The Criteria and the Contested Cases

How the Moscow Patriarchate’s Synodal Canonization Commission actually worked: the criteria it applied — above all the negative test of non-betrayal — the way it read the NKVD interrogation files, the cases it withdrew or declined to advance, and the difficulty of the archives that has slowed the whole process to a near-standstill since 2011. This file goes behind the glorifications into the exacting and painful business of judging, from a persecutor’s paperwork, who died a faithful martyr.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

The Commission and Its Task

The individual glorifications of the Moscow Patriarchate rested on the work of the Synodal Commission for the Canonization of Saints, established in 1989 under the chairmanship of Metropolitan Yuvenaly (Poyarkov) of Krutitsy and Kolomna, which was charged with examining candidates for glorification and, above all, with assembling the cases of the New Martyrs from the newly and partially opened Soviet archives (on the Commission and Metropolitan Yuvenaly’s chairmanship, Christensen, The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia, Routledge, 2018, ch. 4). Its task was without real precedent in the Church’s history. Ordinarily a martyr’s cult grows from below over generations and the Church ratifies an established veneration (the pattern of most canonizations). Here the Commission worked in the opposite direction: from state archives it recovered the names and fates of persons often without any existing cult, examined each against a set of criteria, and proposed those who met them for glorification. It was, in effect, a work of archival forensics in the service of canonization (Christensen, 2018, ch. 4).

The Criteria

The Commission applied a set of criteria that combined the classic marks of martyrdom with tests specific to the Soviet conditions.

Suffering or death for the faith. The candidate must have suffered or been killed for Christ and the Church — not merely as a political figure, a class enemy, or a casualty of the general terror. Because the state framed almost every killing in political terms (see What a New Martyr Is), the Commission had to judge, from the file and the circumstances, that the true ground of the persecution was the person’s fidelity to the faith — that he was arrested and killed as a believer, however the charge was worded (Christensen, 2018, ch. 3–4).
No apostasy, no renunciation. The candidate must not have renounced the faith, abandoned his priesthood, or publicly denied Christ or the Church to save himself.
The negative test of non-betrayal. This is the criterion peculiar to the Soviet material and the most consequential. The candidate must not have informed on or given incriminating testimony against others — must not have, under interrogation, named fellow believers, denounced others, or otherwise cooperated with the NKVD against the Church in exchange for his life or a lighter sentence (Christensen, 2018, ch. 4, on the non-betrayal criterion as central to the Commission’s work). A man who died faithful to Christ but who, under torture, had signed testimony sending others to their deaths could not, on this criterion, be glorified as a martyr — however sympathetic his own suffering.
Not a Renovationist. A cleric who had joined the state-sponsored Renovationist schism, or another schism, could not be venerated as a martyr of the patriarchal Church even if later repressed (on the Renovationists, see The Revolution and the First Blood).

The Interrogation File as Evidence — and Its Two Edges

The application of these criteria depended almost entirely on the NKVD interrogation and case files, which are, paradoxically, the primary source for the martyrs (see The Documentary Record). The file cuts both ways, and this is the crux of the Commission’s difficulty. On the one hand, the file can establish a martyrdom: it records the charge, the interrogation, and — sometimes — the prisoner’s steadfast confession, his refusal to renounce his priesthood, his declining to name others. On the other hand, the same file can disqualify a candidate: the interrogation record may show the prisoner, under the “conveyor” of sleepless questioning and torture, breaking and giving the testimony the interrogators wanted — signing depositions that incriminated fellow clergy or laity (Christensen, 2018, ch. 4). The Commission thus had to read each file with a double question: does it show a confessor, or does it show a man who bought something by betrayal? And it had to do this knowing that the confessions in the files were often extracted by torture and may not reflect what the prisoner truly did or said — an uncertainty at the very heart of the evidence.

The Contested and Withdrawn Cases

The result was a body of cases that could not be resolved, or that were resolved against glorification, or that were reversed. Several kinds must be distinguished, and all are reported honestly.

Cases halted by the non-betrayal test. A number of candidates, otherwise sympathetic, were not advanced because their files showed them giving incriminating testimony against others. The Commission’s own explanations of its work acknowledge that such cases exist and that they were the hardest to judge (Christensen, 2018, ch. 4).
The Sergianism divergence. Because the Moscow Patriarchate glorified martyrs from within the Church that Metropolitan Sergius had led, it weighed differently the cases of those who had broken with Sergius — the Josephites and the Catacomb Church — some of whom ROCOR venerated precisely for that resistance. This produced a real divergence between the ROCOR and Moscow lists (see The Two Glorifications).
Rasputin and the extreme cases. At the opposite pole from withdrawal stands the pressure, from a fervent popular current, to glorify figures the Commission judged unfit — most notoriously Grigory Rasputin, whom some in the “tsar-redeemer” movement have sought to venerate; the Commission and the hierarchy firmly rejected such demands, and Metropolitan Yuvenaly publicly explained why figures like Rasputin (and Ivan the Terrible) could not be glorified (on the rejection of Rasputin and the resistance to the extreme monarchist current, Christensen, 2018, ch. 5; see Memory and Controversy).
Later reconsiderations. In the years after 2000, the Commission in a few instances reconsidered cases in the light of newly examined archival material and removed names from the calendar where the fuller record no longer supported the glorification — a painful but methodologically honest step, and one that underlines that the whole enterprise is evidence-bound rather than merely devotional (the practice of reconsidering and, in some cases, withdrawing glorifications in the light of further archival study is discussed in Christensen, 2018, ch. 4–5).

The Slowing of the Process

The most telling fact about the criteria is what happened when the archives began to close again. Through the 1990s and up to about 2000 the Commission had relatively wide access to the former KGB archives, and the great mass of the individual glorifications was accomplished in that window. After 2000, and especially after the mid-2000s, access to the investigation files was progressively re-restricted — new rules on personal data and on the archives, and a changed political climate, made it far harder for researchers and the Commission to examine the case files on which glorification depended. The consequence is visible in the numbers: the running total of individually canonized New Martyrs reached 1,774 by 1 January 2011, and thereafter the pace of new canonizations slowed almost to a halt (Christensen, 2018, ch. 4–5, on the re-restriction of the archives and the near-cessation of new canonizations after 2011; see The Scale of the Persecution). The slowdown is not a loss of will but a loss of evidence: with the files closed, the Commission cannot apply its own criteria, and it has declined — to its credit, on the repository’s reading — to glorify without the evidence rather than lower the standard.

What the Contested Cases Show

The existence of withdrawn, contested, and unresolved cases is sometimes treated as an embarrassment to the cult of the New Martyrs. It should be treated as the opposite: as the mark of an honest process. A Church that glorified everyone who died would be making a political gesture, not a discernment of sanctity; a Church that applies a stringent non-betrayal criterion, reconsiders cases against new evidence, refuses the extreme demands of the “tsar-redeemer” current, and stops canonizing when the archives close rather than proceeding without proof, is doing something harder and more truthful. The contested cases are where the criteria bite, and their existence is the guarantee that the glorified New Martyrs are a discerned body and not a round number (Christensen, 2018, ch. 4–5). The honest telling of the New Martyrs must therefore hold the glory and the difficulty together: a great cloud of witnesses, established case by painful case, from the paperwork of their persecutors, by a Church weighing evidence it could not always obtain and judging betrayals it could not always be sure of.

References

Christensen, Karin Hyldal. The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia: Soviet Repression in Orthodox Memory. London: Routledge, 2018. (The Synodal Canonization Commission and Metropolitan Yuvenaly; the criteria, especially non-betrayal; the reading of the interrogation files; the contested, withdrawn, and reconsidered cases; the rejection of Rasputin; the re-restriction of the archives and the running total of 1,774 by 2011.)
Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984. (The Renovationist schism and the Josephite/Catacomb opposition relevant to the contested cases.)
PSTGU database “За Христа пострадавшие,” St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University, Moscow. pstgu.ru. (The documentary base from which cases were drawn.)