Canon Michael Bordeaux writes:

FR GLEB YAKUNIN, who died on 25 December, aged 80, was an inspiring figure for thousands in the West for a quarter of a century. From him they learned of the relentless persecution of the Church and his ceaseless bravery in opposing it.

In 1976, he instigated one of the most scandalous episodes in the history of the World Council of Churches. In the early 1970s, the Soviet authorities were systematically imprisoning dissidents, including religious leaders. The previous year, the Soviet government had co-signed the Helsinki Accords, which gave the countries of Europe and North America the right to monitor each other's human-rights performance. Yakunin, a veteran campaigner then in his forties, responded by establishing a Christian Committee for the Defence of Believers' Rights. Many Christians and the Jewish community collaborated with him, sending information, which he systematically collected.

He sent an appeal to the Fifth General Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Nairobi, begging the worldwide ecumenical fellowship to act on behalf of the persecuted Church. The African editors of the assembly's daily newspaper, perhaps unaware of the censorship that the Russian delegates exercised over the assembly's agenda, caused a furore by printing the text of Yakunin's appeal. A rushed resolution expressed solidarity with the persecuted, but, reacting in horror, the organisers forced the assembly to rescind it, promising to instigate a full inquiry into the facts that Yakunin had presented; but, of course, later communist pressure prevented this from happening.

Wrongly believing that he now had world Christian opinion behind him, Yakunin increased his efforts. His energy was prodigious. He collected more than 400 samizdat appeals, totalling some 3000 pages, from the whole religious spectrum, most of which he sent abroad, to be systematically collected and many published by Keston College, the organisation in Kent that was informing the world about Soviet anti-religious policies.

The KGB arrested Yakunin on 1 November 1979. At his trial, the sentence was ten years, five to be served in a camp, the rest in exile. Eight years into this, when Mikhail Gorbachev was at the height of his perestroika policy, he was released.

Gleb Yakunin was initially disadvantaged, since his father came from an aristocratic background and died of starvation during the Second World War, when the boy was ten. Gleb inherited something of his father's musical talent, and learned the clarinet and the saxophone. His mother inculcated the Christian faith in him, but he abandoned it when he was 15, only to rediscover it while a biology student in Irkutsk, Siberia, under the influence of Alexander Men, who was to become the leading theologian of the Russian Orthodox Church until his murder in 1990.

Fr Yakunin's life followed a different course. Whereas Fr Men graduated from the Leningrad Theological Seminary, and developed a low-profile teaching ministry, concentrating on a small inner circle of disciples (until becoming a national figure during the Gorbachev reforms), Yakunin was always more confrontational.

He attended the Moscow Theological Seminary, but did not stay the course. He had borrowed a book by the philosopher Berdyaev from the library when the KGB came to extirpate such works from the shelves; Yakunin refused to give it up, saying that he had lost it, after which he was expelled. He went on to study privately, secured his ordination, and served in a church near Moscow.

Here, at the height of Nikita Khrushchev's new anti-religious campaign, he began to collect information from around the regions, documents handed to him by visitors who came to Moscow, often seeking defence against the local officials who were closing down their churches.

In 1965, with a colleague, Fr Nikolai Eshliman, Yakunin weaved this information systematically into two lengthy and detailed open letters, one to the Soviet government, the other calling on Patriarch Alexi I, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, to be more active in protecting it. They furnished hundreds of examples, and wrote: "The mass closure of churches, a campaign instigated from above, has created an atmosphere of anti-religious fanaticism which has led to the barbaric destruction of a large number of superb and unique works of art." To this day, these documents remain an unsurpassed record of a shameful period in Russian history, not least because senior clerics sought to conceal the persecution.

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Smuggled out, this information resounded around the world, and undoubtedly persuaded Khrushchev's successors to discontinue the church closures. Yakunin, however, became an isolated figure. The punishment meted out to him came not from the KGB, but from Patriarch Alexi (doubtless at the state's instigation), who barred him from exercising his priesthood.

This gave Yakunin all the more time to develop his human-rights work; so the punishment aided and abetted the "crime". He remained free, however, until his arrest in 1979. From prison, he smuggled out letters, particularly asserting his legal right to keep his Bible, which had been confiscated. Ultimately Gorbachev sought to correct the mistakes of the past by releasing imprisoned dissidents, including Yakunin, in 1987.

The year 1988 was remarkable, with the nationwide celebrations marking the millennium of the conversion of ancient Rus' in 988. During these June weeks, Yakunin and his wife, Iraida, whom he had married in 1961, held open house for religious dissidents, inviting foreign Christian leaders in Moscow for the events to visit his flat and learn the real truth about the persecution of the past 60 years, not the sanitised version as presented by the Moscow Patriarchate. Meeting him face to face for the first time, after having written about him for more than 20 years, was a humbling experience for me.

Yakunin at this point might have expected a triumphal reinstatement into the ranks of the Russian Church, or an award of the Nobel Peace Prize, but neither was forthcoming. Ill-advisedly, the Church failed to find a ministry for him. Had it done so, this would have absorbed some of his considerable energies. By contrast, he began to follow a more overtly political line, and was elected to the Duma, the parliament, representing the Democratic Russia party.

Yakunin headed a short-lived commission investigating KGB infiltration into the life of the Church. This gave him a brief, restricted access to the state archives. Here, he found in the records of the Council for Religious Affairs, the body that controlled the life of the Church, incontrovertible evidence that exposed the collaboration of church leaders with the KGB, including that of the new Patriarch, Alexi II. He was not permitted to take photocopies, but made handwritten notes, which he subsequently copied and passed to Jane Ellis, a researcher at Keston College, who published them in its journal, Religion in Communist Lands.

This was a bridge too far for the Moscow Patriarchate, which wrought vengeance on Yakunin by un-frocking him, on the grounds that clergy were not permitted to stand for election to political office. There was supreme hypocrisy in this, as the previous Patriarch, Pimen, had been a member of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and his successor would be a deputy also.

As the Moscow Patriarchate regained its leading position in Russian society, Yakunin's influence declined, but he continued to subject the leading hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church to his scrutiny. Late in life, he became the severest critic of the new "symphony" of Church and State as established between President Putin and the current Patriarch, Kirill. He supported the feminist group Pussy Riot, when they demonstrated against this symbiosis and received a prison sentence. He became a priest in the independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church, later transferring to the uncanonical Apostolic Orthodox Church.

Mental toughness predominated in his personal relationships, but he relaxed with friends and, when able to travel in 1989, enjoyed playing truant from a conference in Manila to go white-water rafting. Here was a man freed from constraint, who was excellent company, and revelling in his freedom.

He is survived by Iraida and their three children, Maria, Alexander, and Anna. He died on (Gregorian) Christmas Day and was buried two days later.

Canon Michael Bourdeaux is the President of Keston Institute, Oxford.