The New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia

The New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia constitute one of the largest groups of saints in Christian history – hundreds of thousands of bishops, priests, deacons, monastics, and laity who suffered imprisonment, torture, and death for the Orthodox faith under the atheist Soviet regime from 1917 to 1991. Their witness is central to ROCOR’s spiritual identity and to the life of the Russian Orthodox Church as a whole.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (glorified by both ROCOR and the Moscow Patriarchate, though at different times)

Overview of the Persecution (1917-1991)

Scale and Duration

The persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church by the Soviet regime was the most extensive and prolonged persecution of Christians in history:

  • Duration: From the Bolshevik seizure of power in October/November 1917 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 – over seven decades.
  • Intensity: The persecution varied in intensity across different periods but was never entirely absent. The most intense phases were:
    • 1918-1922: The initial revolutionary terror
    • 1929-1936: The “Godless Five-Year Plan” under Stalin
    • 1937-1938: The Great Terror (the most devastating period)
    • 1959-1964: Khrushchev’s anti-religious campaign
  • Scale: Estimates of the total number of clergy and laity killed vary widely, and only named ranges should be cited:
    • The Russian presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, chaired by Alexander Yakovlev, reported in November 1995 that some 200,000 clergy, monks, and nuns were killed over the Soviet period; Patriarch Alexei II estimated about 80,000 Orthodox clergy and monastics dead by the late 1930s; N. E. Emelyanov’s research puts executions of priests at over 15,000 in 1918–1919 and about 5,000 in 1930–1931 alone.
    • The number of laity killed for their faith is impossible to fix precisely; the historian M. V. Shkarovskii concludes it ran “at least into the hundreds of thousands” in the interwar decades.
    • Of the 54,147 churches and 25,593 chapels recorded in the official Synod statistics for 1914, estimates of the churches still functioning in the entire Soviet Union by August 1939 range from roughly 100 to 300.

Methods of Persecution

The Soviet authorities employed a range of methods:

  • Execution: Summary executions, mass shootings (particularly during the Great Terror), and individual killings.
  • Imprisonment and labor camps (Gulag): Clergy and faithful were sentenced to years or decades of hard labor in the vast camp system.
  • Exile: Internal exile to remote regions (Siberia, Kazakhstan, Central Asia).
  • Confiscation of church property: Churches, monasteries, theological schools, and charitable institutions were seized.
  • Anti-religious propaganda: A massive state-sponsored propaganda campaign attacked religion through publications, lectures, films, and school curricula. Organizations like the League of Militant Atheists (Soyuz Voinstvuyushchikh Bezbozhnikov) were created to coordinate this effort.
  • Administrative harassment: Clergy were subjected to punitive taxation, denied civil rights, and their children were excluded from higher education.
  • The Renovationist schism: The Soviet authorities actively promoted the “Living Church” (Zhivaya Tserkov’) or Renovationist movement, a schismatic body that accepted Soviet authority and adopted modernizing liturgical reforms, as a weapon against the canonical Church. The state security organs (GPU/OGPU) directly sponsored and manipulated the schism, a relationship documented from Soviet archives (Roslof, Red Priests, 2002).

Key Figures Among the New Martyrs

Patriarch Tikhon (1865-1925)

Patriarch Tikhon (born Vasily Ivanovich Belavin) was elected Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia at the All-Russian Church Council of 1917-1918, restoring the Patriarchate after over two centuries of its suppression by Peter the Great. He led the Church during the initial years of Bolshevik persecution:

  • In his pastoral epistle of January 19 / February 1, 1918, he anathematized those perpetrating “bloody reprisals” and persecution of the Church — aimed at the Bolsheviks, though they were not named as such. The anathema was never formally rescinded; under arrest in June 1923, Tikhon did sign a statement declaring that he was “henceforth no enemy of the Soviet power,” a concession extracted under intense pressure.
  • He was arrested, placed under house arrest, and subjected to intense pressure to collaborate with the regime.
  • He died on April 7, 1925 (March 25 Old Style, the feast of the Annunciation). [Disputed: the official record gives heart failure as the cause of death; rumors of poisoning circulated immediately and are supported by testimony attributed to Bishop Maxim (Zhizhilenko), but the question was never investigated and no documentary proof of poisoning has been produced — see Archpriest Vladimir Vorobiev’s discussion at Pravoslavie.ru]

Patriarch Tikhon was glorified by the Moscow Patriarchate at the Bishops’ Council of October 9, 1989, held in connection with the 400th anniversary of the establishment of the Moscow Patriarchate (not at the 1988 millennium celebrations, when nine other saints were glorified). ROCOR had already included him by name in its glorification of the New Martyrs and Confessors on October 19 / November 1, 1981. He is commemorated as a Confessor (one who suffered for the faith without being killed for it), though some consider his death to have been indirectly caused by the persecution.

Metropolitan Vladimir (Bogoyavlensky) of Kiev (1848-1918)

Metropolitan Vladimir is widely regarded as the first hierarch-martyr of the Soviet persecution. On January 25 / February 7, 1918, he was seized by armed men at the Kiev Caves Lavra (Pechersk Lavra) and shot outside the monastery walls. According to the eyewitness accounts gathered after his death and preserved in the standard lives, he prayed, asked forgiveness of his sins, and blessed his executioners with the words, “May God forgive you” (OCA, “Saint Vladimir, Metropolitan of Kiev and Gallich”; the wording rests on these early testimonies rather than on any official record).

His martyrdom is commemorated as the beginning of the era of the New Martyrs, and the Synaxis of the New Martyrs is celebrated on the Sunday closest to this date. He was glorified by ROCOR in 1981 and by the Moscow Patriarchate at the Bishops’ Council of March 31 – April 4, 1992.

Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna (1864-1918)

Grand Duchess Elizabeth (born Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine), elder sister of Tsarina Alexandra and widow of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich (assassinated in 1905), withdrew from court life after her husband’s murder and founded the Convent of Sts. Martha and Mary (Marfo-Mariinskaya Obitel’) in Moscow in 1909, devoting herself to nursing and the care of the poor. On July 5/18, 1918 — the day after the Yekaterinburg executions — she was thrown alive down a mine shaft near Alapaevsk in the Urals, together with her fellow nun Barbara (Yakovleva), five princes of the Romanov house, and Fyodor Remez, secretary to Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich. Her relics and St. Barbara’s were later carried out of Russia and now rest in the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Gethsemane, Jerusalem; reliquaries of the two Alapaevsk nun-martyrs were opened for veneration at ROCOR’s 1981 glorification. She and St. Barbara were glorified by ROCOR in 1981 and by the Moscow Patriarchate at the Bishops’ Council of March 31 – April 4, 1992.

Metropolitan Benjamin (Kazansky) of Petrograd (1873-1922)

Metropolitan Benjamin was a beloved hierarch known for his closeness to the working people of Petrograd. He opposed the Bolshevik confiscation of church valuables (ostensibly for famine relief, though much of the confiscated material was diverted). He was arrested, subjected to a show trial, and executed on the night of July 30-31 / August 12-13, 1922, on the eastern outskirts of Petrograd, together with Archimandrite Sergius (Shein), Professor Yuri Novitsky, and the lawyer Ivan Kovsharov; the four had been shaved and dressed in rags so that the clergy among them could not be recognized (OCA, “Hieromartyr Benjamin, Metropolitan of Petrograd and Gdovsk”). He is commemorated on July 31 / August 13. All four were glorified by the Moscow Patriarchate at the Bishops’ Council of March 31 – April 4, 1992.

Archbishop Hilarion (Troitsky) of Verey (1886-1929)

Archbishop Hilarion was one of the most brilliant theologians of the Russian Church, a key figure at the 1917-1918 Council. He was repeatedly arrested and imprisoned, spending years in the Solovki prison camp (on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, a former monastery converted into one of the first Soviet concentration camps). In December 1929, while being transported under guard to a three-year exile in Alma-Ata, he contracted typhus and died in a Leningrad prison hospital on December 15/28, 1929, at the age of forty-four; Metropolitan Seraphim (Chichagov) obtained the body and buried him in white hierarchical vestments at the Novodevichy cemetery in Leningrad (Metropolitan John [Snychev], “The Life of Holy Hieromartyr Hilarion (Troitsky)”; OCA, “Hieromartyr Hilarion, Archbishop of Verey”). He was glorified by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1999.

His theological works on the Church and on the unity of the Church were influential, and his suffering in the camps was a powerful witness to the faith.

The Solovki Bishops and the Solovki Message (1926)

The Solovetsky Islands prison camp held a remarkable concentration of Orthodox bishops, priests, and monks. In 1926 (the document is generally dated to June of that year), a group of imprisoned bishops issued the “Solovki Message” (the Memorandum of the Solovetsky Bishops, Pamyatnaya zapiska solovetskikh episkopov), a declaration addressed to the Soviet government:

  • The Message acknowledged the separation of Church and State but argued that the state’s hostility to religion went far beyond mere separation.
  • It called for genuine religious freedom, not merely the formal toleration that existed on paper, and denounced the falsehood of the state-sponsored Renovationist schism.
  • It was a courageous act of resistance from within the prison camp system.

The Memorandum is an unsigned, collective work of the imprisoned hierarchs; the lives of the Solovki new martyrs name Archbishop Hilarion (Troitsky) among its co-authors, though the precise drafting attribution cannot be established from the document itself (OrthoChristian, “The New Martyrs of Solovki”; Regelson, Tragediya Russkoy Tserkvi). A separate epistle of the Solovki bishops, dated September 14/27, 1927, criticized Metropolitan Sergius’s Declaration of that year — the two documents should not be confused.

The Butovo Martyrs

Butovo is a site on the outskirts of Moscow where mass executions were carried out during the Great Terror of 1937-1938. Thousands of people were shot at Butovo, including a disproportionately large number of clergy and faithful:

  • According to the NKVD execution records recovered and published after 1991, 20,761 people were shot at Butovo between August 1937 and October 1938.
  • Among them, about 940 to 1,000 were executed on church-related charges, including seven bishops, more than a dozen archimandrites, and several hundred priests, as well as deacons, monastics, and laity.
  • The site was identified and memorialized after the fall of the Soviet Union, and a church was built there.
  • More than 330 of the Butovo martyrs have been individually canonized by the Moscow Patriarchate.

(Figures from the NKVD execution lists published by the Butovo memorial center; see OrthoChristian, “Butovo Firing Range, the Memorial Site of New Martyrs”)

The Royal Martyrs

The Execution at Yekaterinburg (July 4/17, 1918)

Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne on March 2/15, 1917. He and his family were placed under arrest, first at Tsarskoe Selo, then at Tobolsk in Siberia, and finally at Yekaterinburg in the Urals. In the early hours of July 17, 1918 (New Style; July 4 Old Style), the entire family and their servants were executed by a Bolshevik firing squad led by Yakov Yurovsky in the basement of the Ipatiev House.

Those killed:

  • Tsar Nicholas II (born 1868)
  • Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna (born Princess Alix of Hesse, 1872)
  • Grand Duchess Olga (born 1895)
  • Grand Duchess Tatiana (born 1897)
  • Grand Duchess Maria (born 1899)
  • Grand Duchess Anastasia (born 1901)
  • Tsarevich Alexei (born 1904)
  • Dr. Eugene Botkin, court physician
  • Anna Demidova, maid
  • Alexei Trupp, valet
  • Ivan Kharitonov, cook

Their Glorification

ROCOR glorified the Royal Family as martyrs on October 19 / November 1, 1981, at its Council of Bishops in New York under Metropolitan Philaret (Voznesensky), as part of the general glorification of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. The ROCOR act also included the four servants killed with the family — among them the valet Aloysius (Alexei) Trupp, a Roman Catholic — as well as Anastasia Hendrikova and the Lutheran Catherine Schneider, killed separately in September 1918 (Eastern American Diocese, “The Canonization of the New Martyrs … in 1981 — How It Happened”).

The Moscow Patriarchate glorified the family at the Jubilee Bishops’ Council of August 13–16, 2000, as passion-bearers (strastoterptsy) — saints who accepted death with Christ-like meekness without having been killed specifically for confessing the faith — within the larger Act glorifying the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, “known and unknown,” which named more than a thousand saints (the synaxis had grown to over 1,700 names by 2011 through the continuing work of the Synodal Canonization Commission). The 2000 Act did not include the servants; Dr. Eugene Botkin was glorified separately by the Bishops’ Council of the Moscow Patriarchate on February 3, 2016. The two designations differ deliberately — ROCOR’s 1981 act names the family martyrs, Moscow’s 2000 act names them passion-bearers — and the difference reflects distinct judgments about the character of their deaths, though in popular veneration and church publications they are commonly called the Royal Martyrs in both jurisdictions. (See Glorification of the New Martyrs for the distinction between these categories.)

The Royal Martyrs are commemorated on July 4/17, the date of their execution.

Theological Significance

The Royal Martyrs are venerated not as political figures but as Orthodox Christians who:

  • Maintained their faith and prayerfulness under arrest and in the face of death.
  • Forgave their persecutors.
  • Offered their suffering to God.
  • Tsarevich Alexei’s hemophilia and lifelong physical suffering are seen as a participation in the cross of Christ.
  • The family’s togetherness in death witnesses to the sanctity of the Orthodox Christian family.

The Catacomb Church

After Metropolitan Sergius’s 1927 Declaration of Loyalty, a significant number of clergy and faithful refused to accept the Declaration and went underground, forming what became known as the Catacomb Church (Katakumbnaya Tserkov’):

  • Catacomb communities worshipped in homes, forests, and other secret locations.
  • They were subject to the most severe persecution, as they were regarded by the authorities as both religious dissidents and political subversives.
  • The full history of the Catacomb Church is difficult to reconstruct, as secrecy was essential to survival. Post-Soviet archival scholarship — above all A. L. Beglov’s monograph V poiskakh “bezgreshnykh katakomb”: Tserkovnoe podpolye v SSSR (Moscow, 2008), the first systematic study of the church underground — has shown the underground to have been more diverse, and often more closely connected to the legal Church, than the idealized émigré picture of “sinless catacombs” assumed.
  • Many Catacomb Church figures have been glorified as confessors.
  • ROCOR maintained spiritual solidarity with the Catacomb Church throughout the Soviet period.

(Andreyev, Ivan. Russia’s Catacomb Saints. St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1982)

The Scale of the Persecution

Estimates of the total number of martyrs vary, but the scale is staggering:

  • Clergy and monastics killed: No single number can be defended; the principal named estimates are: about 80,000 clergy, monks, and nuns dead by the late 1930s (Patriarch Alexei II’s estimate); some 200,000 clergy, monks, and nuns killed over the whole Soviet period (1995 report of the presidential rehabilitation commission chaired by Alexander Yakovlev); and a frequently cited breakdown of roughly 600 bishops, 40,000 priests, and 120,000 monks and nuns (discussed, with cautions about the unreliability of all such figures, in the East-West Church Report survey of the persecution).
  • Laity killed: The number of laity killed specifically for their faith (as opposed to other categories of political repression) is impossible to determine precisely; Shkarovskii concludes it must have run at least into the hundreds of thousands in the interwar decades alone.
  • Churches destroyed: Of the 54,147 churches and 25,593 chapels recorded in 1914, estimates of those still functioning by August 1939 range from roughly 100 to 300. Thousands of church buildings were physically destroyed (dynamited, burned) or converted to secular use (warehouses, clubs, swimming pools, museums of atheism).
  • Monasteries: All monasteries in the Soviet Union were closed. The official statistics for 1914 record 1,025 monasteries and convents with some 95,000 monastics and novices; by 1929 not one remained open within the USSR.

Theological Significance

The Blood of Martyrs as the Seed of the Church

The New Martyrs are understood through the lens of the Church’s earliest experience of persecution. Tertullian’s dictum – “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church” (Tertullian, Apologeticum, ch. 50) – is applied to the Russian experience. The revival of the Russian Church after 1991 is seen by many as the spiritual fruit of the martyrs’ sacrifice.

Continuity with Early Christian Persecution

The parallels between the Soviet persecution and the Roman persecution of the early Church are striking:

  • Both regimes were founded on ideologies hostile to Christianity (paganism, atheist materialism).
  • Both used state power systematically to suppress the faith.
  • Both produced a vast host of martyrs whose faithfulness inspired subsequent generations.
  • Both ultimately failed to destroy the Church.

The Cloud of Witnesses

The New Martyrs are invoked as intercessors for:

  • The spiritual renewal of Russia and the Orthodox world.
  • The strengthening of faith in times of persecution and trial.
  • The preservation of the Church’s freedom from state control.

Their commemoration is a central element of ROCOR’s liturgical life and spiritual identity.

Liturgical Commemoration

  • Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia: Celebrated on the Sunday closest to January 25 / February 7 (New Style), the date of the martyrdom of Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev.
  • Individual commemorations: Many New Martyrs have individual feast days on the dates of their martyrdom.
  • The Royal Martyrs: July 4/17.

See Also

References

  • ROCOR Council of Bishops. Act of Glorification of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. New York, October 19 / November 1, 1981. (Detailed account: Eastern American Diocese of ROCOR, “The Canonization of the New Martyrs by the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia in 1981 — How It Happened,” eadiocese.org.)
  • Moscow Patriarchate. Act of the Jubilee Bishops’ Council on the Conciliar Glorification of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia of the Twentieth Century. Moscow, August 13–16, 2000.
  • Moscow Patriarchate. Act of the Bishops’ Council of March 31 – April 4, 1992 (glorification of Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev, Metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd and those with him, and Grand Duchess Elizabeth and the nun Barbara).
  • Beglov, A. L. V poiskakh “bezgreshnykh katakomb”: Tserkovnoe podpolye v SSSR [In Search of “Sinless Catacombs”: The Church Underground in the USSR]. Moscow: Izdatel’skii Sovet RPTs / Arefa, 2008.
  • Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917-1982. 2 vols. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984.
  • Regelson, Lev. Tragediya Russkoy Tserkvi, 1917-1945 [The Tragedy of the Russian Church]. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1977.
  • Andreyev, Ivan. Russia’s Catacomb Saints. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1982.
  • Roslof, Edward. Red Priests: Renovationism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905-1946. Indiana University Press, 2002.
  • Shkarovskii, M. V. Russkaya Pravoslavnaya Tserkov’ pri Staline i Khrushcheve (Gosudarstvenno-tserkovnye otnosheniya v SSSR v 1939-1964 godakh) [The Russian Orthodox Church under Stalin and Khrushchev]. Moscow: Krutitskoe Patriarshee Podvor’e / Obshchestvo lyubitelei tserkovnoi istorii, 1999. (No English translation; cited here from the Russian original.)
  • Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression (Alexander Yakovlev, chairman). Report of November 1995 on the killing of some 200,000 clergy, monks, and nuns; as reported in the Baltimore Sun, November 28, 1995.
  • “Persecution of Christians in Tsarist Russia and the Soviet and Post-Soviet Union.” East-West Church Report (eastwestreport.org) — survey of casualty estimates, including N. E. Emelyanov’s figures.
  • Orthodox Church in America, Lives of the Saints (oca.org): “Saint Vladimir, Metropolitan of Kiev and Gallich”; “Hieromartyr Benjamin, Metropolitan of Petrograd and Gdovsk”; “Hieromartyr Hilarion, Archbishop of Verey.”
  • Metropolitan John (Snychev). “The Life of Holy Hieromartyr Hilarion (Troitsky), Archbishop of Verey.” (English translation at OrthoChristian.com.)
  • OrthoChristian.com: “The New Martyrs of Solovki Became the Voice of Conscience of the Russian Church”; “Butovo Firing Range, the Memorial Site of New Martyrs” (reporting the published NKVD execution lists).
  • Vorobiev, Archpriest Vladimir. “Patriarch Tikhon is One of the Greatest Universal Saints” (interview). Pravoslavie.ru / OrthoChristian.com.
  • Tertullian. Apologeticum. Ch. 50.