Alexander
Kravetsky Mar 6th, 2012
No book on
the history of the Russian Church in the twentieth century can be complete
without including the name of St. Athanasius (Sakharov), Bishop of Kovrov, a
catacomb bishop who reunited with the Moscow Patriarchate in 1945. We will not,
however, discuss the historical events in which he participated, but rather how
holiness exists in time – all the more so, since we are considering the
twentieth century, which is nearly contemporary.
Icon of St.
Athanasius (Sakharov) the Confessor, Bishop of Kovrov. The icon was painted in
2006 for the Church of the Protection of the Theotokos in the Butyrskaya prison
from donations from the parishioners of the St. Nicholas Church in Biryulyovo.
Almost Our
Contemporaries
The
beginning of the Church-wide veneration of the New Martyrs and Confessors of
Russia allowed us the entirely unique experience of witnessing the attainment
of holiness. Not long ago, our lives were separated from the earthly lives of
the saints by centuries. While reading about early Christian martyrs, the
temporal distance deprived us of the ability to relive their struggles. In the
lives of the saints we studied historical details, searching for moral lessons
while enjoying the exquisite style of Byzantine hagiography. We could not do
one thing: experience for ourselves the fear and pain of a person thrown into
an arena teeming with wild beasts.
Bp.
Athanasius (Sakharov), 1962
It has been
centuries since people forgot how to read the lives of saints as eyewitness
accounts. Not incidentally, literary historians have noted a fundamental
abstraction in hagiography and the refusal of authors to specify historical
details. D.S. Likhachev[1] once pointed out that the authors of the lives of
Russian saints wrote descriptively and without political terminology about very
specific details. Instead of “burgomaster” [posadnik] they wrote of “a certain
nobleman” or of “an elder,” and instead of “Prince,” they wrote of “a ruler of
that land.” The names of episodic characters were eliminated and replaced with
the descriptive “a man,” “a certain maiden,” etc. In practice, glorification by
the Russian Orthodox Church took place after a considerable time. However, the
glorification of the New Martyrs and Confessors made it impossible to leave out
historical specificity.
The new
saints are practically our contemporaries. They are the contemporaries of our
grandparents or great-grandparents, and so their lives belong to a time we know
about not only from books, but also from the stories of our older generations.
In these accounts, the abstract words “ruler of the city” cannot appear, simply
because the portraits of these rulers hung in the schools our parents attended.
And children with red scarves [i.e., Young Pioneers], whose descendants we are,
brought these rulers flowers on the anniversaries of the revolution.
An
Unnoticed Revolution
The
difference between the approach of historians and hagiographers is well known.
The historian describes the life of a person, his biography, while the
hagiographer writes a description of his holiness. The short span of time
separating us from the New Martyrs allows us the opportunity to see this
difference.
Sergei
Sakharov was born into a family with a traditional, provincial way of life. As
a child he went to church joyously and was very fond of solemn hierarchal
church services, and at home played “church” in bishop’s robes constructed from
his mother’s shawl; he imitated the service, by censing, blessing, and so on.
As he matured he had the ability to bypass, and perhaps even to ignore, the
temptations of his times. Very indicative in this respect are the years the
saint spent studying at the seminary in Vladimir. His memories of seminary life
were always very warm. An historian, however, might reconstruct the seminary
life of those years as anything but idyllic.
Here are
the memories of seminary life in Vladimir of Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky),
who was a supervisor there from 1895 to 1897: “I took vodka away from the
seminarians and reprimanded them severely, though not publically. While moving
tables, the caretaker of the diocesan dormitory found a forged bottom shelf (an
armful of banned books fell out of it), and I investigated the matter
privately. It happened that sometimes in the evening I would go around the
dormitories and suddenly hear, ‘Oh, what if I slipped you an ace!’ Obviously,
the seminarians were quietly playing cards. I broke the silence: ‘Yes, yes,
good move!’ Confusion then followed.”
In 1903,
when the future saint studied there, the seminary in Vladimir had a secret cell
of the Social Democratic Party, which broke up after one of its organizers was
killed by the careless handling of explosives. An underground seminary congress
gathered there in the summer of 1905. In December of the same year the
seminarians went on strike.
Characteristically,
Sergei Sakharov, who was a witness of these events, did not talk about them at
all. One gets the impression that social life and political passions did not
particularly interest him. Remembering his seminary years, he often spoke of
Archbishop Nicholas (Nalimov) of Vladimir, a strict ascetic who was an expert
on the divine services. It seems that the rest passed by unnoticed and did not
have much significance for the saint.
After
seminary he studied at the Moscow Theological Academy (here Sergei Sakharov was
tonsured a monk with the name of Athanasius). He also taught and participated
in the Local Council, after which the monk Athanasius returned to the Vladimir
Diocese.
Bp.
Athanasius (Sakharov), Ishim, 1943
“We Need
Not Fear Prison…”
He became a
bishop in 1921. Before his consecration to the episcopacy the future hierarch
was summoned to the GPU[2] and threatened with repression if he agreed to
become a bishop. Before the Revolution, being a bishop meant having many
significant social benefits, but by 1920 a hierarch was guaranteed persecution
and deprivation.
St.
Athanasius was arrested for the first time just seven months after his
consecration. By his own count, over the years he spent only two years, nine months,
and two days in diocesan service, yet “in bonds and bitter work” (i.e., prison
and exile) he spent twenty-one years, eleven months, and twelve days.
We know
much about prisoner life. In reading the letters of St. Athanasius from the
camps and the memories of people who saw him there, one is struck by his
incredible ability to ignore the inhumane living conditions and by his strength
to remain a monk in the face of it all.
Here is an
excerpt from a letter to his mother from the Taganskaya prison, where he was
awaiting exile: “Now I see here bishops and priests who are in prison for
Christ. I hear about Orthodox pastors in other prisons who are all complacent
and calm. <…> We need not fear prison. It is better to be here than to be
free, and I am not exaggerating. Here is the true Orthodox Church. We are
inside as if in isolation during an epidemic, though we do experience some
restriction. Yet how many sorrows you have! <…> Constantly waiting to be
called to visit those whom you do not want to visit. <…> And trying to
stand firm. We are almost guaranteed not to experience this. So when I receive
condolences on my present situation, I am very embarrassed. The plight of free
Orthodox Christians that carry the banner of Orthodoxy is much greater. Help
them, O Lord.”
His letters
from camp resemble those of a pilgrim writing from a distant monastery. Here is
his description of a 1940 Nativity service held in a shack on bunks in the
White Sea-Baltic Canal (Belomorcanal) camp and of his visit to the graves of people
close to him: “This night, with some breaks (I fell asleep … woe to lazy me…) I
served a festive vigil. After the service I went to glorify the newly-born
Christ at the graves of the departed and the cells of the living. Here and
there I sang the festal troparion and kontakion, then the augmented litany,
changing only one petition, and then the special dismissal, after which I
congratulated the living and departed, ‘all ye for Him are still alive.’ As if
I saw everyone and was comforted by collective prayer. And how many places I
visited spiritually… I started, of course, with the grave of my sweet mother,
and then visited my father, my Godmother, and then traveled around Holy Russia,
first to Petushki, and then to Vladimir, Moscow, Kovrovo, Bogolyubovo, Sobinka,
Orekhovo, Sergiev, Romanov-Borisoglebsk, Yaroslavl, Rybinsk, St. Petersburg,
and then to places of exile: Kem, Ust-Sysol’sk, Turukhansk, Yeniseisk,
Krasnoyarsk…”
To comment
on this “Christmas portrait,” it should be added that this letter was written
by a fifty-one-year-old man with heart disease, who could barely breath when
walking, but had to walk daily five kilometers to his workplace. The work
consisted of unloading firewood, logging, snow removal, and more. Any
Church-related items were not permitted in camp. Everything was taken away, not
only books but even a hand-painted Easter egg received by mail. Despite
official permission for imprisoned priests to keep their long hair, the
hierarch was forced to cut his hair.
In some
camps the prisoners were allowed to have books. Here is how E.V. Apushkina
describes the arrival of Hieromonk Hierax (Bocharov) to the Mariinsky Camp in
1944: “The door opened. There was the sound of rolling dice, swear words, and
prison jargon. The air was blue with smoke. The rifleman nudged Fr. Hierax and
pointed out his bunk. The door slammed shut. Stunned, Fr. Hierax stood at the
doorstep. Someone said to him: ‘Go over there!’ Going in the indicated
direction, he stopped at an unexpected sight. On the lower bunk, his legs
tucked up, surrounded by books, sat Bishop Athanasius. When he raised his eyes
and saw Fr. Hierax, whom he knew, His Grace was not surprised and did not greet
him, but simply said: ‘Read! Tone such-and-such, troparion such-and such!’ ‘Can
we read here?’ ‘Yes we can, we can! Read!’ Continuing the service with the
bishop, Fr. Hierax noticed that all anxiety and all heaviness that had been
pressing on his soul were immediately gone.”
“Prayer
Will Save You All…”
The retired
bishop spent the last years of his life in the city of Petushki, Vladimir
region. He was denied political rehabilitation. During the Khrushchev period
former Soviet party functionaries arrested during the purges were politically
rehabilitated. Church leaders were still considered enemies of the people, so
the authorities did not question the correctness of their condemnation.
St.
Athanasius spent the remainder of his life after his return from the camps in
Petushki. The house where the saint reposed has been preserved. Pious
parishioners turned this house into a small museum. In the room are his
personal items: a bed, desk, icons, embroidered vestments, and a wooden
Panagia, carved and painted by him.
In 1958,
the prosecutor of the Vladimir region wrote that since Bishop Athanasius had for
over thirty years not concealed that he was “a believer and servant of the
Church, and so could not agree with the atheistic authorities in matters of
religious views and worship,” his sentence was therefore fair and there was no
reason for rehabilitation.[3]
The bishop,
during his last years, could serve only at home in his cell – which had its
advantages, not only because of the widespread reduction of church services,
which greatly distressed Bishop Athanasius, but because only in his cell could
he pray before icons of the last Tsar and his family and of Patriarch Tikhon,
both of whom he greatly venerated. Only where the saint was devoid of prying
eyes could he strictly fast and pray for Russia each year on November 7 and
8(Soviet holidays dedicated to the October Revolution).
The saint’s
forced isolation was not reclusion. He kept up correspondence with spiritual
children and people continually came to him with their questions and problems.
Church historian M. E. Gubonin,[4] who visited Bishop Athanasius in 1958,
compared the hierarch with the bishops exiled during the Ecumenical Councils.
He wrote: “Looking at him you can vividly imagine that remote epoch of dogmatic
and iconoclastic troubles in Byzantium, when young hierarchs and monks, zealots
for pure Orthodoxy, were exiled and forgotten by all, and after decades had
passed they stood before the eyes of the younger generation like people from
another world, gray-haired and with trembling hands, but with an unconquerable,
strong spirit still blazing with the flame of their unshakable faith in the
beliefs to which they so readily sacrificed their oppressive exilic life.”
St.
Athanasius died on October 28, 1962. His last words were “Prayer will save you
all!” He was buried in the cemetery of the Presentation in Vladimir, adjacent
to the barbed wire fence of the Vladimir prison that he repeatedly had to
visit. After his glorification in the autumn of 2000, the saint’s relics were
transferred to the Monastery of the Nativity of the Mother of God, of which he
had been superior in 1920. For a long time the monastery housed the Vladimir
Cheka.[5] The procession with the relics went along the same path that Bishop
Athanasius followed when led from prison for interrogation.
The Right
for An Anachronism
Here we are
attempting to speak of a saint, not of a historical figure. Therefore, we do
not write about St. Athanasius’ participation in the Local Council of
1917-1918, nor about his struggles against the Renovationists,[6] nor about his
break with Metropolitan Sergei (Stragorodsky),[7] and then, after the Second
World War, his reunification with the Moscow Patriarchate, nor of his many
years as a corrector of liturgical books. We are not interested in him as an
historical person, but rather in how sanctity triumphs over historical time.
The
phenomenon of the New Martyrs began to be understood only in the 1960s (in 1981
the New Martyrs of Russia were glorified by ROCOR and in 2000 by the Moscow
Patriarchate). But the words “New Martyr” first appeared in documents of the
Local Council of 1917-1918, when no political analyst could possibly have
predicted the scale of church persecution. In 1918, St. Athanasius, together
with Professor B. A. Tourayev,[8] was commissioned by the Local Council to
compose the “Service to All Saints of the Russian Land,” which included this
troparian to the New Martyrs:
O ye holy
hierarchs, royal passion-bearers and pastors,
monks and
laymen, ye countless new-martyrs and confessors,
men, women
and children, flowers of the spiritual meadow of Russia,
who
blossomed forth wondrously in time of grievous persecutions,
bearing
good fruit for Christ in your endurance:
Entreat
Him, as the One that planted you,
that He
deliver His people from godless and evil men,
and that
the Church of Russia be made steadfast
through
your blood and suffering,
unto the
salvation of our souls.
When these
troparia were being written, the Bolshevik war against the Russian Church was
just beginning and few believed that this persecution would only increase. An
historian analyzing the trends of these times might say that things could have
evolved differently. Yet holiness is a victory over time and the holy
hagiographer can afford to write what the historian would call an anachronism.
[1] Dmitry
Sergeyevich Likhachov (November 28 [O.S. November 15], 1906, St. Petersburg –
September 30, 1999, St. Petersburg) was an outstanding scholar who was
considered the world’s foremost expert in Old Russian language and literature.
He has been revered as “the last of old St Petersburgians,” “a guardian of
national culture,” and “Russia’s conscience.”
[2] The State
Political Directorate was the secret police of the Russian Soviet Federative
Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and the Soviet Union from 1922 until 1934. Formed
from the Cheka, the original Russian state security organization, on February
6, 1922, it was initially known under the Russian abbreviation GPU–short for
“Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravlenie of the NKVD of the RSFSR” (Государственное Политическое Управление НКВД РСФСР). Its first chief was the Cheka’s former chairman, Felix Dzerzhinsky.
[3] Rehabilitation
(Russian: реабилитация,
transliterated in English as reabilitatsiya or reabilitacija) in the context of
the former Soviet Union, and the Post-Soviet states, was the restoration of a
person who was criminally prosecuted without due basis to the state of
acquittal.
[4] Mikhail
Efimovich Gubonin (June 24, 1907 Moscow province – October 9, 1971 Moscow) —
Russian artist, church historian, archivist, author of several literary works.
[5] Cheka (Chrezvychaynaya Komissiya,
Extraordinary Commission) was the first of a succession of Soviet state
security organizations. It was created by decree on December 20, 1917, by
Vladimir Lenin and subsequently led by aristocrat-turned-communist Felix
Dzerzhinsky. After 1922, the Cheka underwent a series of reorganizations into
bodies whose members continued to be referred to as “Chekisty” (Chekists) until
the late 1980s.
[6] The Renovationist Church (Russian:
Obnovlencheskaya Tserkov), a reform movement supported by the Soviet
government, was a federation of several reformist church groups that took over
the central administration of the Russian Orthodox church in 1922 and for over
two decades controlled many religious institutions in the Soviet Union.
[7] Seeking to convince Soviet authorities to
stop the campaign of terror and persecution against the Church, Metropolitan
Sergei sought means of peaceful reconciliation with the government. On July 29,
1927, he issued his infamous Declaration, in which he professed the absolute
loyalty of the Russian Orthodox Church to the Soviet Union and to its
government’s interests. The Declaration, albeit well intentioned, sparked
immediate controversy among Russian churchmen, many of whom (including many
notable and respected bishops in prisons and exile) broke communion with Sergei.
Later, some of these bishops reconciled with him, but St. Athanasius and many
other bishops remained in opposition to the “official Church” until the
election of Patriarch Alexei I in 1945.
[8] Boris Aleksandrovich Turaev (Born July 24
[Aug. 5 O.S.], 1868 – July 23, 1920, in Petrograd (St. Petersburg). Russian
Orientalist. Founder of the Russian school of the history and philology of the
ancient East. Seminal figure in Russian Egyptology and Ethiopian studies.
Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1918; corresponding member,
1913).
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