What a New Martyr Is

The terminology of the category: novomucheniki i ispovedniki Rossiiskie, “the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.” This file distinguishes the martyr who dies for Christ from the confessor who suffers and survives, and both from the passion-bearer who accepts an unjust death in a Christ-like spirit — three overlapping categories that the two great glorifications turned on — and sets out the theology of martyrdom under a state whose persecution was avowedly not religious but ideological.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

The Name

The Russian Church’s title for the class is Sobor novomuchenikov i ispovednikov Tserkvi Russkoi — “the Synaxis (or Assembly) of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church,” in older usage Rossiiskikh, “of Russia.” The two nouns are not synonyms but a pair, and the pairing is deliberate. A muchenik (μάρτυς, martyr) is one who was killed for Christ; an ispovednik (ὁμολογητής, confessor) is one who confessed the faith under persecution — imprisonment, torture, exile — and survived it (a distinction as old as the early Church, where the confessores were those who had suffered for the faith but not died, and were venerated in their lifetimes; see, for the ancient pattern, the treatment in The Documentary Record). The adjective “new” (novo-) marks these as the martyrs and confessors of the modern, twentieth-century persecution, distinguished from the martyrs of the early Church and from the earlier Russian saints. The persecution to which the name refers is the one that began with the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and ran, in waves of varying ferocity, until the Soviet state’s collapse (Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982, SVS Press, 1984, vol. 1, on the periodization).

Martyr, Confessor, Passion-Bearer

Three categories overlap in the Russian sanctoral vocabulary, and keeping them distinct is essential to understanding both the theology and the glorification debates.

The martyr (muchenik; hieromartyr, sviashchennomuchenik, for an ordained martyr; venerable-martyr, prepodobnomuchenik, for a monastic). The martyr is one put to death for confessing Christ. In the classic definition the martyrdom must be for the faith — the martyr dies rather than deny Christ, apostatize, or betray the Church. This is the load-bearing criterion, and under the Soviet conditions it became genuinely difficult to apply, because the state almost never framed its killings as religious. A priest was shot as a “counter-revolutionary,” a “saboteur,” a member of a fabricated “monarchist-fascist organization,” not as a Christian per se. The Church’s judgement in glorifying such a person is that the ostensible political charge was a mask, and that the true ground of the killing was the man’s fidelity to Christ and the Church (Christensen, The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia, Routledge, 2018, ch. 3, on the criterion and its application; on the criterion in the Moscow Patriarchate’s practice see The Criteria and the Contested Cases).

The confessor (ispovednik). The confessor suffered for the faith — was arrested, imprisoned, sent to the camps, exiled — but was not killed, or survived to die a natural death. St. Luke (Voino-Yasenetsky) of Crimea, the surgeon-archbishop who spent eleven years in prison and exile and died a free man in 1961, is the paradigm; St. Afanasy (Sakharov), Bishop of Kovrov, who spent some three decades in prisons, camps, and exile, is another (see The Confessors of the Faith). St. Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow, is venerated as a confessor: he was not executed but died in 1925 after imprisonment and unrelenting pressure (see St. Tikhon and the Patriarchal Church). The confessor’s crown is real but distinct from the martyr’s; the Church honours the endurance without asserting a violent death.

The passion-bearer (strastoterpets). This is a peculiarly Russian and Slavic category, without an exact Greek or Latin equivalent, and it is the subtlest of the three. The passion-bearer is one who accepts suffering and an unjust, violent death in a spirit of Christ-like non-resistance and forgiveness — but whose death is not, strictly, “for the faith.” The prototype is the eleventh-century princes Saints Boris and Gleb, the sons of St. Vladimir, who were murdered in a dynastic struggle and who chose not to resist, and who were glorified not as martyrs for Christ but as passion-bearers, imitators of Christ’s own innocent, non-resisting suffering (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, Harvard University Press, 1946, on the passion-bearers Boris and Gleb as a distinctively Russian type of sanctity). It was under this category — and not as martyrs — that the Moscow Patriarchate glorified the Emperor Nicholas II and his family in 2000: they were killed not for confessing the faith but as the deposed imperial family, and the Church honoured the manner of their dying, not a formal confession of Christ demanded and given at the point of death (see The Imperial Passion-Bearers). This choice of category was itself part of the debate, since the Russian Church Abroad had in 1981 glorified the same family as full martyrs [Disputed: the Royal Family’s category — ROCOR glorified them in 1981 as martyrs (muchenikí), within its Synaxis of the New Martyrs; the Moscow Patriarchate in 2000 glorified them as passion-bearers (strastoterptsy), a category honouring their Christ-like acceptance of death without asserting a death “for the faith.” The two acts reflect different theological judgements about the nature of their killing, not a disagreement about the facts of it. See The Glorifications: Methodology.].

The Theology of Martyrdom Under an Atheist State

The Soviet persecution posed a genuinely new problem for the theology of martyrdom, and it is worth stating precisely. In the classic persecutions — Roman, Persian, Islamic — the persecutor typically demanded apostasy: sacrifice to the gods, tread on the cross, deny Christ, and live. The martyr’s “no” was a religious act answered to a religious demand, and the evidentiary situation was, in principle, clean: the man died because he would not deny Christ. The Soviet state, by contrast, was ideologically committed to the disappearance of religion, not to the extraction of formal apostasy, and it clothed its repression in the language of politics and class war. Believers were shot as “kulaks,” “wreckers,” “spies,” members of invented conspiracies; the interrogation files record political, not creedal, charges (Shkarovskii, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ pri Staline i Khrushcheve, Moscow, 1999, on the political framing of anti-church repression; Christensen, The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia, 2018, ch. 3).

This created two theological tasks that the Church has had to perform in retrospect. The first is discernment of the true ground of death: to judge, from the surviving evidence, that a given killing was in substance a killing for Christ and the Church, whatever the paperwork said. Where a priest was arrested precisely because he was a priest who would not abandon his parish, refused to renounce his orders, or continued to serve after his church was closed, the Church has read the political charge as a pretext and the death as a martyrdom. The second task is the negative criterion: the martyr must not himself have bought his life or lightened his sentence by betraying others — by informing, by giving the testimony the interrogators wanted against fellow believers. This is why the surviving interrogation files matter so much and cut both ways: they can establish that a man died confessing the Church, and they can also show that a man, under torture, named others. The Moscow Patriarchate’s canonization commission made non-betrayal an explicit criterion, and it is one reason a number of cases were withdrawn or never advanced (see The Criteria and the Contested Cases; Christensen, 2018, ch. 4).

The deeper theology the category expresses is ancient: that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church (Tertullian, Apologeticus 50), and that the Church of Russia, having passed through a persecution larger in absolute numbers than any in her prior history, has been given a “cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) as the spiritual foundation of her renewal. Patriarch Tikhon himself, in the first months of the terror, framed the coming suffering in exactly these terms, calling the faithful to meet persecution with the endurance of the ancient confessors and anathematizing those who shed innocent blood (Patriarch Tikhon, Epistle of 19 January / 1 February 1918, in Pospielovsky, 1984, vol. 1). The full theological reflection is developed in The Theology of the New Martyrdom; here it is enough to fix the vocabulary and to note that the category is not a single simple thing but a graded family — martyr, hieromartyr, venerable-martyr, confessor, passion-bearer — each term doing precise work.

Why the Distinctions Matter

None of this is terminological fastidiousness for its own sake. The distinctions determine the count (a “New Martyr” in the strict sense is not every believer who suffered), they determine the glorification criteria (the negative test of non-betrayal applies to martyrs and confessors alike), and they determine the honest description of particular saints (the Royal Family are passion-bearers in Moscow’s reckoning, martyrs in the Church Abroad’s). A collection that blurs the terms will inflate the numbers and misdescribe the saints; one that keeps them sharp can tell the truth about both the scale and the particular cases. That discipline — inherited from the repository’s methodology — governs everything that follows (METHODOLOGY §4; see The Scale of the Persecution).

See Also

References

  • Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984. (The periodization of the persecution; Patriarch Tikhon’s 1918 epistle.)
  • Shkarovskii, Mikhail V. Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ pri Staline i Khrushcheve. Moscow: Krutitskoe Patriarshee Podvor’e, 1999. (The political framing of anti-church repression.)
  • Christensen, Karin Hyldal. The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia: Soviet Repression in Orthodox Memory. London: Routledge, 2018. (The criteria of martyrdom and their application; the non-betrayal test; the passion-bearer category for the Royal Family.)
  • Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind. Vol. 1, Kievan Christianity: The Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (Boris and Gleb and the passion-bearer type of Russian sanctity.)
  • Tertullian. Apologeticus 50 (“the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church”). — Scripture: Hebrews 12:1.