Ordination in Tashkent (1921)

In the midst of the civil war that engulfed Russian Turkestan, the widowed professor-surgeon Valentin Voino-Yasenetsky was ordained to the priesthood in Tashkent. The call came at a diocesan assembly where he spoke against the schismatic currents of the day; afterward Bishop Innokenty of Tashkent told him, “Doctor, you ought to be a priest!” — and he answered without hesitation, “Very well, Vladyko! I will be a priest if it is pleasing to God!” He was ordained deacon and then, on the Feast of the Meeting of the Lord, 15 February 1921, priest, while continuing as a professor of surgery and anatomy. This file covers the setting, the call, the dialogue, and the ordination itself.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / New Martyrs and Confessors (canonized 2000)

Tashkent in the Civil War

By 1920 Tashkent, where Voino-Yasenetsky had arrived as chief surgeon in 1917, was a city living through revolution and civil war: Soviet power newly and violently established in Central Asia, the Church already under pressure, and the diocese contending with the schismatic and renovationist currents that the early Soviet years let loose. Voino-Yasenetsky, a layman of pronounced and public piety, took an active part in the life of the diocese, attending its assemblies and defending the Church’s order against the disorders of the moment (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; ru.wikipedia, Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий)). He was also, by now, a figure of standing in the new Soviet medical world: professor of topographic anatomy and operative surgery in the newly founded Turkestan State University and chief surgeon of the city hospital. That a man so placed should seek ordination, in such a year, was an act whose cost he cannot have failed to reckon.

The Call: “Doctor, You Ought to Be a Priest!”

The decisive moment came at a diocesan assembly, late in 1920, where Voino-Yasenetsky delivered a speech — on the troubles besetting the diocese, against the schismatics — that impressed the ruling hierarch, Bishop Innokenty (Pustynsky) of Tashkent and Turkestan [the calling bishop is Innokenty (Pustynsky); not "Pelevin," a name sometimes wrongly attached]. Afterward the bishop turned to him with words the autobiography records and which became the hinge of his life: “Doctor, you ought to be a priest!” — «Доктор, вам надо быть священником!» (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering).

The reply was instant and unhesitating, and it is among the best-attested utterances in the whole record, coming directly from his own autobiography: “Very well, Vladyko! I will be a priest if it is pleasing to God!” — «Хорошо, Владыко! Буду священником, если это угодно Богу!» (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; also carried in Marushchak, The Blessed Surgeon). He had not sought it, had received no warning of it, and had every worldly reason to refuse it; and he accepted it on the spot. He understood the bishop’s words, he wrote, as nothing less than a divine summons spoken through a hierarch’s lips — “I accepted Bishop Innokenty’s words as God’s call through a bishop’s lips” («слова Преосвященного Иннокентия я принял как Божий призыв архиерейскими устами») (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering).

Ordination Deacon and Priest

Events moved at once. He was ordained deacon the following Sunday, and then ordained priest on the Feast of the Meeting of the Lord (Sretenie), 15 February 1921 (New Style), by Bishop Innokenty — «в праздник Сретения Господня 1921 года, я был рукоположен во иерея епископом Иннокентием» (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering) [Disputed: ordination date — the autobiography gives the Feast of the Meeting of the Lord, 15 February 1921; some loose English summaries give "January 1921"; the autobiography's feast-dated 15 February is used here]. He was assigned as the fourth priest of the Tashkent cathedral, and the bishop charged him in particular with the ministry of preaching — a charge that suited the eloquent professor and that would, four decades later, leave the Church a corpus of well over a thousand sermons (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; see The Sermons).

He did not lay down the scalpel. From the day of his ordination he was a priest and a professor of surgery at once — celebrating the Liturgy, preaching, and continuing to lecture and operate — and the union of the two offices, far from being concealed, became visible and provocative, as the next file describes. The civil-war ordination of 1921 set the pattern of his entire life: the priest who was also the surgeon, refusing on principle to be only one of the two. Within two years the same refusal would carry him into the episcopacy and into prison.

Why He Said Yes

The instantaneousness of the assent — “Very well, Vladyko!” — can obscure how strange it was, and how much it cost. By every worldly measure Voino-Yasenetsky had nothing to gain and a great deal to lose by accepting ordination in Soviet Tashkent in 1921. He stood at the height of a brilliant medical career: a professor in a new state university, the city’s chief surgeon, the author of a prize-winning monograph on regional anaesthesia, a man whose path lay open to the summits of Soviet science. To put on the cassock in that year was to mark himself, in the eyes of a state already turning against the Church, as an enemy — to forfeit advancement and to court the harassment, dismissal, and arrest that in fact followed. He knew this. The autobiography is candid that the decision was not made in ignorance of its price but in spite of it, as obedience to what he took to be a divine summons spoken through a bishop’s lips (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering).

The deeper logic was the logic of his whole life, traced already in the renunciation of art for “what is useful for suffering people” (see The Artist Turned Doctor). He had never sought what pleased him but what served; and the priesthood, offered to him unbidden in the Church’s hour of need, was simply the next and highest form of that service. The widower of 1919, his household settled and his children provided for, was free to give himself wholly, and he gave himself at once. The speed of the “yes” was not impulsiveness but readiness — the readiness of a man for whom the question had, in principle, been settled long before it was asked.

The Diocese in Crisis

The Tashkent diocese that received its new priest was a Church under siege from two directions at once — from the atheist state without and from schism within. The early 1920s were the years in which the Soviet authorities, having failed to destroy the Church by direct assault, took up the subtler weapon of fostering the Renovationist (Living Church) schism: a state-backed movement of clergy that seized churches and chanceries from the Patriarchal Church and claimed to be the true, “progressive” Orthodoxy, loyal to the revolution. Across Russia and Central Asia, dioceses were torn between the lawful Tikhonite hierarchy and the Renovationist usurpers, and the faithful were left to discern, parish by parish, where the true Church stood (ru.wikipedia, Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий); see Russian Orthodox Tradition).

It was precisely as a defender of the Patriarchal Church against the schismatics that Father Valentin made his mark, and it was this firmness that recommended him to the episcopate two years later. His preaching and his organizing work held the Tashkent faithful to the Tikhonite obedience, and when the diocese was deprived of its bishop he became one of the chief supports of its order. The priest of 1921 was thus, from the first, a contender — not a quiet parish celebrant but a public champion of the persecuted true Church, exactly the man the exiled Bishop Andrei would seek out in 1923 to raise to the episcopate (see Consecration and the First Arrest (1923)). The ordination amid the civil war was not the beginning of a sheltered religious life but the enlistment of a fighter, and the fight began at once.

References

Voino-Yasenetsky, Valentin (Archbishop Luke). «Я полюбил страдание» [I Loved Suffering]. Autobiography. (azbyka.ru.) — The diocesan assembly and his speech against the schismatics; Bishop Innokenty’s “Doctor, you ought to be a priest!” and the reply “Very well, Vladyko!”; “I accepted Bishop Innokenty’s words as God’s call”; ordination deacon and priest on the Meeting of the Lord, 15 February 1921; fourth priest of the cathedral, charged with preaching.
Marushchak, Archdeacon Vasiliy. The Blessed Surgeon. Divine Ascent Press, 2002. — The ordination call and dialogue within the saint’s life.
Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий). ru.wikipedia.org. (Used to locate dates and the bishop’s name; cross-checked against the autobiography.) — Bishop Innokenty (Pustynsky); the 1921 ordination; the simultaneous university professorship.