Father Dmitri Dudko

On June 20 1980, the Russian Orthodox priest Father Dmitri Dudko, who had been imprisoned that January as one of Russia's bravest dissidents, appeared on Soviet television and renounced his activities in a 20-minute interview, which was subsequently reported verbatim in nearly every Soviet newspaper.

The KGB had clearly prepared the event as a decisive measure, not only against the "anti-Soviet" activities of Moscow proto-democrats, but also against any residual independence within the Russian Orthodox Church. One analyst detected 20 phrases in the confession likely to have been distributed by the KGB.

Dudko, who has died aged 82, once had an immense influence on the thousands of would-be neophytes who flocked to his sermons. These events had latterly taken on the form of conversations, in which Dudko answered questions from his crowded Moscow congregation, first in writing, and later in direct dialogue. Reconstructed from notes, circulated in samizdat, these sermons appeared in French in 1975, in English (as Our Hope) two years later, and in eight other languages.

No Russian priest of modern times, except Father Alexander Men, who was murdered in 1990, had more influence than Dudko. His converts included the young Alexander Ogorodnikov, who founded the Christian Seminar, a discussion group which, in part, modelled its activities on Dudko's dialogues. The leaders of the group were themselves all in prison by the time of his arrest.

Dudko was born into a peasant family in the village of Zarbuda, in the Bryansk region. He embraced Christianity after finding a copy of the Bible when all the churches in his region were closed. He lived under Nazi occupation from 1941 to 1943, when a few churches reopened. After liberation, he served in the Soviet army. He was arrested in 1948 for writing a poem criticising the destruction of Russia's holy places, and served eight-and-a-half years before being released under the post-Stalin amnesty. The KGB kept a careful watch on him from this time on.

As an ex-political prisoner, Dudko was accepted only with difficulty as a theological student at the Zagorsk seminary. Later, in 1973, the weak Patriarch Pimen, bowing to the KGB, ordered him to stop his unconventional sermons, after which the priest continued to conduct sessions in the privacy of his home.

In 1975, while visiting his mother, he suffered two broken legs when a lorry crashed into his car, an accident almost certainly the work of the KGB. But he recovered, and resumed his work as an assistant priest at Grebnevo, 20 miles from Moscow. Then, in 1977, a press campaign began against him.

Dudko once said that no week of his life had passed without some interference from the Soviet authorities, and it seems likely that this pressure was already grinding him down before his arrest.

After his recantation, and with the advent of Gorbachev's perestroika, he wrote voluminously, not least as the "spiritual adviser" to the hardline nationalist newspaper Zavtra (Tomorrow). In tune with its editorial policy, he offered support for a return to authoritarianism, arguing that a Stalin- (or Putin-) type discipline was the only way to save Russia from the effects of the oligarchs.

In all this, however, even after the resumption of his parish ministry, Dudko had become an irrelevance, even to those whose lives he had transformed by bringing them to the faith. No one reading the words he subsequently vouchsafed to Xan Smiley, then a British correspondent in Moscow, could feel anything other than deepest sympathy with the man whom the KGB broke in 1980: "I thought if I didn't agree, I wouldn't live ... Compared to the hell that I then brought into my soul, anything - even torture or execution - would have been easier to bear."

Dudko wrote in Choice, a religious quarterly: "I consider my [confession] to have been treacherous, if not before God and the church, then towards those friends with whom I was walking along the same path and doing the same work."

Dudko was married, with a daughter and a son, himself a priest presently working in the foreign relations department of the Moscow Patriarchate.

· Dmitri Sergeyevich Dudko, priest, born February 24 1922; died June 28 2004

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