vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #167 / Social life / Reading article...

Alexander Maritsky was raised by devout parents, the son of a soldier killed two days before the end of World War II, but he followed the way of sin, he says, until he was 17.

Then his mother's prayers led him to God and to a devout old man, Archimandrite Serafim Tyapochkin. On Monday, Maritsky, 54, now a monk, set off walking across Russia, teaching people along the way about the holy man and the faith that resulted in him being locked up in Soviet prisons for 14 years.

Maritsky was one of nine pilgrims who set off on a 10,000-kilometer journey from this city on the Sea of Japan to Moscow. They plan to march 20-30 kilometers a day, finishing in Moscow by Jan. 7, 2000 -- Orthodox Christmas, and two millenniums after the traditional day of Christ's birth.

"This is to remind people that they are Russian," said Mikhail Alexandrov, 41. "It's to return to our base, the only base of the Russian people: the Orthodox faith. It is the only belief that can strengthen our motherland and restore our people."

The pilgrims will participate to varying degrees. Some plan to walk every step. Others may ride some stretches in a bus that carries supplies and a tent. But there is one firm rule: Pilgrims must carry the icons every step, even in the depth of winter.

"In Chita, for example, it will be minus 40 degrees, but the icons must be walked the whole way," said Alexander Melnikov of the Andrei Pervozvanny religious foundation.

As the pilgrims pass through towns and villages along the way, priests will baptize converts, conduct weddings and call for people to join them for part of the walk. In fact, about 20 people set out from Vladivostok's Marfo-Mariinskaya monastery with the pilgrims. Their numbers included priests in cassocks, organizers in suits and black dress shoes, Cossacks in tsarist-style uniforms and women in the white kerchiefs and aprons of Sisterhood, an Orthodox lay organization that does voluntary work in hospitals.

Sister Galina, 67, a Sisterhood member, carried an icon of the Holy Mother and Child and a candle shielded from the wind by half of a plastic Coke bottle.

"How far we walk -- God will tell us," she said. "When He says stop, we will stop."

Though the monks and lay sisters on the march speak in deeply religious terms, others describe their journey in nationalistic tones. Vladimir Lepyoshkin, deputy chairman of the krai Committee for Religious Affairs, said the goal is to unite the Slavic peoples and bring forth a renewed Slavic spirit. Vladivostok resident Leonid Kashchuk, 28, marched in a Cossack uniform and knee-high boots, carrying an icon. He plans to walk the entire way to Moscow. "I'm a Cossack, and Cossacks are for faith, the tsar and the motherland," he said.

One of the trip's organizers, Alexander Vasilyev, 39, started the trek in a suit and dress shoes, yet he carried an icon of the Virgin Mary. Though Vasilyev, who works in a Moscow publishing house, will not walk the entire way -- sometimes he will fly ahead to prepare things for the pilgrims in villages and cities -- he plans to devote most of the next one and a half years to the walk.

As the pilgrimage proceeded out of Vladivostok, traffic backed up. Motorists slowed to stare at the group. Mothers rushed their children over for priests to bless. One man waiting at a bus stop with a suitcase picked up his bag and joined the procession.

Over the last six years, the churches nearly doubled from 30 to 56, said Father Innokenty, press secretary for the Vladivostok Eparchy, or diocese. Hard times in Russia have made people more open to spiritual matters, Innokenty said. "If the system is sick, the heart is the first to feel it," he said.

In a sign of just how the church has become a part of Russian public life since the collapse of the Soviet Union, both regional Governor Yevgeny Nazdratenko and presidential representative Viktor Kondratov, also head of the region's Federal Security Service, were on hand as the pilgrims left. The Border Guards and the Emergency Situations Ministry have offered assistance to the pilgrims.

Yet some supporters fear that the church's influence in slipping, a sense reflected nationwide in the Orthodox Church's support of legislation last year that restricted the rights of faiths that have been in the country for less than 15 years. In 1991, said the krai administration's Lepyoshkin, there were nine religious confessions in Primorye. Now there are 29. Thus priests walking the route will seek to increase the number of believers through performing baptisms and weddings.

The believers' goals may be spiritual, but a few kilometers up the road from the church, reality was already sinking in. "My shoes are already broken," said Maritsky, the monk. "They're probably imported -- they're no good. But the military promises to give me a pair of boots that will probably last a long time."