The Confessors
The confessors — those who suffered for the faith and survived: imprisoned, exiled, worked in the camps, but not killed, or dying a natural death after their sufferings. This section treats St. Tikhon, the confessor-patriarch who bore the first years of the persecution, and the confessors who came home from prison and camp: St. Luke of Crimea, St. Afanasy Sakharov, and others.
Tradition: Russian Orthodox
Overview
The category “New Martyrs and Confessors” holds two crowns, and this section treats the second. The confessor (ispovednik) confessed Christ under persecution — arrest, interrogation, prison, camp, exile — and survived it, or died naturally afterward. The confessors are as much a part of the Sobor as the martyrs, and some of the most luminous figures of the whole persecution belong to their number.
The first file, St. Tikhon and the Patriarchal Church, treats the confessor-patriarch. St. Tikhon led the Church through the revolution, the separation decree, the valuables campaign, and the Renovationist schism, bore imprisonment and unrelenting pressure, and died in 1925 — worn down but not executed, and venerated as a confessor. His life is deferred to his own collection and summarized here only in his confessing role.
The second file, The Confessors of the Faith, treats those who came home: above all St. Luke (Voino-Yasenetsky) of Crimea, the surgeon-archbishop who spent eleven years in prison and exile and won the Stalin Prize for his medical work; St. Afanasy (Sakharov), Bishop of Kovrov, who spent decades in confinement; and the wider company of confessors who bridged the persecuted Church and its later revival.
Contents
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| saint-tikhon-and-the-patriarchal-church.md | St. Tikhon as confessor; his leadership through 1917–1925; deferred to his own collection and linked |
| the-confessors-of-the-faith.md | Those who survived prison and camp — St. Luke of Crimea, St. Afanasy Sakharov, and others |
See Also
- What a New Martyr Is — the martyr / confessor distinction
- The Hierarch-Martyrs — the bishops who were killed rather than survived
- St. Tikhon of Moscow — the confessor-patriarch’s own collection
- St. Luke of Crimea — the surgeon-confessor’s own collection
References
- Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984.