, the Moscow Patriarchate announced. He was 82.

Rev. Dudko, an elfin man with a gentle manner and beaming smile, rose to prominence in the 1970s for his powerful sermons, which grew into question-and-answer sessions about Christianity and faith at a time when religious inquiry was a crime punishable by Soviet law. More than anything, he spoke out against godlessness.

He attracted and had a profound impact on many young intellectuals, some of whom he baptized and some who became religious dissidents and were imprisoned for their faith.

St. Vladimir ' s Seminary Press in Crestwood, N.Y., published a collection of Rev. Dudko ' s sermons under the title " Our Hope " in 1977.

His activities led to his arrest in 1980. He was accused of giving " slanderous materials " to Christopher S. Wren, a New York Times correspondent in Moscow, as well as to an American professor and other foreigners.

In a blow to many of his followers, he recanted on Soviet television six months after his arrest.

" I repudiate what I have done and assess my so-called struggle against godlessness as a struggle against the Soviet power, " he said, reading from a typewritten statement.

Rev. Dudko had already spent eight years in prison as a young man. He was arrested in 1948 when he was a student at the Moscow Theological Academy, charged retroactively with disseminating " anti-Soviet propaganda " for religious poetry he had written during World War II.

He eventually finished his theological studies in 1960 and became a parish priest.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he became closely associated with nationalists grouped around Alexander Prokhanov, a writer and editor of a newspaper called Zavtra. In Christmas and Easter messages he wrote for the newspaper he was identified as its dukhovnik, or spiritual father.

The newspaper is known for its defense of the Soviet empire and Stalinism, views that Rev. Dudko came to share, despite the fact that his father was a peasant who was arrested in 1937, at the height of Stalin ' s repression, for refusing to join a collective farm.

Rev. Dudko said, " The time has come to rehabilitate Stalin, " praised him for his asceticism and forging of a powerful state, and added, " I even pray for the repose of his soul. " He condemned Russia ' s democratic reformers as well as Western capitalists for worshipping mammon and driving the Russian people into poverty. He campaigned for Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist presidential candidate, and called for a " real union of believers and Communists. "