Martyrs and Confessors

Ecumenical Review, The, July, 2000 by Olivier Clement

Martyrdom, we know, has been and is the basic Christian experience. The word "martyr" means "witness", and martyrs are witnesses who confess their faith before the powerful of this world, and face their judgment. More often than not martyrs are not ascetics, spiritual athletes. They are ordinary people, who put their whole trust in Christ crucified and risen. When suffering comes their way, they do not rebel against it or become tense, but surrender themselves to Christ, identifying as it were with his sufferings, as if they were crucified with him. But then they experience the peace and joy of the resurrection flowing into them. Sometimes this can be seen, but at other times it all lies hidden in the paschal mystery of death. (Confessors bear similar witness, but escape death.)

A considerable number of the very many martyrs in Russia in the 20th century have been canonized by the church. Others are still being considered. In this article I shall avoid controversy and any attempt to classify, and I apologize for any omissions. I only pray that we may remember some faces, some gestures or words, an example, a prayer, and so a hope.

Before the second world war: the breaking of the storm

From the revolution onwards all the violence of modern atheism and materialism has been let loose on the Russian Church. From 1918 to 1941 it underwent one of the most terrible periods of persecution ever known by the Christian world, and martyrs and confessors numbered tens of thousands. There was chaotic violence, extreme but sporadic, during the civil war. There were systematic trials and executions during the great famine of 1922-23. There was the destruction of rural Christianity and deportations of village priests and cantors between 1928 and 1934 during land collectivization, and there were the massive Stalinist purges directed among others against intellectuals in 1937-38 (Fr Paul Florensky, the great religious scholar and philosopher, was shot in 1937). I shall give just three examples.

Metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd was condemned and executed in August 1922. He was a genuine martyr, with no political ambiguity whatsoever. He was immensely popular and his appointment had been confirmed by election, the 1918 council having reintroduced the election of bishops by the clergy and the people. He had been very open to the new authorities and did not condemn communists, but regarded them as "gentiles and tax-collectors" to whom the church was to bring the gospel. He had reached an amicable agreement over the problem of the confiscation of sacred objects during the great famine. His popularity -- in the city of the revolution! -- and his very openness made him a formidable personality and he refused to support a schismatic movement against the church of the patriarch. In the course of his trial (the result of which was predetermined) his bearing was simple and unaffected. His lawyer, Gurevitch, who was Jewish, was to state later, after having fled to the West, how much he had been impressed by the metropolitan's attitude. In his calm gentleness and love, you could feel, he said, the presence of One of whom this man was but the witness. When the metropolitan was brought into the courtroom, the crowd would bow before him, despite the brutality of the guards and indeed the risk of being arrested. He himself blessed them. During the hearings, he sought above all to clear those accused with him. In the end the president was moved to say to him, "All the time you have spoken of others. The court would like to hear what you can say about yourself." The metropolitan stood, puzzled, and then said, "I do not know what your judgment will be, whether it will be life or death, but whatever the verdict I raise my eyes fervently to heaven and cross myself and say, `Glory to you for all, Lord our God'." In prison, on the eve of his execution, he wrote, "Now I must go beyond all knowledge and all self-importance, and leave everything to grace."

I take my second example from a fine study by Vladimir Zielinsky published in Paris in the review Les quatre fleuves. The daughter of a priest asked her father for permission to study to become a schoolteacher. "So be it," he finally said, "but do not give up our faith." But she was influenced by atheist propaganda and returned home an ardent atheist. When religious festivals took place, she would organize protest processions around the church with her students bearing placards proclaiming, "Away with God!" She stirred up the population against her father. He used to travel by horse and cart to other villages, where there was no longer any church, to conduct confessions, weddings and burials. One day in the forest a stone was thrown at him. The horse brought him home wounded in the head, and two days later he died. There was no enquiry and the church was closed. "And now," says his daughter, thirty years later, "sometimes I think of all that and I pray to him as if he were a saint, `Father, forgive me, I was mad'."