Religion: Billy in Moscow

“This is the first time in years that I have gone to a country just as a tourist,” said the tall, blond American. The tourist: Billy Graham. The country: Russia.

The usual crowds of admirers and autograph hunters were missing when Billy landed at Moscow’s airport. In his party: boyhood pal and associate Grady Wilson, his male secretary and two U.S. businessmen—Printing Tycoon William Jones of Los Angeles, who had persuaded Graham to take the trip, and Charlotte (N.C.) Department Store Owner Henderson Belk, who was taking Bible instruction from Billy en route. Sightseeing with American reporters and an Intourist guide, Billy did a double take at the large gold crosses atop the Kremlin churches. “There is a symbol I never expected to see here,” he said. “I hope it has meaning for the future.” Russian tourists, gaping at paintings of Jesus Christ in the Kremlin’s Cathedral of the Assumption, equally astonished him. “A tender, moving thing . . . Never, never did I expect to find this in the Kremlin.”

He never expected to find a bevy of French models in Dior dresses in the Kremlin either, but there they were (for a big Dior fashion show), and Billy hesitantly consented to pose for photos with two of them. Said he: “I wish my wife were here.”

He was the honored guest at a Baptist Sunday service held in a large wooden hall crammed with more than 2,500 worshipers, most of them women. But he did not preach. He had the wrong kind of visa. Russian Baptist leaders explained politely: “It is not customary here to have tourists preach.” Perhaps this would be possible on his next visit, they added, and Billy asked to be shown the mammoth Lenin Stadium, which seats 100,000. (“I knelt and asked God,” he said later, “that some day it will be filled with people listening to the Gospel.”)

In Paris last week, after five days of Intourist tourism, Baptist Graham told reporters he had not been surprised when Russian religious leaders told him that atheism was declining and religion rising in the U.S.S.R. “I could read on the faces of the people a great spiritual hunger, and the sort of insecurity that only God can solve,” he said. “We don’t like Communism, but we love the Russian people.”

Tourist Graham also had a good word to say for “the high standard of Russian morality” and the “moral purity” of the Russians as compared to the broad-daylight sex life he had observed in London parks (TIME, June 22). Said Billy: “I did not see one person walking down the street with an arm around another. We went to a park where thousands of young people were gathered. They held hands, but they were very disciplined.”