The Three Exiles (1923–1943)

Between his consecration in 1923 and his rehabilitation in the war, Bishop Luke endured three distinct arrests and exiles totaling roughly twelve years. The first (1923–1926) took him through the Moscow prisons — where he met Patriarch Tikhon — to Yeniseisk, Turukhansk, and a punitive Arctic exile at Plakhino beyond the Polar Circle. The second (1930–1933) followed a fabricated charge and sent him to the Russian North at Arkhangelsk. The third (1937–1942) began in the Great Terror with a brutal interrogation “conveyor” and hunger strikes, and ended in exile at Bolshaya Murta and Krasnoyarsk on the eve of his war service. Because the autobiography telescopes the chronology and the archival reconstructions diverge from it, this file gives the sequence with every contested date and place flagged.

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

A Note on the Chronology

The chronology of the exiles is genuinely contested, and the guide shows it so. St. Luke’s autobiography, dictated in old age, compresses and reorders the carceral years; the archival reconstructions of Lisichkin (from the KGB files) and the standard reference summaries supply precise document-dates that sometimes diverge from his memory by months or a year. Where they conflict, the reconstruction is generally preferred for hard dates and the autobiography for the lived detail, with the divergence flagged. The table below gives the skeleton; the sections that follow give the substance.

Exile	Arrest	Route and places	End / return
First	10 June 1923, Tashkent `[9 vs 10 June]`	Moscow prisons (Lubyanka basement → Butyrka → Taganka); met Patriarch Tikhon; by rail to Yeniseisk (Jan 1924); Turukhansk (Aug 1924); Plakhino, beyond the Arctic Circle (Dec 1924 – Mar 1925); back to Turukhansk	release order 20 Nov 1925; returned to Tashkent 1926
Second	6 May 1930, Tashkent (the Mikhailovsky affair)	Tashkent prison ~1 year; sentence 15 May 1931; via Kotlas/Makarikha to Arkhangelsk (from 1932)	term ended 1933 `[vs spring 1934]`
Third	July 1937, Tashkent `[23 vs 24 July]`	the interrogation “conveyor” and hunger strikes; sentenced 13 Feb 1940; Bolshaya Murta (Mar 1940); Krasnoyarsk (late 1941)	freed to war service; Archbishop of Krasnoyarsk 27 Dec 1942

First Exile (1923–1926): To the Arctic

After the arrest of 10 June 1923, Bishop Luke was sent under guard to Moscow, where he passed through a succession of prisons — the basement of the GPU on the Lubyanka, then Butyrka, then Taganka. In the capital, before deportation, occurred the meeting that confirmed the rule of his life: he saw Patriarch Tikhon twice and concelebrated with him once — “twice I was at Patriarch Tikhon’s, and once I served together with him” — «Дважды был у Патриарха Тихона и один раз служил совместно с ним» — and received from the Patriarch the directive not to abandon his surgical work (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; see St. Tikhon of Moscow and Medicine as Vocation).

Then came the long deportation eastward by rail, in the winter of 1923–24, through Tyumen, Omsk, Novosibirsk, and Krasnoyarsk, to Yeniseisk on the Yenisei, reached about January 1924 (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; ru.wikipedia, Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий)). At Yeniseisk, and at every stage that followed, he operated: his surgical skill was so prized that the exiling authorities themselves could not afford to keep him from the operating table, and a long, well-attested anecdote tells of his restoring sight to several blind men (see Operating in Exile).

From Yeniseisk he was moved on — to the village of Khaya, back to Yeniseisk, and then far down the river to Turukhansk, reached about August 1924. There the local population’s evident reverence for him so irritated the authorities that they imposed a still harsher punishment: exile to Plakhino, a tiny settlement on the Yenisei beyond the Arctic Circle, where he lived through the polar winter, roughly December 1924 to early March 1925, in conditions of extreme cold (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; ru.wikipedia, Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий)). To this period belongs his celebrated retort to the officials threatening him with ever-remoter exile — “Where further can you exile me — I am already beyond the Polar Circle?” («Куда же дальше вы можете меня сослать, я ведь уже за Полярным кругом?») — well-attested in the Russian tradition and characteristic of the man (ru.wikipedia; Marushchak, The Blessed Surgeon).

He was recalled to Turukhansk in the spring of 1925 after a local man died for want of the surgeon the authorities had sent away. A release order followed on 20 November 1925, and he left Turukhansk that December, returning to Tashkent in 1926 [Disputed: the year of return — the autobiography telescopes the dates so that the sequence can read as ending in 1924–25; the archival sequence (Plakhino Dec 1924 – Mar 1925, release order 20 Nov 1925) places the return in 1926, which is used here] (ru.wikipedia, Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий)). (A claim that he performed “the first animal-to-human kidney transplant” in 1924 appears in some English devotional retellings but in no archival or Russian source and is not credited here [Disputed: this transplant claim appears only in some English devotional accounts and is unsupported in the archival and Russian sources; it is treated as a hagiographic embellishment].)

Second Exile (1930–1933): Arkhangelsk

The second arrest, on 6 May 1930 in Tashkent, grew out of the Mikhailovsky affair. Ivan Petrovich Mikhailovsky, a Tashkent university physiologist who had become mentally ill — he had attempted bizarre experiments to “resurrect” his dead son — took his own life. As a physician, Bishop Luke had earlier certified Mikhailovsky’s condition as one of “undoubted mental illness”; the authorities seized on this to construct a charge that the suicide had been a murder concealed by “religious fanatics,” with Luke implicated (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; ru.wikipedia, Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий)). He was held in the Tashkent prison about a year and then sentenced, by the OGPU on 15 May 1931, to three years’ exile in the Northern Region (Severny Krai) [Disputed: ru.wikipedia loosely gives "April 1931" for the sentence; the document is dated 15 May 1931].

He was sent north — through the Makarikha camp near Kotlas and Kotlas itself — to Arkhangelsk, where he lived from 1932 in the Russian North. There he continued both his medicine and his research, developing a method of treating suppurating wounds with a biological salve, working in part from the practice of a local folk healer, Vera Valneva, in whose house he lodged (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; ru.wikipedia, Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий)). The exile term ended and he returned in 1933 [Disputed: 1933 vs spring 1934 — the three-year term from 1930/31 expired in 1933; some summaries place his actual return to Central Asia in spring 1934. The Essays appeared in 1934]. It was in the wake of this second exile that the first edition of his Essays on the Surgery of Purulent Infections appeared, in 1934, bearing his episcopal name (see Essays on the Surgery of Purulent Infections).

Third Exile (1937–1942): The Conveyor

The third and harshest arrest came in the Great Terror, in July 1937, when Bishop Luke was sixty [Disputed: 23 July (miloserdie.ru and the житие) vs 24 July (ru.wikipedia) — the two leading sources differ by a single day]. The charge was membership in a “counter-revolutionary church-monarchist organization,” with the usual fabricated accessories. The interrogation employed the notorious “conveyor” (конвейер) — relays of fresh interrogators working a prisoner in continuous shifts, day and night, under a bright lamp, depriving him of sleep and food to break his will. “This terrible conveyor went on continuously, day and night” — «Этот страшный конвейер продолжался непрерывно день и ночь» — he wrote (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering).

The number and length of the conveyors and of his counter-measure, the hunger strike, are reported variously and cannot be fixed precisely from the published sources [Disputed: the conveyor and hunger-strike details — Marushchak/pravoslavie.ru describe a single ~13-day conveyor (c. 23 November – 5 December 1937), while miloserdie.ru describes two two-week conveyors (November 1937 and February 1938); on the hunger strikes, Marushchak gives three strikes of about seven days each while ru.wikipedia characterizes it as an 18-day strike. Settling these would require the raw NKVD file (Lisichkin)]. What is firm is his refusal to confess. In a written statement of 29 March 1939 he declared that he could acknowledge himself a “counter-revolutionary” only insofar as that followed from the fact of his preaching the Gospel — «Признать себя контрреволюционером я могу лишь в той мере, в какой это вытекает из факта проповеди Евангелия» (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; Lisichkin, Крестный путь).

The sentence came at last on 13 February 1940 from a Special Conference (Особое совещание): five years’ exile to Krasnoyarsk Krai, the term counted from the arrest (ru.wikipedia, Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий)). From March 1940 he lived in exile at Bolshaya Murta, a village about 110 km north of Krasnoyarsk, working as the hospital surgeon. Then, when Germany invaded in June 1941, his exile took its extraordinary turn: he was brought to Krasnoyarsk itself, late in 1941, to serve as chief surgeon of the city’s military evacuation hospitals — an exiled bishop made the chief surgeon of a war-zone medical district (see Chief Surgeon in Krasnoyarsk). The third exile effectively ended when he was named Archbishop of Krasnoyarsk on 27 December 1942, his term expiring as the war reconciled the state, for a season, to the Church it had persecuted.

The Texture of the First Exile

Behind the bare itinerary of the first exile lies a particular human ordeal. Before the long journey east, there were the Moscow prisons and their transit machinery — the basement of the GPU on the Lubyanka, then Butyrka, then Taganka — through which the prisoner was passed and processed before deportation (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering). It was in the interval of these Moscow months that the meeting with Patriarch Tikhon fell, so that the same passage that broke a man’s liberty also gave him the directive that would order the rest of his life — not to abandon his surgery (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; see St. Tikhon of Moscow).

Then came the deportation itself: the long haul by rail across Siberia in the depth of winter, through Tyumen, Omsk, Novosibirsk, and Krasnoyarsk to Yeniseisk, reached about January 1924 (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; ru.wikipedia, Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий)). The punitive logic of the exile reached its extreme at Plakhino, beyond the Arctic Circle, where through the polar winter of roughly December 1924 to March 1925 he lived in a chum — the conical reindeer-skin tent of the northern peoples — in cold so severe that, by his own account, the ice was not even scraped from the window-frames and the hut could not be made warm (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; ru.wikipedia, Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий)). It is to this farthest point of banishment that his well-attested retort belongs — when threatened with exile yet more remote, he answered, “Where further can you exile me — I am already beyond the Polar Circle?” — the words of a man whom the authorities had quite literally run out of map (ru.wikipedia; Marushchak, The Blessed Surgeon). The recall from Plakhino, like so much in these years, turned on his surgery: it was the death of a man who needed an operation, in a district from which the only surgeon had been deliberately removed, that forced the authorities to bring him back (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering).

The Texture of the Second Exile

The second exile is marked above all by the cynicism of its pretext. The Mikhailovsky charge was a fabrication built upon a tragedy: a mentally ill physiologist had taken his own life, and the authorities, seizing on the medical certificate of insanity that Luke had earlier and honestly given, recast the suicide as a murder concealed by “religious fanatics” so as to draw the bishop into it (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; ru.wikipedia, Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий)). The charge had nothing to do with any act; it was a frame constructed around an honest professional judgment.

In the Russian North to which it sent him — through the Makarikha transit camp near Kotlas, and then to Arkhangelsk from 1932 — the pattern of the first exile repeated: the persecuted bishop became indispensable as a healer. There he pursued his research on suppurating wounds, developing a biological salve, and did so in part by attending to the practice of a local folk healer, Vera Valneva, in whose house he lodged and whose empirical northern remedies he studied with the seriousness of a scientist examining a phenomenon rather than dismissing it (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; ru.wikipedia, Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий)). The fruit of these years was scientific as well as confessional: the first edition of his Essays on the Surgery of Purulent Infections appeared in 1934, bearing his episcopal name, in the wake of this exile (see Essays on the Surgery of Purulent Infections).

The Texture of the Third Exile

The third exile, in the Great Terror, brought the persecution to its cruelest pitch in the “conveyor” (конвейер) — the interrogation method in which relays of fresh questioners worked the prisoner in unbroken shifts, under a bright lamp, denying him sleep and food until his will should break. “This terrible conveyor went on continuously, day and night,” he wrote (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering). Against it he set the one weapon left to a prisoner — the hunger strike — turning his own body into the instrument of his resistance, though the published sources cannot agree on the exact number and length of either the conveyors or the strikes (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; Marushchak, The Blessed Surgeon; miloserdie.ru, “Три ссылки святителя Луки”) [Disputed: as flagged above, Marushchak gives three hunger strikes of about seven days each while ru.wikipedia characterizes it as an 18-day strike; miloserdie.ru and Marushchak/pravoslavie.ru also differ on the number of conveyors. These divergences are preserved, not resolved.]. What did not break was his refusal to confess to a lie. In the written statement of 29 March 1939 he set down the exact measure of his guilt: he could acknowledge himself a “counter-revolutionary” only insofar as that followed from the fact of his preaching the Gospel (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; Lisichkin, Крестный путь). The formula is the whole of his confessorhood in a sentence: he would not deny that he preached, and he would concede no crime but that one.

The Meaning of the Carceral Years

Two facts, taken together, give these twenty years their weight. The first is the irony that ran through every exile: in each region of banishment — Yeniseisk, Turukhansk, Arkhangelsk, Bolshaya Murta, and at last Krasnoyarsk in the war — the very authorities who had condemned the bishop came to depend on the surgeon, so that the man sent to the edge of the inhabited world was repeatedly recalled, sheltered, or set to work because the sick could not do without him (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; ru.wikipedia, Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий)). His hands kept saving the regime that was trying to silence his voice. The second is the arithmetic of the whole: of his thirty-eight years as a bishop, roughly twelve were spent in prison and exile — very nearly a third of his episcopate passed in custody or banishment (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; Marushchak, The Blessed Surgeon). It is this proportion that makes the three exiles not an interruption of his episcopate but, in a real sense, its principal form: he was a bishop chiefly in prisons, on prison trains, and in huts at the edge of the world, and it is there that the title “confessor” was earned (see The Confessor as Witness).

References

Voino-Yasenetsky, Valentin (Archbishop Luke). «Я полюбил страдание» [I Loved Suffering]. Autobiography. (azbyka.ru.) — The Moscow prisons; “twice I was at Patriarch Tikhon’s, and once I served together with him”; the deportation to Yeniseisk, Turukhansk, and Plakhino; the polar winter; the Mikhailovsky affair and the second exile to Arkhangelsk; the wound-treatment method and Vera Valneva; the “conveyor” — “this terrible conveyor went on continuously, day and night”; the hunger strikes; “I can acknowledge myself a counter-revolutionary only insofar as this follows from the fact of preaching the Gospel.”
Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий). ru.wikipedia.org. (Used to locate document-dates; cross-checked against the autobiography and Lisichkin.) — The first-exile route and the 20 Nov 1925 release order; the “beyond the Polar Circle” retort; the 6 May 1930 arrest and 15 May 1931 sentence; the third arrest of July 1937; the 13 Feb 1940 sentence; Bolshaya Murta and Krasnoyarsk.
Lisichkin, V. A. Крестный путь святителя Луки: подлинные документы из архивов КГБ. Moscow: Troitskoe Slovo, 2001. — The archival documents underlying the arrest, interrogation, and exile dates.
Marushchak, Archdeacon Vasiliy. The Blessed Surgeon. Divine Ascent Press, 2002. — The narrative of the three exiles; the conveyor and hunger strikes.
“Три ссылки святителя Луки” [The Three Exiles of St. Luke]. miloserdie.ru. — The reconstruction of the exile chronology, including the two-conveyor account of the 1937–38 interrogation.