by Stefano Caprio

A Russian online platform is currently broadcasting a series of documentaries entitled ‘The Living Word’, dedicated to great figures of Orthodoxy who were killed in the years following the Bolshevik Revolution. These figures remind us that one can give one’s life for ideals that unite religious faith, evangelical charity and love for one’s homeland – not to destroy the enemy, but to build a new world.

Martyrdom is the central message of Easter, which celebrates the death and resurrection of Christ, and in these years of bloody and religious conflict between East and West – from Russia to America, via Ukraine and the Middle East to the Holy Land – the number of innocent deaths is becoming increasingly impossible to count.

In the times we live in, ‘martyrdom’ has been replaced by ‘genocide’, reversing the testimony of those who give their lives for the faith with the anonymous masses united by ethnicity, language and ‘traditional values’ outraged by enemies, pointed to in equal measure by all parties involved in the ongoing hybrid and military conflicts, and projected also into the tragedies of past history, rewritten according to new political-ideological canons.

One of the most striking initiatives in this regard was the replacement of the “Gulag Museum”, founded in Moscow in 2001 by those who had spent several years in Soviet labour camps, with the “Museum of the Victims of the Nazi Genocide against the Soviet People”.

The previous version featured testimonies from people who had ended up in Stalin’s ‘meat grinder’, alongside official statistics on the repressions of the 1930s, whilst the new museum focuses on the heroism of the resistance to the invasion of Operation Barbarossa, ordered by Hitler in 1941 and repelled at the cost of millions of lives, from Stalingrad to Leningrad and across Soviet Ukraine.

The rhetoric of Victory becomes the new proclamation of Russia’s rebirth in the face of the Western Antichrist, which constitutes the fundamental justification for Putin’s war, launched over four years ago against Ukraine with the intention of bringing about the definitive Apocalypse of the Russian World against all the demons arrayed throughout the universe, now even around the Moon with the new American Artemis II mission, which the Russians would instead like to claim as the ‘Russian Moon’ (and quite a bit Chinese too).

It is therefore striking to see a television initiative that returns to the memory of Soviet victims, precisely during these days of remembrance of Christian martyrdom. On 5 April, Catholic Easter Sunday and Orthodox Palm Sunday, the Russian online platform Okko is premiering a series of documentaries entitled Živoe Slovo, the “Living Word”, dedicated to the martyrs and confessors during the years following the Bolshevik Revolution.

These are four episodes on “the lives of 20th-century Russian saints”, faithful to Christian ideals during the years of atheist persecution. Whilst undoubtedly significant for patriotic propaganda promoting the superiority of the “true Russian faith” – a narrative in which they were certainly not voluntary protagonists – their stories help to remind us that holiness in Russia is far more than mere political-religious pride.

The stories to be broadcast are those of the missionary martyr Nikolai Varzhansky, entitled “I am going into eternity”, of the martyr priest Roman (Medved), “Always seeking perfection”, of the martyr Tatiana Grimblit, “I would like to offer my life to you”, and of the martyr bishop Fadei (Uspensky), “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”.

Their stories unfold across the whole of Russia, from Petrozavodsk to Tomsk, from Sevastopol to Perm, featuring over twenty hours of interviews with historians, researchers and members of the Orthodox clergy, based on significant archival materials, documents and film footage, including various stylistic choices, such as the reproduction of Faddey’s homilies in the form of the archbishop’s direct speech, without adding any further words.

The production was supported by the Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives, bringing together a group of young directors and composers under the supervision of the Orthodox Archimandrite Damaskin (Orlovsky), a member of the Synodal Commission for the Canonisation of Saints.

Nikolai Varzhansky was born in 1881 in Volhynia, a region in western Ukraine, and completed his seminary studies at the Moscow Theological Academy in 1907 with a thesis on the relationship between Orthodox and Latin theology, drawing on the legacy of the great early 17th-century theologian Petro Mohyla, one of the spiritual founders of Ukraine.

That same year he married Zinaida Neofitova, daughter of another priest, Neofit Ljubimov—a well-known missionary and preacher—who was later shot alongside him by the Soviets in 1918. He joined his father-in-law in missionary work aimed at the Christian formation of the people, and in 1910 he published an ‘Anti-Sectarian Orthodox Catechism’, which was widely circulated and remains highly relevant even today, when, despite formal membership of the Orthodox Church, a large part of the Russian population turns to the pagan deities of the ancient Slavs.

Father Roman (Medved), born in 1874, was a spiritual son of Saint John of Kronstadt, the Russian “John Bosco” who, in the early 20th century, devoted himself to assisting the poor and young people, proposing a socially and politically active version of Orthodoxy whilst preaching from his island of Kronstadt opposite the port of St Petersburg. Ordained a priest in 1901, Father Roman carried out his ministry in the imperial capital and then in Sevastopol in Crimea, as chaplain to Russian sailors.

From 1918, he formed a very fervent community in Moscow, seeking to demonstrate loyalty to the new regime, but was nevertheless arrested in 1931, at the onset of Stalinist terror, and sentenced to 10 years in a labour camp.

He was released in poor health in 1936, but the following year they sought to arrest him again; by then he was on the brink of death, which occurred on 8 September 1937. His remains were displayed in 1999, on the eve of the Jubilee, in the Moscow church of the Protection of the Mother of God on Liščikovaja Hill, overlooking the banks of the Moskva River.

Tatiana Grimblit was born in 1903 in the Siberian city of Tomsk; at just 17 years of age she lost her father and began working as a teacher in a children’s home. Raised with a deep Christian spirit, she wished to devote herself wholeheartedly to loving her neighbour; in 1920, the civil war between the Red and White Armies ended in Siberia, and a period of repression began, marked by arrests and detentions.

She decided to distribute all her possessions and whatever she collected from the churches of Tomsk to feed the prisoners in the city jail, trying to come to an agreement with the guards; for this charitable activity she was arrested several times, charged with ‘anti-Soviet propaganda in aid of counter-revolutionary elements’.

The Troika of the NKVD, the summary tribunal of the political police, sentenced her to death by firing squad, which took place on 23 September 1937 at the Butovo firing range on the outskirts of Moscow, now a memorial site for the martyrs of the revolutionary period.

Archbishop Faddey (Uspensky), born in 1872 in the Nizhny Novgorod region, was also close to Saint John of Kronstadt, whom he met whilst a seminarian at the Moscow Theological Academy, where he became the spiritual son of the starets German, who lived in a skete, a hermitage just outside the Lavra of St Sergius of Radonezh.

In 1908 he became bishop in Volhynia, maintaining strict monastic customs, before being arrested in 1922, having weathered the revolutionary storm by travelling between Ukraine and the Caucasus to assist the faithful as far as Vladikavkaz.

He was very close to Patriarch Tikhon (Bellavin), elected at the 1917 Council as a bastion of the Church against revolutionary atheism, entering and leaving prisons and travelling through the dioceses left without pastors.

Until he was arrested again in Tver, north of Moscow, in 1937 on charges of leading a ‘monarchist-ecclesiastical association’, with his execution by firing squad taking place on 31 December of that year; his remains are venerated in the Cathedral of the Ascension in Tver.

These and many other Russian Orthodox martyrs remind us that one can truly lay down one’s life for ideals that unite religious faith, evangelical charity and love for one’s homeland—not to destroy the enemy, but to build a new world.

Their lives are not propaganda, but a testimony to a force greater than any enmity or ideology, and from their blood we may hope that a renewed Church, a purified people, and a truly Christian Russia may arise.

RED LANTERNS IS THE ASIANEWS NEWSLETTER DEDICATED TO CHINA. WOULD YOU LIKE TO RECEIVE IT EVERY THURSDAY? TO SUBSCRIBE, CLICK HERE.

• Russian
• World