Talk:Sergei Kourdakov

You have been had

Why on earth this guy is classified as an KGB agent in the English Wikipedia?

He was a civilian sailor. He studied in a merchant marine college. He was not even in the military, much less in the KGB. The whole "anti-chtistian squad" ordeal he (he!) describes is a banal neighborhood watch system ("druzhina") that existed everywhere in the Soviet Union. Citizens were organized in para-police squads that patrolled the streets and indeed picked up drunks and broke fights in the clubs (as he himself and this article mentions multiple times). Yes, druzhinas were vectored at underground church services - when they could find one, - but this has very little to do with the KGB and in any case does not make a druzhina member a KGB agent.

Once again: what makes you classify this person as a KGB agent? It's a merchant sailor, a radioman, nothing more. Not an officer even - too young to get an officer rank, this was just a college that produced rank and file sailors. I don't question his druzhina involvement and the whole underground Christiany stuff, but I assure you that he had zero ties with the KGB (it did not work this way in the Soviet Union).

Fix the link to the Russian article on him: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Курдаков,_Сергей (You did not even get his name right in Russian, both in the link and in the article).

Translate that article using Google Translate and get more reliable info on him from there.

Learn about druzhina: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_People's_Druzhina (and compare it to the crap you have here).

You have been had by people with political agenda.

• Neutral wikipedia reader here - totally agree with this assessment... everything about this article smells fishy. He's repeatedly referred to as a "High rank KGB agent" - at the age of 20? o rly? what a joke. I'm not sure this article even has a place in wikipedia, he has no claim to notability as far as I can tell. 31.54.34.186 (talk) 16:09, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Forgive Me Sergei

From looking over the previously used source, as well as the one other source I discovered online, I have come to the conclusion that there is absolutely no reliable source for the alleged documentary Forgive Me Sergei. Following the guidelines outlined by WP:RS and other Wikipedia policies, I do not believe the website http://www.forgivemesergei.com/, which is the website of the very obscure documentary about Sergei Kourdakov and the source that was previously used on this article, to be a reliable source for any Wikipedia. To start off, WP:RS states that "self-published material may, in some circumstances, be acceptable when produced by an established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications." As far as I can tell, the website is the main source of information in regard to this film and the first to publish information about it. WP:RS also states that a source can be used only if, among other reasons, "there is no reasonable doubt as to its authenticity." One large reason that leads me to doubt its authenticity is its apparent identity crisis. The title of the website (what you read on the top of a browser) is "Forgive Me, Sergei", while the banner of the website uses "Forgive Me Sergei", without the comma. And on the bottom of each page, a crucial spelling mistake exists to the title: "Forgive Me Sergi". The fact that this error has existed since the website's creation in 2006 (see 2006 archived edition) and has lasted for more than three years does little to turn this website into a 'reliable source'.

The single other reference that I have found in pertaining to this film is this advertisement found on a shady news source known as The Online News Station. The reliability of this source is thrown into serious doubt when a logical check is performed: The article starts off with two still images from the film, the first of which is claimed to be Irene Dobrovlenskaya (known in Kourdakov's autobiography as Big Irene) with an unknown individual. The caption for the image states that Irene, then 80 years old (assumingly at the time this article was published in 2006), was the founder of the Bareshevo orphanage, which celebrated it's 70th anniversary in 2001. Assuming that is true, Irene would have to be five years old to have founded the orphanage in time. Even if we were to assume that Irene was 80 in 2001 and not in 2006, Irene would have to be ten years old to found the orphanage in time. Therefore, something must be terribly incorrect in the article, and the source cannot be used as a reliable source either. Eugeniu B +1 07:29, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

I think that the movie is still worth of mentioning, as it is pretty important to the topic of this wiki page. BTW: you can find numerous other sources about the movie in programs of film festivals, e.g.:

[1] [2] [3] etc...

Most of the information in the wiki page has "Persecutor" book as its source and if findings in the movie are true, it is a pretty bad source.

To: Sorafune(Eugeniu) If you challenge this, please explain what you challenge. Do you have any doubts about movie's existence, its relevance to the topic, or that information I have added about the movie is not true?

And please understand that wikipedia is about verifiability, not truth [4], so we should not discuss here which one of the two sources (book/movie) is true, just inform people about existence of both views. And if you have some reliable source that challenges content of the movie, feel free to add it.Marsiancba (talk) 22:02, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

That's the thing. All of the sources you mentioned do only one thing: they prove the existence of the film. Other than that, they say things like Walker "battles the inconsistencies of her most beloved Christian martyr." Where does that fit in this article? There's nothing specific. What part of the book was "largely a fake"? What inconsistencies did she "reveal"? Also, most of the parts sourced by the book are quotes. Sorafune +1 00:38, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Ok, so you do not doubt existence nor relevance of the movie. If you challenge the content of the section, go on and rewrite it. But still I think that the web page of the movie can be used as a source for this section - it might not be a good source on Kourdakov's life, but the section is about the (may be only one) movie about him and for that purpose I think it is a good source. And also I think that this section should be moved to The Persecutor article. Here should be only a small note that "Some people question content of the book" (with link to the section in The Persecutor).Marsiancba (talk) 07:48, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Ok, I added a general criticism section on The Persecutor and included a sentence on the intro to this article that the book has been the source of various criticism. How does that look? Sorafune +1 23:10, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Thank you, I think it is ok. I only added info about second author of the documentary, but otherwise it looks good.Marsiancba (talk) 19:42, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

The documentary is on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkEqC0jHdJ8 . This still opens a lot of questions, though the interview with Underground Evangelism at the end of the book makes them look especially shady. I have a lot of doubts about Koudakov's story after watching it. 87.139.107.213 (talk) 09:20, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Reference citations

It's generally a good idea to have at least two reference citations per paragraph, particularly for paragraphs in the body of the text. 165.134.155.135 (talk) 20:10, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Natasha Zhdanova's fate

I wonder why nobody has ever heard about Natasha, especially from Perestroyka on. Allegedly, she went back to the Ukraine; and then? Has she died; did she abominate any media racket, or what? She would be the crown witness for the reliability of the whole story. Hellsepp --Hellsepp (talk) 18:16, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

To be honest, I'd like to know what happened to her as well. I think there's a possibility that she just doesn't know what happened to Kourdakov. I mean for starters, she may not remember any of the attackers' names. And Kourdakov's story only gained attention in the US and Canada, they slowly spread across the Atlantic, but probably hardly penetrating the Soviet Union. It would be an extremely rare coincidence for her to find The Persecutor in Ukrain or elsewhere in the SU. She may be dead, but it's possibly that she's alive somewhere but no one's taken the time to track her down; after all, the last we as the readers of his book know of her is one small clue from over forty years ago. But there's just one thing I disagree with you. I don't think she would necessarily be the crown witness for this entire story. Although she did have a very large impact on Kourdakov's psychological course, she was after all, one of the hundreds of people Sergei personally attacked. Sorafune +1 23:44, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

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NPOV

The article is based mostly on the controversial autobiography, not on independent sources, therefore I added the templates POV and Partisan sources. We should clearly separate the real life of SK and the events from his novel-autobiography, which are not supported by any outside evidence (or are even contrary to the evidence).Ioannes Pragensis (talk) 08:38, 6 December 2020 (UTC)