The Confessors of the Faith

The confessors who came home: those who suffered years of prison, camp, and exile for the faith and survived, or died a natural death after their sufferings. This file treats above all St. Luke (Voino-Yasenetsky) of Crimea, the surgeon-archbishop who spent eleven years in confinement and won the Stalin Prize for his medicine; St. Afanasy (Sakharov), Bishop of Kovrov, who spent some three decades in prisons, camps, and exile; and the wider company of confessors who bridged the persecuted Church and its later revival.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

The Confessor’s Crown

Not every witness of the persecution was killed. A great number confessed the faith through arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, forced labour, and exile — and survived, or died naturally after release. These are the ispovedniki, the confessors, and the Church venerates them alongside the martyrs in the single Sobor of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia (on the category, see What a New Martyr Is). Their confession was often longer and, in a sense, harder than the martyr’s: the martyr’s ordeal ended with the bullet, while the confessor bore decades of the camps and returned to a Church still under the boot. Two figures stand for the whole company.

St. Luke (Voino-Yasenetsky) of Crimea

The most celebrated of the confessors is St. Luke (Valentin Feliksovich Voino-Yasenetsky), Archbishop of Simferopol and Crimea (1877–1961), a man whose life joined two vocations almost unheard-of in combination: he was at once a bishop of the Church and a distinguished surgeon and medical scientist. His life is treated in full in his own collection (see St. Luke of Crimea); here it is enough to mark his place among the confessors.

Trained as a surgeon before the revolution, Voino-Yasenetsky was ordained priest in 1921 and consecrated bishop in 1923, in the very teeth of the persecution — an act of open confession, since to become a bishop then was to volunteer for the state’s list of enemies. He was arrested repeatedly and endured, in all, some eleven years of prison and Siberian exile across three separate periods of confinement between the 1920s and the early 1940s, subjected to the interrogators’ “conveyor” of sleepless questioning, yet never renouncing either his priesthood or his faith; he is said to have appeared for interrogation and even to trial in his riasa and cross (the account of his arrests and exiles is given in his memoir and the standard biographies; see St. Luke of Crimea). What makes his case singular is that his medical genius was too valuable for the state to destroy: during the Second World War he served as a leading surgeon treating the wounded even while an exiled bishop, and in 1946 he was awarded the Stalin Prize for his scientific monographs — above all his classic Essays on the Surgery of the Suppurative Infections (Ocherki gnoinoi khirurgii) and his work on regional anaesthesia — a state honour given to a man the same state had imprisoned for his faith (the Stalin Prize of 1946 and his surgical works are documented in the standard accounts of his life; see St. Luke of Crimea). He ended his life as ruling archbishop of Crimea, blind in his last years, and died in 1961 a free man and a confessor. He was glorified by the Moscow Patriarchate — locally in Crimea in 1995/1996 and for the whole Church among the Sobor of New Martyrs and Confessors — and his relics in Simferopol are a major site of veneration (see St. Luke of Crimea for the full account of his glorification and cult). St. Luke is the emblem of the confessor precisely because his witness was so public and so paradoxical: a man the Soviet state could neither silence nor spare.

St. Afanasy (Sakharov), Bishop of Kovrov

If St. Luke is the confessor the state could not destroy, St. Afanasy (Sergei Grigorievich Sakharov), Bishop of Kovrov (1887–1962), is the confessor the state simply could not stop confining. A liturgical scholar of great learning — he is remembered as the compiler of the service to All the Saints of Russia — Afanasy was consecrated bishop in 1921 and thereafter spent the overwhelming majority of the next three decades in prisons, camps, and exile: by the common reckoning of his own accounts, roughly thirty years in confinement or banishment, with only a few years of freedom in between, released for good only in the mid-1950s (his own tally of his years of imprisonment and exile is recorded in his letters and the biographical literature; the standard figure is on the order of three decades of confinement out of the years of his episcopate). Afanasy belonged to the number of bishops who, after Metropolitan Sergius’s Declaration of 1927, separated from Sergius’s administration in conscience while never joining any schism or breaking the unity of the faith — a “non-commemorating” confessor who nonetheless, at the end of his life, recognized the reconciled Patriarchate and died in its communion, an example often cited of confession without schism (on Afanasy’s stance toward the Declaration and his eventual reconciliation, see the discussion of the Sergianism question in The Glorifications: Methodology; his life is summarized in the OCA synaxarion and OrthodoxWiki, “Athanasius (Sakharov) of Kovrov”). He was glorified by the Moscow Patriarchate among the Sobor of New Martyrs and Confessors at the Jubilee Council of 2000. His witness shows the confessor’s characteristic endurance — decades of imprisonment borne without renouncing the faith and without tearing the Church.

The Wider Company

Behind these two stand a great multitude of confessors of every rank. There were bishops who spent the 1930s in the camps and lived to help rebuild the Church after 1943. There were priests who served secretly in the underground “Catacomb” communities, baptizing and communing the faithful in apartments and forests when the churches were shut. There were monastics who kept their vows in secret after their monasteries were destroyed, and laypeople — including the tserkovnitsy, the devout women who so often kept parish life alive — who hid priests, preserved the vessels and books, and passed the faith to the next generation through the worst of the terror (Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982, SVS Press, 1984, vol. 1, on the underground Church and the role of the laity; on the documentary traces of these figures, see The Documentary Record). Many of them are named in the PSTGU database of those who suffered for the faith; a smaller number have been formally glorified; the rest are commemorated as the confessors “known to God” in the general glorification of the Sobor (see The Scale of the Persecution and The Feast and the Cult).

The confessors are indispensable to the honest telling of the New Martyrs’ story for a particular reason: they are the living bridge. Because they survived, the memory of the persecuted Church did not die with the martyrs but was carried by those who came home from the camps into the Church of the later twentieth century, and it is in large part through their testimony — St. Luke’s memoir, Afanasy’s letters, the recollections of returned confessors — that the Church could later reconstruct the lives of the martyrs who did not survive to tell their own. The confessor’s crown and the martyr’s crown belong to one Sobor, and the confessors are, in the order of history, the ones who made the martyrs remembered.

References

Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984. (The underground Church; the confessors and the laity; the reconstruction of the persecuted Church.)
Voino-Yasenetsky, St. Luke (Valentin). Memoirs (autobiographical account, “I Loved Suffering…”), and the standard biographies; the surgical works Ocherki gnoinoi khirurgii [Essays on the Surgery of the Suppurative Infections] and the Stalin Prize of 1946 — sourced in full in the dedicated collection St. Luke of Crimea.
OrthodoxWiki and Orthodox Church in America synaxarion, “Athanasius (Sakharov) of Kovrov.” (Afanasy’s episcopate, his decades of imprisonment and exile, his stance toward the 1927 Declaration and his reconciliation, and his glorification in 2000; used to locate the account.)