The Years of the Great Terror

Through the 1930s, in the years of the Stalinist purges that all but annihilated the open Russian Church, the bedridden elder of Vyritsa carried on a hidden ministry, receiving the stream of visitors who found their way to his house. This file sets that eldership against the documented reality of the Great Terror — the mass closures, the arrests and executions of clergy by the tens of thousands — and weighs what the biographies relate of the period.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (20th-c. elder; Soviet period)

The Church in the Terror

The decade in which Seraphim conducted his Vyritsa eldership was the worst the Russian Church endured. The “godless five-year plan” launched in 1932 aimed at the total eradication of religion; the collectivization drive shattered the rural parishes; and the Great Terror of 1937–1938 fell on the clergy with annihilating force. By the late 1930s the number of functioning Orthodox churches in the entire Soviet Union had collapsed from tens of thousands to a few hundred, and the great majority of the bishops and clergy had been arrested, exiled, or shot (Pospielovsky, The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1984, vol. 1, chs. 7–9; Davis, A Long Walk to Church, 2003, ch. 1; on the persecution, Orthodoxy: Soviet Persecution). Estimates of clergy killed in the Terror years run into the tens of thousands; the open institutional Church was brought to the edge of extinction, with perhaps only a few hundred churches still open across the country on the eve of the war (Davis 2003; Pospielovsky 1984, vol. 1 — the figures are scholarly estimates, not exact counts).

It was in these conditions — when to be a priest was to risk the camps or the firing squad, when even attending church could draw suspicion — that the hidden elders of the dispersed monasticism became, for many of the faithful, the surviving channel of the Church’s spiritual life. The elder of Vyritsa was one such channel.

The Hidden Ministry

The biographies present the 1930s at Vyritsa as a continuous, if perilous, ministry. People came — the Life speaks of an unceasing stream of visitors making their way to the wooden house: the grieving, the frightened, families of the arrested, clergy in hiding, ordinary believers seeking confession, counsel, or simply the presence of a holy man in a terrifying time (Filimonov, Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim; Moscow Patriarchate notice, 2000). The elder, bedridden, received them one by one or in small groups, hearing confessions, giving counsel, and (the biographies relate) often knowing the visitor’s situation before it was told — the gift of clairvoyance that fills the accounts of the period (on which, critically, see Discernment and Counsel).

These accounts are the Life’s testimony to the period, drawn from the recollections of disciples and visitors, and are reported here as what the biographies relate, pinned to that source rather than asserted as documented fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5; the general source problem is treated in The Problem of Embellishment). The historical plausibility of a sought-out hidden elder in the 1930s is high — the phenomenon is well attested across the dispersed monasticism — but the specific incidents come to us through devotional memory, often recorded decades later.

The Danger

What the biographies rightly emphasize, and what the historical record confirms, is the danger of such a ministry. In the years of the Terror, a man receiving streams of religious visitors was an obvious target: he could be denounced, his visitors informed upon, the whole household swept up in the machinery of arrest (Pospielovsky 1984, vol. 1; on the mechanics of the Terror, standard histories of the period). The Life relates that the elder was indeed under surveillance and threat, that searches and interrogations touched the household, and that he and those around him lived in constant expectation of arrest — yet that he was, again and again, spared (Filimonov, Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim). The biographies read this preservation as providential; the historian can only note that some of the dispersed elders did survive the Terror, by a mixture of obscurity, fortune, and the regime’s inability to reach every wooden house in every dacha town, while many others did not.

The Substance of the Eldership

Stripped of its miraculous coloring, what the Vyritsa eldership of the 1930s amounted to was this: in a country where the institutional Church had been smashed and the open practice of the faith driven underground, a bedridden monk in a small town offered confession, counsel, and consolation to whoever could reach him, at risk to himself and them, and pointed them toward endurance, repentance, and trust in the providence of God. That is the historical core, and it is enough to account for his memory. The spiritual teaching that crystallized this ministry — above all the counsel to accept all that befalls as from the hand of God — is treated in Section 08 (see From Me This Has Come and The Counsel of the Elder).

The Terror gave way, at the end of the decade, to a still greater convulsion: the German invasion of 1941, which brought the front to the very edge of Leningrad and put Vyritsa under occupation. The eldership of the Terror became the eldership of the war (see The War Years).

See Also

References

  • Filimonov, Valentin P. Вырицкий старец преподобный Серафим [Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim]. St. Petersburg, 1990s–2000s. (The stream of visitors; the clairvoyant counsels; the surveillance and danger; the providential preservation.)
  • Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1984. (The “godless five-year plan”; the collapse of open churches; the Terror against the clergy.)
  • Davis, Nathaniel. A Long Walk to Church. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2003. (The near-extinction of the open Church by 1939; the surviving-church figures.)