The Young Believer under Soviet Rule

To grow up a believer in the Georgian SSR was to live against the grain of the entire official world — a world of militant State atheism, of churches closed and desecrated, of surveillance and suspicion. This file traces what it cost, and what it asked, for the young Goderdzi (“Vasiko”) Urgebadze to keep the faith he had found as a boy: the atheist schoolroom, the rescue of icons from the rubbish heaps, the conscription into the Soviet Army in 1949 and the secret fasting at Batumi, and the formation of the humility and watchfulness that would carry him toward the monastic life.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox (canonized 2012)

A Faith Against the Official World

The childhood awakening described in the sibling file — the bought Gospel, the stone churches, the love of the holy images (see Tbilisi and the Fatherless Boy) — did not unfold in a neutral setting. It unfolded under militant State atheism, the official creed of the Georgian SSR and the whole Soviet Union, which held religion to be a relic to be uprooted from the new society. By the time Goderdzi Urgebadze came of age, churches across Georgia had been closed and desecrated, clergy arrested or dispersed, and the open profession of faith made a liability that could cost schooling, work, and freedom (Larisa Khrustalyeva, Elder Gabriel [Urgebadze], OrthoChristian.com art. 65883; for the institutional history, see Orthodoxy: The Church of Georgia).

The point the sources press is structural, and it governs everything that follows: for this young man, the turn to God was a turn against the entire official world (Khrustalyeva, OrthoChristian art. 65883). There was no private, untroubled space in which to be devout. To keep the faith was, by the regime’s own definition, to set oneself against the regime — and the young believer kept it anyway. He belongs, by this fidelity, in the wider company of those who held to Christ under the Soviet yoke (see Orthodoxy: New Martyrs and Confessors).

The School and the Strangeness

He had begun school at six, and it was in that schooling — an education whose declared aim was to produce atheists — that the name of Christ had nonetheless reached him at about seven (Khrustalyeva, OrthoChristian art. 65883). To carry a living faith through a Soviet education was to live a kind of double life from childhood: to learn the official catechism of unbelief in the classroom while keeping, in secret, the Gospel he had bought with his own saved money.

The cost was social before it was anything else. The boy who kept apart, who shunned the noisy games and loved silence, was already marked as odd; the tradition that he was mocked as strange has its origin here (Khrustalyeva, OrthoChristian art. 65883; A Short Life of St Gabriel of Samtavro, Orthodox England). In a society that prized collective enthusiasm and conformity, a solitary, prayerful child was a visible anomaly. The mockery he met was the small change of the larger pressure the regime brought against all belief — and it was, in retrospect, the first schooling of the man who would one day make of strangeness itself a deliberate weapon for Christ (see Tonsure as Gabriel).

“You Are Nothing but Refuse”

Out of these years the sources draw the humility-motif that would define him. The self-address preserved by those who kept his memory — “Always remember, Vasiko, that you are nothing but refuse” — uses the household pet-name given him in his Communist father’s house and turns it into an instrument of self-abasement (monkgabriel.ge, life page). It is reported here as the tradition gives it: a saying treasured by his disciples as the key to his inner life, not a dated utterance fixed to a particular day.

The note is the hinge between the boy and the saint. The world had already named him refuse — the strange one, the mocked one, the boy whose dead father had been a Party man and whose faith his own mother feared. What the tradition records is that he took that judgment, embraced it, and made it the foundation of a deliberate humility, meaning it as the truth about every man before God. The same motif underlies his literal labor among the city’s refuse — the rescue of icons from the rubbish heaps — to which the foundations now turn.

Rescuing the Icons from the Rubbish

The most characteristic act of the young believer’s life under the regime was the rescue of the holy images the regime had thrown away. In a time when icons were stripped from desecrated churches and discarded onto town dumps and rubbish heaps, he went and gathered them. Khrustalyeva preserves the practice in her own words:

“Fr. Gabriel found the icons for this church at the town dumps… Sometimes he wandered around the dumps days on end. He had a small studio where he cleaned the icons and gave them frames.” (Khrustalyeva, OrthoChristian art. 65883)

The “church” she names is the one he built with his own hands at the family home on Tetri Tskaro Street, finished around 1962 and walled with these rescued icons — the full account of which belongs to the sibling file (Tbilisi and the Fatherless Boy). What concerns the believer’s life under Soviet rule is the discipline itself: the wandering of the dumps days on end, the cleaning, the framing, the patient salvage carried on for years (Khrustalyeva, OrthoChristian art. 65883). It was a quiet, sustained act of defiance, conducted not in the street but among the garbage — a counter-iconoclasm, gathering up what the atheist state had cast out and restoring it to honor. The man who would one day burn the State’s central icon in public had first spent years, unseen, rescuing the Church’s icons from the State’s rubbish.

Conscription: The Soviet Army, 1949

The regime that the young believer set himself against also conscripted him. In 1949 he was drafted into the Soviet Army and stationed at Batumi, the Black Sea port in the Adjarian autonomous republic of the Georgian SSR (Khrustalyeva, OrthoChristian art. 65883; “Gabriel Urgebadze,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Urgebadze). Military service placed him at the very center of the Soviet apparatus — in the uniform of the army of the atheist state — and made the keeping of his faith both harder and more secret than it had ever been.

He kept it. The sources record that at Batumi he secretly fasted and attended St. Nicholas Church, the functioning Orthodox church of the city, slipping away from the life of the barracks to the life of the altar (Khrustalyeva, OrthoChristian art. 65883). To fast in secret and to attend church while serving in the Soviet Army was no small thing: it carried real risk, and it required exactly the watchfulness and the inner discipline the foundations have been tracing. The army years are, in this light, of a piece with everything before them — the double life of the schoolroom, now lived under arms — and they show the same refusal to let the regime’s claim on his body become a claim on his soul.

The Watchfulness of the Suspected

Surveillance was the air a believer breathed in the Soviet Union, and the young Urgebadze breathed it. The disposition the foundations record — the keeping-apart, the secrecy of the fast, the salvage carried out among the dumps rather than proclaimed — is in part the disposition of a man who knew himself observed. This watchfulness, learned young, would harden in the years after his open protest into the settled condition of his middle life (see The Years of Suspicion).

It would be a mistake, though, to read these years only as fear and concealment. The same sources record a faith that was growing, not merely surviving — a young man moving steadily toward the monastic life, his attachment to the holy images and to the services of the Church becoming the whole substance of his days. The concealment was tactical; the devotion was total.

Toward the Monastic Life

The young believer’s path under Soviet rule did not end in mere endurance; it ran toward a vocation. The discipline learned in these years — the secret fasting, the love of the services, the humility that named itself refuse, the patient salvage of the holy — was the formation of a monk. Within a few years of his army service he would receive monastic tonsure and the name Gabriel, embracing as a deliberate, chosen vocation the folly-for-Christ that his childhood strangeness had only foreshadowed; that turn is the subject of the next section (see Tonsure as Gabriel). The eldership and the open spiritual fatherhood that would crown his life lay still further off (see The Cell at Samtavro; and on the tradition of spiritual direction, Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction).

What the foundations establish is the ground from which all of that grew: a young man who, in a world built to extinguish faith, kept it — in the schoolroom, in the army, among the rubbish heaps of the city — and who was already becoming the fool-for-Christ the Church would one day glorify.

References

Khrustalyeva, Larisa. Elder Gabriel (Urgebadze): His Life, Miracles, and Service after his Death. Trans. Dimitra Dwelley. OrthoChristian.com, art. 65883 (orthochristian.com/65883.html), 19 November 2013. The restrained baseline for the atheist context, the school, the icon-rescue at the town dumps (quoted verbatim), the 1949 conscription, the Batumi posting, and the secret fasting and attendance at St. Nicholas Church.
“Gabriel Urgebadze.” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Urgebadze). The 1949 conscription into the Soviet Army and the Batumi service, drawing on the Georgian Patriarchate materials, with the Georgian SSR context.
A Short Life of St Gabriel of Samtavro. Orthodox England (events.orthodoxengland.org.uk). The solitary, mocked child and the faith kept against the atheist world.
The official monastery site, monkgabriel.ge (life page). The self-address “Always remember, Vasiko, that you are nothing but refuse” and the humility-motif of the young believer.
Mshvenieradze, Dali. Beris Diadema [“The Elder’s Diadem”], 2 vols. Tbilisi, 2006–2007. The Georgian memoir-collection of disciples’ and nuns’ reminiscences behind much of the English-language material on these years.
Jinoria, Malkhaz. Gabriel the Monk — Your Life Is My Life. Tbilisi, 2009. The compiled life and reminiscences of the elder.