Dubbed the Effataa Awakening, testimonies of worshipers speaking in tongues and scores of miraculous healings drew thousands of visitors from across the Soviet Union from 1976-1980 – and all practically next door to the Estonian SSR's notorious KGB headquarters on Pagari tänav.

"That the largest religious revival in the entire history of the Soviet Union was happening right here is remarkable in itself," said chaplain and researcher Allan Kroll.

While the USSR did not ban religion outright, it was heavily suppressed, especially in the Soviet regime's early decades.

The state purged many religious leaders and believers, promoted atheism, and even abolished Christian traditions, including Christmas — sometimes artificially replacing them with alternatives like the secular New Year.

"Those crowds who came, turning a new page in their lives at a time when people were constantly being pressured and persecuted, that was something truly extraordinary," Kroll added.

Researcher and former Effataa Choir member Riho Saard said the events at the time resembled mass psychosis, even judging by multiple eyewitness accounts.

"Outsiders often wrote it off as charlatanry or some kind of fraud," he said. "But the people involved, of course, didn't see it that way. Their sincere hope was that what's written in the New Testament, especially in the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospels, would truly come to pass."

Deep in Soviet times

Although St. Olaf's Church (Oleviste kirik) itself dates back to the 13th century, the current congregation was established on Soviet initiative in 1950, merging eight independent Tallinn congregations, including Evangelical Christians, Baptists and Pentecostals.

In the mid-1970s, St. Olaf's congregation member Rein Uuemõis worked as an engineer for Soviet Estonia's People's Commissariat of Local Industry.

"At work, he was always addressed as 'comrade,' and he had to call everyone else that too," said pastor Ülo Niinemägi. "But he ended up becoming what you might call a Soviet Union apostle."

What unfolded in Tallinn at the time, he said, was unprecedented.

It was at Uuemõis' home where the Effataa Awakening began with simple prayer meetings, which quickly expanded to youth nights in the church crypt and St. Mary's Chapel, complete with a popular gospel choir.

Organizer Tarmo Vardja named the growing movement Effataa — the Estonian form of "Ephphatha," meaning "Be opened," which Jesus said in Mark 7:34 when healing a deaf man.

"Maybe it sounds a bit too childish, but we wanted for the Estonian people to be saved," recalled Uuemõis, now 94. "And the most incredible part is that God actually favored this!"

Miracles and manifestations

Deep into the Soviet occupation of Estonia, Effataa meetings mixed religious and scientific presentations with Christian music, drawing figures like Niinemägi, a former hippie, and troubled teen Jaanus Meriküll, who remembers having an extraordinary experience at his first meeting.

"Something just comes over you, something touches you, and suddenly it's like someone threw a bucket of water on you in a sauna — WHOOSH!" Meriküll described.

"And I've got tears running down my face, and I'm shouting all kinds of things," he continued. "And then — fine, I'll tell you everything — then suddenly I started speaking a language I didn't even understand."

Saard joined soon after. As the gatherings grew larger and more intense, more and more participants started reporting people collapsing, speaking in unknown languages and cases of miraculous healings.

In a rare cassette recording, one young woman described in 1976 how a tumor that had defied doctors disappeared after she turned to Jesus.

"He healed me," the woman said. "And when I went back to the doctor, they examined me again and found nothing at all."

Niinemägi recalled a personal experience with members of the movement praying for him.

"There had been one or two people ahead of me; I was either the second or third," he said. "And when [one of them] reached out a hand to me, I felt like I flew into the air like a down feather and landed on a 30-centimeter-deep pile of feathers."

The pastor emphasized how powerful the moment had felt. "Nothing like it had ever happened in the Soviet Union before — people just falling down under the power of God," he said.

Word continued to spread

Archival documents show that these manifestations caused tension even within the congregation. Even so, despite primitive means of communication and heavily censored press, word of these Effataa nights continued to spread.

"Around 1978, people started coming from all over the Soviet Union, from the Black Sea all the way to Kamchatka, to take part in the Russian-language services here at St. Olaf's," said Kroll.

"St. Olaf's became, you might say, a holy pilgrimage site for countless people across the Soviet Union at the time," Niinemägi recounted. "They came from beyond the Urals, from Syktyvkar, from Armenia, Georgia, Ossetia, Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania."

Meriküll said the surge of people that descended on the Tallinn church was overwhelming.

"There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them," he recalled. "That's when you really saw the suffering across the entire [Soviet] Union: the sick, the afflicted..."

Lines for intercessory prayers grew to stretch around the church as people came in droves to be prayed for in St. Mary's Chapel.

Both Niinemägi and Uuemõis shared the same account of a deaf and non-speaking 16-year-old boy who, after being prayed for, reached the door of the chapel and told his father in Russian, "Father, let's go home. I can hear."

Niinemägi added that after that incident, the entire rest of their family's village then showed up in Tallinn.

Records and recollections

No precise records were kept of visitors or miracles, and few photos survive. But one photo from 1978 reportedly shows a pile of wooden crutches and canes left behind by those healed at St. Olaf's.

Niinemägi said even the fire department eventually came and fined them, citing the fire hazard and ordering them to remove the wooden canes.

The only known video footage of an Effataa meeting dates back to the same year, when the American-Canadian gospel band Living Sound performed at St. Olaf's Church that June.

The most detailed written accounts were recorded by congregation member Edgar Kuusk, who documented the more significant events from February 1978 through March 1979.

His daughter, Külvi Kuusk, said her father recorded instances of all kinds of internal illnesses, people with problems with their legs, including wheelchair users, as well as those with vision issues, all of whom were healed at the Tallinn church.

"One time, there was a grown man who was wild and yelling here in the church," she said. "They prayed for him, and then he calmed down; he changed. At first, his mother didn't believe it was possible, until he told her, 'Mom, everything is alright now.'"

Skeptics and believers

Researcher Riho Saard, whose recent book on gospel music in Estonia dedicated an entire chapter to the Effataa Awakening, said miracles are very hard to verify empirically, adding that with internal illnesses, it's extremely difficult to say for sure that someone was truly healed.

The phenomenon he witnessed firsthand was unique, though he said it fits more within alternative medicine and folklore than mainstream science.

"As far as I know, no medical board officially confirmed or documented anyone's healing, and I don't know if such evidence ever existed," Saard said.

Chaplain and fellow researcher Allan Kroll, however, wouldn't have expected any such official records.

"Come on, it was the Soviet era," he said. "I'd love to see the doctor willing to sign off on something saying, '[The patient] went to St. Olaf's Church, prayed and I can attest they were healed.'"

Saard pointed out that conventional medicine does actually recognize that healings like these — especially psychosomatic ones — can happen naturally.

"Nobody denies that," he said. "And the fact that someone has a positive attitude, or faith that they can get better, is already half the battle, as they say. Of course, in many cases, people were also receiving medical treatment at the same time."

While many remain skeptical, several others either involved at the time or who have later researched the Effataa movement in Tallinn are still convinced that people really were healed at those meetings — and that this wasn't simply a case of mass hysteria.

Even without scientific proof, both KGB and Ministry of Internal Affairs records surviving in Estonia indirectly confirm the extraordinary events of the era.

Church bugged by KGB

By 1978, Soviet Estonian authorities issued instructions for the tightly controlled media, including ETV and children's radio programming, to publish content "that would foster ironic attitudes toward charlatanism and religious fanaticism in children."

A series of articles soon also appeared on "miracle healing," "hypnotism" and "St. Olaf's emissaries" traveling to other Soviet republics. Both Kroll and Saard say the KGB feared the movement could become anti-authoritarian and spread beyond Estonia, so it was kept under close watch.

"Starting with the physical space," Kroll said. "They installed 40 bugs right in this very room where we're sitting."

He said the information slipped that a church official had let them into the building and that the bugging devices were installed there with the official's knowledge.

Even congregation member Edgar Kuusk's daughter, Külvi Kuusk, knew about the surveillance at the time.

"I knew very well that I couldn't speak loudly about everything at the church, because there were 'ears' everywhere," she recalled. "And of course, those directly involved faced serious consequences."

Chaplain and researcher Allan Kroll said Soviet authorities at the time often didn't have to resort to more than simple pressure tactics to ruin young people's lives.

Students who wanted to finish school or go to university were threatened with a character reference so bad it would guarantee they'd never amount to anything. Older folks were pressured in various other ways.

"There's even a saying from the time that all the [movement] leaders always kept wool socks packed in their suitcase," Kroll said, a dark reference to the very real possibility of being deported to Siberia like tens of thousands of Estonians before them.

Pastor Ülo Niinemägi said things got especially difficult in the run-up to the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics, whose official sailing events were held in Tallinn.

He said the Soviet authorities "wanted to 'cleanse' the city of undesirable elements," including their church.

"Moscow had been demanding for three years already, 'When will you stop these healings?'" he recalled. "Then they realized that, legally, every congregation could conduct services in the language in which it was registered."

A regretful decision

Whether prompted by the end of the internationally watched Olympic Regatta in Tallinn or the death of an epilepsy patient who had come to St. Olaf's Church seeking help, by the fall of 1980, the KGB had effectively presented the congregation with an ultimatum: stop its Russian-language services or the church would be shut down.

That November, the church council, which included pastor Rein Uuemõis at the time, decided to comply and bring that chapter in the congregation to a close.

While this didn't immediately end the Effataa Awakening, whose activity continued sporadically elsewhere, Kroll said the major wave of miracles and healings had passed.

"That was the hardest decision ever made at St. Olaf's," Niinemägi said. "We've asked for forgiveness, Rein has publicly asked for forgiveness, countless times. I'd say we probably should have just faced the harsher consequences rather than give in. But it was done."

Ninety-four-year-old Rein Uuemõis now spends his days in a care home, in frail health. Even 50 years later, despite remembering how exhausted Effataa leaders were, he still tearfully regrets that fateful decision and how the movement ended.

"But I experience God's love every day, through the members of my congregation," he added.

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