The Priest and Lay Martyrs

The great mass of the New Martyrs: not the bishops but the parish priests who would not abandon their churches, the deacons and monastics, and the lay believers — the tserkovnitsy, the churchwardens, the ordinary faithful — who make up the overwhelming majority of those who died for the faith and of whom most are known, if at all, only as a name in an interrogation file. This file describes the pattern of their martyrdom and gives representative documented cases, while insisting that the multitude is mostly nameless.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

The Base of the Martyred Church

The hierarch-martyrs are the most visible of the New Martyrs, but they are the smallest part of them. The overwhelming majority were parish clergy and laypeople — the priests who kept serving after their churches were ordered shut, the deacons and readers, the monks and nuns turned out of destroyed monasteries, and above all the ordinary believers who would not stop being believers. Of the more than 36,000 persons documented in the PSTGU database of those who suffered for the faith, the great bulk are priests and laity, not bishops (PSTGU, “За Христа пострадавшие,” pstgu.ru; see The Scale of the Persecution). And of these, most are known only as names — a date of arrest, a charge, a sentence, a date of execution, recovered from an NKVD file — with little or nothing of the interior life the hagiographer would want. The honest treatment of the priest and lay martyrs must therefore begin by admitting that the multitude is largely anonymous, and that the named, storied cases are the exception the archive happens to preserve (on the nature and limits of this evidence, see The Documentary Record).

The Pattern of the Priest-Martyr

The typical parish martyr followed a recognizable path. A priest continued to serve his parish after the revolution, resisting or simply outlasting the pressure to close his church, to hand over the sacred vessels, or to join the state-sponsored Renovationist schism. He was arrested — often more than once, in the successive waves of 1922, the collectivization years, and above all 1937 — on a fabricated political charge: membership in a nonexistent “counter-revolutionary organization,” “anti-Soviet agitation” (the notorious Article 58 of the criminal code), espionage, sabotage. He was interrogated, sometimes tortured, and pressed to name others and to renounce his priesthood. If he refused, he was sentenced by an extrajudicial body — a troika or a dvoika of NKVD officials — to be shot or sent to the camps, and the sentence was carried out quickly and in secret (Shkarovskii, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ pri Staline i Khrushcheve, Moscow, 1999, on the mechanism of clergy arrests and the extrajudicial sentencing; Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982, SVS Press, 1984, vol. 1). The martyrdom, in the Church’s later judgement, lay precisely in the fidelity that led to the arrest and in the refusal to buy life by apostasy or betrayal — the criterion that the canonization commission would later make central (see The Criteria and the Contested Cases).

Representative Documented Cases

A few cases can stand for the pattern, chosen because they are well documented and because they were among the priest- and lay-martyrs formally glorified.

The Butovo priests. The single largest documented concentration of glorified New Martyrs is at the Butovo firing range outside Moscow, where among the more than 20,000 shot in 1937–38 were some hundreds put to death on church-related charges — including, by the tabulation of the Butovo research, seven bishops, around fifteen archimandrites, and roughly six hundred priests and deacons, of whom over three hundred have been glorified (see The Butovo Firing Range). These are overwhelmingly ordinary parish clergy — men whose names are known only because the Butovo execution registers survived and were opened in the 1990s.

The lay martyrs. The laity died alongside the clergy, and the Church has been careful to glorify laypeople as well as priests, precisely to show that the martyrdom was the whole Church’s and not only the clergy’s. The Petrograd martyrs of 1922 already included two laymen — the law professor Yuri Novitsky and the lawyer Ivan Kovsharov, shot with Metropolitan Veniamin — glorified as lay martyrs (see The Martyred Bishops). Among the many lay New Martyrs later glorified are churchwardens, choir directors, and above all the devout laywomen who kept parishes functioning, hid and fed persecuted priests, preserved liturgical books and vessels, and were arrested for these very acts of fidelity; the pattern of the arrested tserkovnitsa (church-woman) recurs throughout the case files (Pospielovsky, 1984, vol. 1, on the central role of the laity, and especially laywomen, in sustaining church life under persecution; Christensen, The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia, Routledge, 2018, on the composition of the glorified, including laity). Their martyrdom answers a question the bishops’ cannot: it shows that the persecution fell not only on the institution but on simple belief, and that the Sobor of the New Martyrs is a cross-section of the whole people of God.

The monastics. When the monasteries were suppressed — the great houses closed in the 1920s, their communities scattered — the monks and nuns did not cease to be monastics. Many were arrested precisely as former monastics, an identity the state treated as inherently subversive, and shot or sent to the camps in the Terror; some continued their monastic life in secret until arrested. The venerable-martyrs (prepodobnomucheniki) of the suppressed monasteries form a distinct sub-group of the Sobor (Pospielovsky, 1984, vol. 1, on the suppression of the monasteries and the fate of the monastics; on the Optina community in particular, see The Optina Elders).

The Nameless Multitude

Even with these documented cases, the truth about the priest and lay martyrs is that they are, in the main, a multitude the records cannot individuate. For every glorified priest of Butovo there are believers whose files were destroyed, whose deaths went unrecorded, or whose cases the canonization commission could not resolve to the required standard of evidence. The Church’s response has been to glorify the whole body under a general commemoration: at the Jubilee Council of 2000 the Moscow Patriarchate glorified not only the individually named New Martyrs but “all the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, known and unknown,” precisely so that the anonymous multitude of parish clergy and laity would be commemorated with the named few (see The Feast and the Cult and The Criteria and the Contested Cases). The priest and lay martyrs are thus the reason the feast of the New Martyrs is, more than most saints’ feasts, a commemoration of the unknown — a liturgical acknowledgement that the great mass of those who died for the faith are remembered by God though their names are lost to the Church’s records (on this theological point, see The Theology of the New Martyrdom).

See Also

References

  • Shkarovskii, Mikhail V. Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ pri Staline i Khrushcheve. Moscow: Krutitskoe Patriarshee Podvor’e, 1999. (The mechanism of clergy arrests, Article 58, the troikas, and the extrajudicial sentencing.)
  • Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984. (The parish clergy, the suppression of the monasteries, and the central role of the laity, especially laywomen, in sustaining church life.)
  • Christensen, Karin Hyldal. The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia: Soviet Repression in Orthodox Memory. London: Routledge, 2018. (The composition of the glorified New Martyrs, including clergy and laity.)
  • PSTGU database “За Христа пострадавшие,” St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University, Moscow. pstgu.ru. (The documented body of clergy and lay sufferers.)