Operating in Exile

The single fact that sets St. Luke apart among the New Martyrs and Confessors is that his persecutors could not do without him. Through all three exiles he went on operating — in Yeniseisk and Turukhansk on the Yenisei, in the Arctic, in Arkhangelsk in the Russian North, and at Bolshaya Murta near Krasnoyarsk — because the regions to which he was banished had no surgeon of his skill, and the exiling authorities themselves were forced to set him at the operating table. This file gathers the surgery of the exile years: the restoring of sight at Yeniseisk, the wound-treatment research in the North, and the strange dependence of the state on the man it had condemned.

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

A Surgeon the State Could Not Spare

Most confessors of the Soviet persecution were removed from any sphere where their gifts could serve; St. Luke was the rare exception, because his gift was one the remote places of his exile could not replace. A first-rank surgeon and professor of operative surgery, set down in the medical desert of Siberian Yeniseisk or polar Turukhansk, was too valuable to leave idle, and the very officials charged with punishing him found themselves obliged to let him operate. The result was a paradox that runs through the whole carceral period: the prisoner-bishop spent his exiles not only in privation and cold but, much of the time, in the operating theatre of the local hospital, saving the lives of the people among whom he was banished — and of, sometimes, the families of his guards (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; Marushchak, The Blessed Surgeon; see The Three Exiles).

This is why his surgical case material kept growing through the years of exile, and why the Essays on the Surgery of Purulent Infections could be written and rewritten across the very decades of his imprisonment: the operating never stopped (see Essays on the Surgery of Purulent Infections).

Yeniseisk and the Restoring of Sight

The best-known surgical episode of the first exile belongs to Yeniseisk, reached in early 1924. The town and its district had no comparable surgeon, and Bishop Luke was soon performing major operations — including, the biographies relate, eye surgery that restored sight to several blind men, among them members of one family who had been blind for years (Marushchak, The Blessed Surgeon; ru.wikipedia, Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий)). The account is carried by the devotional biographies and is reported here as their tradition, pinned to its source; the broader fact behind it — that he did extensive and successful surgery at Yeniseisk, prized enough that the authorities could not simply warehouse him — is well attested [Disputed: the specific "restored sight to a whole blind family" detail rests on the devotional biographies (Marushchak; pravoslavie.ru) and is reported as their account, not certified as documented fact; the general fact of his major surgery at Yeniseisk is firmly attested]. The reverence this won him among the population was precisely what provoked the authorities to push him onward to Turukhansk and then to Arctic Plakhino — punishing the prisoner for being too evidently a blessing.

The Russian North: Wound-Treatment Research

The second exile, to Arkhangelsk (1932–1933), turned his surgery toward research even under the conditions of banishment. Working in the Russian North, he developed and tested a method of treating suppurating wounds with a biological salve, drawing in part on the practice of a local folk healer, Vera Valneva, in whose house he lodged — bringing a professor’s rigor to a peasant remedy and folding the results into his lifelong study of infected wounds (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; ru.wikipedia, Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий)). The episode shows the cast of his mind: even in exile, stripped of his chair and his city, he was still gathering the clinical material of the Essays and still advancing the science of purulent surgery.

Bolshaya Murta and the Threshold of War

In the third exile, from March 1940, he served as the hospital surgeon at Bolshaya Murta, the Krasnoyarsk-region village to which he was banished — an exiled bishop in his sixties running the surgery of a remote Siberian district hospital (ru.wikipedia, Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий)). It was from this post that the war lifted him, in the autumn of 1941, to Krasnoyarsk and the chief surgeonship of an entire district of military evacuation hospitals — the surgery of exile becoming, almost without a break, the surgery of the war effort (see Chief Surgeon in Krasnoyarsk).

The Paradox of the Indispensable Prisoner

The strangeness of St. Luke’s case is worth pressing further, because it is genuinely without close parallel among the confessors of the period. The Soviet machinery of exile was designed to remove its victims from any place where they could do good or gather a following — to scatter them into the emptiness of Siberia and the North and let cold, hunger, and obscurity finish the work the courts had begun. With most prisoners this succeeded. With St. Luke it could not, for a simple and intractable reason: the empty places to which he was sent had sick people in them, and no one else who could cut for a strangulated hernia, drain a deep abscess, set a shattered limb, or open a skull (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; ru.wikipedia, Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий)). A first-rank professor of operative surgery is not a fungible unit of forced labor; his skill could not be replaced by any number of guards, and a district that had been given such a man, even as a prisoner, could not in conscience or in practice let him sit idle while patients died (see The Three Exiles). So the very state that exiled him was compelled, again and again, to set him back at the operating table — to use the bishop it had condemned. The prisoner could not be warehoused; he was too useful to waste, and his usefulness was a kind of immunity the regime could neither grant nor wholly take away.

The Texture of Surgery Without a Hospital

The conditions under which this surgery was done should not be imagined as anything like the well-appointed clinics of Tashkent. In Yeniseisk, in polar Turukhansk, on the Arctic margins, and at Bolshaya Murta, St. Luke operated in primitive district hospitals or in rooms barely fit for the name, often without proper instruments, without reliable anesthesia, without the equipment a major operation demands, in cold and scarcity, improvising what he lacked (Voino-Yasenetsky, I Loved Suffering; ru.wikipedia, Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий)). That he went on performing serious surgery under such conditions — and went on succeeding — is itself part of the witness: the skill the state could not replace was matched by an ingenuity the deprivations of exile could not defeat. The case material gathered in these makeshift theatres was not lost to him either; it continued to feed the great study of infected wounds, so that the Essays on the Surgery of Purulent Infections drew on a clinical experience accumulated, in part, in the very hospitals of his banishment (see Essays on the Surgery of Purulent Infections).

The Healing Hands the State Could Not Silence

Set beside the eye surgery of Yeniseisk and the wound-treatment research of the North, a single thread emerges. The state had many ways to silence a bishop — it could forbid him to preach, close his churches, intercept his letters, and bury him in the tundra. What it could not do was stop his hands from healing, because it needed those hands itself. And the healing was not mute. To the people of Yeniseisk who saw blind men given their sight, to the family in whose house at Arkhangelsk he lodged and worked, to the patients of every remote ward in which he operated, the exiled surgeon was a visible sign that the persecuted Church still served and still blessed — that the man the newspapers called an enemy was, to the sick of the place, a deliverer (Marushchak, The Blessed Surgeon; pravoslavie.ru). The devotional accounts that report the restored sight understand it in exactly this key: a miracle of mercy worked through the hands of a confessor (reported here as their account; see the [Disputed: ...] note above). Whatever the precise factual residue of any single story, the pattern they preserve is well grounded — the surgery of the exile years was a sermon the state could not censor, preached not in words but in the recovered sight, the drained wound, the life saved, of those among whom he was sent to be forgotten.

The Witness of the Scalpel

The operating done in exile was not incidental to St. Luke’s confession but part of it. He had refused, on principle and with Patriarch Tikhon’s blessing, to separate the surgery from the priesthood (see Medicine as Vocation); in exile that refusal became a witness the state could not suppress, because it needed the surgeon even while it punished the bishop. The hands the regime could not afford to silence went on healing through every year it tried to break him — and in this the captivity itself became a pulpit, the operating table a place where the persecuted Church went on visibly serving the very people in whose name it was being persecuted.

References

Voino-Yasenetsky, Valentin (Archbishop Luke). «Я полюбил страдание» [I Loved Suffering]. Autobiography. (azbyka.ru.) — The operating through the exiles; the wound-treatment work in the North and Vera Valneva; the captors’ dependence on his surgical skill; the Bolshaya Murta hospital post.
Marushchak, Archdeacon Vasiliy. The Blessed Surgeon. Divine Ascent Press, 2002. — The Yeniseisk eye surgery and the restoring of sight (devotional account); the surgery of the exile years.
Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий). ru.wikipedia.org. — The surgical work at Yeniseisk; the Arkhangelsk wound-treatment method; the Bolshaya Murta hospital surgeonship.
Святитель Лука (Войно-Ясенецкий). pravoslavie.ru/62067.html. — The exile surgery within the devotional account.