07 — Arrest, Solovki, and Martyrdom

Florensky was arrested in May 1928 and exiled to Nizhny Novgorod, returning within months after the intervention of Ekaterina Peshkova; arrested again on 26 February 1933 in the fabricated case of a “Party for the Rebirth of Russia,” he was sentenced on 26 July 1933 to ten years and sent to the Far East, working at the permafrost research station at Skovorodino; transferred to the Solovetsky camp in 1934, he set up a laboratory extracting iodine and agar from White Sea seaweed and wrote the long letters to his family that are the most moving thing he left. On 25 November 1937 a special troika sentenced him to death, and he was shot on 8 December 1937 near Leningrad.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Theological Academy; the Russian religious renaissance)

A correction stands at the head of this section, because the record was deliberately falsified. [Corrected: Soviet authorities gave Florensky’s family a false date of death in 1943 — the Registry Office of the Nevsky District of Leningrad supplied 15 December 1943 on 3 November 1958, during the Khrushchev thaw. The true date and manner of death were disclosed only on 24 November 1989, when the KGB informed the family that he had been shot on 8 December 1937 in the Leningrad District under a secret sentence (“The Death of Pavel Florensky (1882–1937),” Religion in Communist Lands 18:4, p. 343). Any source giving 1943, or “died in the camps,” reproduces the falsification and should be corrected.]

The place of execution and burial remains genuinely uncertain and is reported as such in the second file, with the candidates named.

Files in This Section

File Description
The Arrests of 1928 and 1933 The 1928 arrest and Nizhny Novgorod exile; the 1933 case, the interrogation, the depositions, and the sentence
Solovki and the Death of 1937 The Far East and Skovorodino; Solovki from 1934; the iodine laboratory; the letters; the troika of 25 November 1937 and the execution of 8 December

See Also