The Witness
The evidence and the meaning: the paradoxical documentary record on which knowledge of the New Martyrs rests, and the theology of the new martyrdom. This section treats the NKVD case files as the primary source that both preserves and limits what can be known, alongside the PSTGU database; and then the meaning the Russian Church has drawn from the martyrdom — the blood of the martyrs as the seed of the Church’s renewal.
Tradition: Russian Orthodox
Overview
Two questions remain after the history and the glorifications: how do we know what we know about the New Martyrs, and what does their martyrdom mean? This section answers both.
The first file, The Documentary Record, treats the sources — above all the NKVD interrogation and execution files, the primary evidence for most of the martyrs, which is at once a rich and a treacherous witness: it preserves names and fates that would otherwise be lost, but it is the persecutor’s own paperwork, its confessions extracted by torture, its access now restricted. It treats the PSTGU database and asks precisely what such evidence can and cannot establish.
The second file, The Theology of the New Martyrdom, treats the meaning: the ancient conviction that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church, applied to the Russian Church’s twentieth-century catastrophe and to the renewal that followed the Soviet collapse.
Contents
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| the-documentary-record.md | The NKVD case files as paradoxical primary source; the PSTGU database; what can and cannot be known |
| the-theology-of-the-new-martyrdom.md | The meaning for the Russian Church; the “seed of the Church”; martyrdom under an atheist state |
See Also
- The Scale of the Persecution — the numbers the record supports
- The Criteria and the Contested Cases — how the files were read for glorification
- The Feast and the Cult — how the martyrs are venerated
References
- PSTGU database “За Христа пострадавшие,” St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University, Moscow. pstgu.ru.
- Christensen, Karin Hyldal. The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia: Soviet Repression in Orthodox Memory. London: Routledge, 2018.