Vyritsa under German Occupation

The documented wartime reality at Vyritsa: the town fell under German and Romanian occupation from 1941 to 1944, within the ring of the siege of Leningrad, and — as across the occupied northwest — the occupiers permitted the reopening of churches, transforming the religious situation. This file sets the elder’s wartime ministry in that concrete historical frame, and reports the traditions of his intercession and counsel during the occupation.

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

The Occupation

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Army Group North drove on Leningrad with extraordinary speed. By the late summer and autumn of 1941 the German front had reached the city’s southern approaches, and the great siege of Leningrad — one of the deadliest in human history — closed in September 1941 and lasted until January 1944 (standard histories of the Eastern Front and the Leningrad siege). Vyritsa, some sixty kilometers south of the city, lay in the zone overrun by the German advance and fell under occupation from 1941 until the Soviet reconquest in 1944. For nearly two and a half years the elder’s town was behind German lines, within the larger catastrophe of the siege.

The occupation was harsh — the northwest of Russia under German rule suffered requisition, forced labor, deportation, and atrocity — and Vyritsa, in particular, became the site of a German-administered camp; the wartime suffering of the region was severe (general histories of the occupation of northwest Russia). The elder and his household lived through all of this within the occupied zone.

The Reopening of the Churches

The single most consequential fact for the religious history of the occupied territories was the German policy, for its own purposes, of permitting the reopening of churches. Across the occupied Soviet northwest, under the auspices of the so-called Pskov Orthodox Mission, hundreds of churches that the Soviets had closed were reopened, priests resumed services, and a startling religious revival took place — a revival the Germans tolerated as useful anti-Soviet propaganda and the population embraced as the return of a suppressed faith (Pospielovsky, The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1984, vol. 2; Davis, A Long Walk to Church, 2003, ch. 1; on the wider wartime change, Orthodoxy: Soviet Persecution). The contrast with the prewar Terror was extreme: in occupied territory the open practice of Orthodoxy suddenly revived, even as it remained crushed on the Soviet side of the line — until Stalin’s own wartime turn toward the Church from 1943.

At Vyritsa, the biographies relate, a church was open during the occupation and the faithful could again attend services — a transformation of the elder’s local situation after the underground years of the Terror (Filimonov, Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim). This is consistent with the documented reopening of churches throughout the occupied northwest under the Pskov Mission, and gives the wartime accounts of his ministry a plausible institutional setting that the 1930s had lacked.

The Elder in the War

Against this backdrop the biographies present the elder as a center of intercession and counsel through the occupation: praying for Russia’s deliverance (the stone-prayer tradition belongs here; see The Thousand Nights on the Stone), receiving the suffering of both the occupied population and, the accounts add, even occupying soldiers who are said to have come to him, and consoling families in the agony of the siege and the war (Filimonov, Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim; Moscow Patriarchate notice, 2000). A recurring motif is that the elder foretold the survival of Vyritsa and the eventual deliverance of Russia, and counseled trust in God amid the terror of the front (on these predictive accounts, treated critically, see The Prophecies Attributed to Him).

These wartime accounts are, again, the testimony of the Life, pinned to disciple recollection and reported as such (METHODOLOGY §3.5; see The Problem of Embellishment). Some of the more striking episodes — encounters with German officers, specific predictions fulfilled — are exactly the kind of material that tends to grow in the retelling and should be weighed with caution. What is historically secure is the frame: an aged elder living through the occupation of his town within the siege of Leningrad, in a place where the churches had reopened, ministering to a terrified population.

The Schemanun Seraphima’s Death

It was during these war years, the biographies relate, that the elder’s former wife, the schemanun Seraphima, died — placed by the Life in 1945 (Filimonov, Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim; see Retirement to Vyritsa). The companion of his monastic vocation since 1920 thus predeceased him by four years, in the closing phase of the war. The elder himself would live on into the postwar Soviet period, dying in 1949 (see Glorification 2000).

After the Occupation

The Soviet reconquest of 1944 lifted the German siege and restored Soviet rule over Vyritsa — but it did so after Stalin’s own dramatic wartime concession to the Church. In September 1943, facing the war’s demands, Stalin had received the surviving hierarchs, permitted the election of a patriarch, and allowed a limited reopening of churches and reestablishment of the Church’s structures on the Soviet side (Pospielovsky 1984, vol. 2; Davis 2003, ch. 1). The elder thus passed his final years (1944–1949) in a Soviet Union where the Church, though still tightly controlled, had a precarious legal existence again — a milder twilight than the Terror of the 1930s. The last phase of his life unfolded in that uneasy postwar settlement.

See Also

References

  • Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1984. (The Pskov Mission and the reopening of churches in the occupied northwest; Stalin’s 1943 concession.)
  • Davis, Nathaniel. A Long Walk to Church. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2003. (The wartime religious revival; the 1943 turn.)
  • Filimonov, Valentin P. Вырицкий старец преподобный Серафим [Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim]. St. Petersburg, 1990s–2000s. (The open church at Vyritsa; the wartime ministry; the death of Seraphima in 1945.)
  • Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate). Hagiographical notice, glorification of August 2000.