| Archbishop Hilarion clearly understood the renovationists’ lawlessness, and he conducted heated debates in Moscow with Alexander Vvedensky. As Archbishop Hilarion himself expressed it, he had Vvedensky “up against the wall” at these debates, and exposed all his cunning and lies. The renovationist bosses sensed that Archbishop Hilarion interfered with their doings, and they therefore exerted all efforts to deprive him of his freedom. In December 1923 Archbishop Hilarion was sentenced to three years in prison. He was taken to the prison camp in Kem, and then to Solovki. When the archbishop saw the horrific conditions in the barracks and the camp food, he said, “We won’t get out of here alive.” Archbishop Hilarion had embarked upon the path of the cross, which culminated in his blessed repose. Archbishop Hilarion’s path of the cross is of great interest to us, for in it is revealed the full magnificence of spirit of this martyr for Christ; therefore we will allow ourselves to take a more detailed look at this period in his life. Living in Solovki, Archbishop Hilarion preserved all those good qualities of soul that he had gained through his ascetic labors, both before and during his monastic life and as a priest and hierarch. Those who lived with him during those years were witnesses to his total monastic non-acquisitiveness, deep simplicity, true humility, and childlike meekness. He simply gave away everything he had when asked. He took no interest in his own things. That is why he needed someone to watch after his suitcase, out of mercy for him. He did have such an assistant at Solovki. Archbishop Hilarion could be insulted but he would never answer back; he might not even notice the attempt to insult him. He was always cheerful, and even if he was worried or distressed, he always tried to cover it up quickly with his cheerfulness. He looked at everything with spiritual eyes, and everything served for his spiritual profit. “At the Philemonov fishery,” one eyewitness related, “four and a half miles from the Solovki kremlin and main camp, on the shores of the small White Sea bay, Archbishop Hilarion and I, along with two other bishops and a few priests (all prisoners), were net-makers and fishermen. Archbishop Hilarion loved to talk about this work of ours using a rearrangement of the words of the sticheron for Pentecost: ‘All things aregiven by the Holy Spirit: before, fishermen became theologians, and now it’s the opposite—theologians have become fishermen.’” Thus did he humble himself before his new lot. |
| As soon as the column began its procession, it was attacked by a group proclaiming their support of a federalized Ukraine, who were wearing masks and carried bats and air pistols. Some witnesses say that both sides had firearms. Numerical superiority was on the side of the pro-unity supporters, who numbered several thousand, against the 300-400 federalist demonstrators. The latter had to retreat to a shopping mall and take cover. The police tried to keep the two sides separated by forming a cordon of officers, but were unsuccessful. Certain people with red armbands who, by all appearances, were provocateurs, played a special role in these events. Such bands were worn by both pro-unity and federalist demonstrators, as well as a number of policemen. It was specifically these people in red armbands, according to eyewitness reports, who opened fire and later threw explosive packages (firecrackers) from the roof of the Trade Union Building. As a result, the pro-unity activists broke through onto the Kulikovo Pole square, where the federalist camp was situated, and burned the camp. Fire in the Trade Union Building The videos recorded by participants in the events attest to the fact that the fire in the Trade Union Building began literally just a couple of minutes after the federalist camp was torched. In one video one can see how the fire appears simultaneously by the entrance to the building and in a fifth-floor window. The cause of the fire remains unclear as of yet. Investigators think that an explosive package or flare ignited plastic panelling on the premises but it is still unclear which side it was thrown by. The fire brigade arrived at the scene of the incident only 40 minutes after the fire broke out, The pro-unity activists maintained a siege of the building, in which there was no water or fire extinguishers, throughout this time and even, according to the reports of witnesses on internet forums, slashed the fire hoses, which made putting the fire out much more difficult. Some of the supporters of a united Ukraine shot at the windows of the burning building. |
| Childhood Irina Ivanovna would have to live through all the hardships of camp life together with her mother. As a child she had to work in the forest along with other prisoners’ children. Looking for things to do the children would ramble through the forest, and, hiding in the thick underbrush, saw much that their parents didn’t know. “We were witnesses to people’s executions,” Irina Ivanovna shared. “Mainly they were people who couldn’t work due to hunger and sickness. They took them to specially dug ditches, undressed them, removed anything of value, knocked out any gold teeth, and shot them. I still remember those terrible places were people died; there are still shoes and torn clothing scatterd around there.” The “Lesozavodskoe” cemetery in the village of Adjer, where the prisoners of Lokchimlag, Pezmog camp section were buried from 1938-1945. The other nightmare of life in Lokchimlag was hunger. Irina Ivanovna recalled how at times her mother was able to save her only one cabbage leaf for the whole day. In search of food the hungry children rifled through the storehouse looking to steal rotten potatoes. They were caught and cruelly punished: “Some would kick us, others would hit us in the stomach. My stomach was enlarged from hunger, I was sick with rickets,” Irina Ivanovna relates. And one day in this world of cruelty, evil, and sadness sounded the quiet but beautiful, tender childish voice—Irina sang the prisoners’ favorite songs, which she had heard and learned during her work in the forest. The child’s voice penetrated to the hearts of those tormented people. Listening to the singing of a little girl born in Lokchimlag became the favorite occupation of the prisoners’ fleeting rest periods. Prisoners’ barracks in Lokchimlag. Photo: 1989, from the “Repentance” fund collection. Escape Then there was an attempted escape from the camp. “Mama and I walked at night, running for three days from the guards with dogs,” the woman relates. In Poztykeros the priest of a local church hid the mother and child. |
| The holy hierarch’s first arrest took place on March 30, 1922. This was the beginning of many years of prison trials for Vladyka Afanasy. However, as strange as it may seem, the imprisoned bishop counted his own situation as easier than the lot of those who, remaining in freedom, had to endure enormous pressure from the renovationists. He even called prison an “isolation from the renovationist epidemic.” Vladyka’s path from prison to prison and exile was endless and excruciating. Of the prisons, there were: Vladimir, Taganka in Moscow, Zyryansk, and Turukhansk. Of the camps, there were: Solovki, Belomor-Baltisk, Onega, Marii in Kemerovo province, Temnikov in Mordovia… On November 9, 1951 the sixty-year-old bishop’s final term of prison camp ended. However, even after this he was kept in total uncertainty of his future, and then settled involuntarily in an institution for invalids at Potma station in Mordovia, where the regime differed little from a prison camp. The archpastor could be arrested right on the road, as once happened to him while travelling around the Yuriev-Polsky region. From 1937-38 he was arrested a number of times, and prepared for immediate execution. At the beginning of World War II, Vladyka was sent by prisoner convoy to Onega prison camp in Archangelsk province on foot, and the prisoners had to carry their belongings. As a result of the strenuous travel and hunger, Vladyka became so weak that he was seriously preparing for death… The Onega camps were exchanged for indefinite exile in Omsk province. In one of the state farms near the city of Golyshmanovo, Vladyka worked as a night guard of the vegetable gardens. Then he was transferred to the city of Ishim, where he lived on the aid sent to him by his friends and spiritual children. In winter 1942, Bishop Afanasy was unexpectedly sent by convoy to Moscow. The investigations went on for a long time. He was interrogated around thirty different times, usually at night. The interrogations would last four hours, but one time they lasted a whole nine hours. Sometimes it would take four hours to write only one page of protocol, and sometimes, more than ten pages… Not once did Vladyka betray anyone under interrogation, nor did he incriminate himself. |
| Who knows if the photographs of the face of a priest from the village of Ilyinskoe, Fr. Symeon Subbotin will someday surface for us to view? From the records we can imagine a self-restrained man who had to endure very much in his lifetime, but who nevertheless found the strength to answer the ridiculous accusations made against him at his final “judgment seat” in the same “tone” as his interrogators, with a dash of humor. We know from the records that the church was closed and that the sixty-eight-year-old “priest does not serve, but lives off of other people and is corrupting the collective farm.” Batiushka was one of the “former ones”, with the background of a teacher in a local school and a clerk at the village administration, who was arrested and tried in the early 1920s, but acquitted for lack of evidence. Now he was finally faced with “factual accusation”: “There were incidences when your goats caused damage to the collective farm by eating the winter crops and trampling them.” The accused answered: “From the political point of view, this is clearly a case of sabotage, and cannot be interpreted otherwise!” Whether they took “additional measures” against him, or Fr. Simeon simply considered hypocrisy undignified for a man of his years, we don’t know, but when questioned about his view of Communist party politics he answers plainly: “The Soviet government does not rule rightly.” The final result of the ruling by the “troika” of 16/XI–1937: “Subbotin, Simeon Petrovich is sentenced to ten years of correctional prison camp. Right after that follows the announcement: “30/XI–1937 departed for Kargapol camp, NKVD. No further information on his fate.” Information is discovered significantly later at an inquiry by his family in 1956: “Prisoner S. P. Subbotin, born 1869, died while serving his prison term in Kargapol camp on January 3, 1938, from paralysis of the heart.” The investigator who conducted the interrogation was fired from the “organs” in 1953, and Fr. Simeon was rehabilitated in 1958, posthumously. |
| Leather-clad, AK-47-wielding gunmen protect Issa's small compound and pedestrians are scrutinized as they walk in adjacent pot-holed lanes. In December, Issa was wounded in an assassination attempt in Ain el-Hilweh by jihadists that left one of his bodyguards dead. The bomber, who died in the attack, was an Egyptian. The assassination attempt took place at the funeral of Mohammad al-Saadi, a PLO official who was shot dead along with two companions days earlier outside the camp. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Issa, a father of five young children, including a newborn, says the tensions in Ain el-Hilweh won't stay under control for long, despite mediation efforts between the camp's armed factions, and between the PLO and rival Hamas, and Hezbollah, Lebanon's militant Shia movement. " All the leaders are worried and we are trying to contain fallout from the jihadists' bombing campaign, " he says. According to Issa, jihadists " manipulate cleverly the schism between Sunnis and Shia in their recruitment. " " There are between to 200 to 300 fighters now in Ain el-Hilweh, mostly Palestinians and Lebanese but there are a few Iraqis and Yemenis among them, " he says. Most of them live in one quadrant in the camp, which is close to the southern seaport of Sidon, although there is a pocket of jihadists elsewhere in an area mostly dominated by Fatah, the most powerful faction within the PLO. The jihadists are members of a variety of groups--including homegrown ones such as Fatah al-Islam and Jund al-Sham--but all are increasingly " coming under the sway " of the Lebanese wing of Jabhat al-Nusra, Syria's Al Qaeda affiliate, he says. He names the most important jihadist commander in the camp as Tawfiq Taha, a 52-year-old who is wanted by Lebanese authorities in connection with several bombings including attacks in 2007 and 2008 on UN peacekeepers. Taha owns a house that backs on to Issa's compound, although he reportedly now lives elsewhere in Ain el-Hilweh. |
| St. Hilarion is commemorated twice a year: on December 15/28, the day of his martyric repose, and on April 27/May 10, the day of his glorification. St. Hilarion left a large body of homilies and apologetical writings, many of which can be found in Russian on the web site of Sretensky Monastery, www.pravoslavie.ru, and a few of which have been published in English. Here are the titles of some of them: Metropolitan John (Snychev) of St. Petersburg and Ladoga (†1995) The All-Russian Local Council was the first Church Council in Russia since the abolition of the Patriarchate at the Council of 1681–1682. Its sessions lasted from August 1917 to September 1918.—Ed. Later Metropolitan of Kazan and Sviyazhsk, he was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1937.—Ed. Yevgeny Alexandrovich Tuchkov was the plenipotentiary for Church affairs of the GPU, the forerunner of the KGB. He was responsible for disrupting the Russian Church in every possible way, including the use of mass arrests and the execution of clergy, as well as open support for the “Living Church” (see note 4 below).—Ed. That is, members of the “Living Church,” an organization that attempted to supplant the Russian Orthodox Church while reforming Orthodox teachings, traditions and practices according to modern liberal ideas. Izvestia, September 23, 1923.—Ed. Alexander Vvedensky was a liberal priest who, from 1923 until his death in 1946, was one of the leaders of the “Living Church.”—Ed. Kem, a city in Karelia, had a prison camp that was used from 1926 to 1939 as a departure point for political prisoners who were being sent to Solovki.—Ed. The Monastery of Solovki, located on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, was turned into a labor camp after the Bolshevik revolution. In 1926 it became a prison camp, and remained so until its closure in 1939. It was reopened as a monastery in 1990.—Ed. Orarion: a narrow stole worn by Orthodox deacons over the left shoulder. The Gregorian schism, so-called after its founding bishop, Gregory (Yakovetsky), was a new schism fostered by the Soviet authorities after the obvious failure of the renovationists. It was essentially a council of bishops, submissive to and therefore legalized by the Soviet authorities. These bishops claimed to govern the Church after the death of Patriarch Tikhon, since the Locum Tenens, Metropolitan Peter of Krutitsa, was imprisoned. They differed from the renovationists in that they recognized both the reposed |
| For this purpose, it is crucial to create a certain missionary map of each diocese, which would include not merely information on the quantity and the density of population, but also reports on the activities of dissenting and pseudo-Orthodox communities, and also various sects. Moreover, this map should specify the priorities of each diocese over their activities, for example at educational, medical, social, or penal institutions. This map should become a guide to our missionary work and one of the key information sources, in particular, for the highest church authority. Missionary activities among residents of outlying towns of Siberia, the Far East, and the Far North are quite topical. It is a traditional approach to mission, which was already formed in the pre-revolutionary period, and it is the priority of our Church. But if in the nineteenth century the missionary efforts focused mainly on representatives of the indigenous peoples, then today it is just as crucial to work with people who – belonging to the Orthodox tradition ethnically and culturally – are happened to be cut off from not merely well-being of civilization, but also communication with Orthodox spiritual centers – churches and monasteries – due to various practical reasons. The presence of priests at the places where people work in harsh conditions, such as oil-derricks or gas fields, is as important as the presence of chaplains in the armed forces. The most effective form of missionary work has been missionary camps in these regions for the past several years. Remarkably, the number of missionary camps has increased almost twice since the fourth All-Church Orthodox Missionary Gathering in 2010. However, its number is yet quite low. A missionary camp should become the beginning of a fully functioning church community, which would unite people and give them an opportunity to feel human and Christian solidarity, especially under very difficult conditions of life. There is an excellent example of the “Spasski” missionary camp in the village of Tiksi in the Yakutia Diocese situated by the Laptev Sea in the Arctic desert. It was constructed under harshest conditions, including climatic, social, and economic situations. It was decided to close the long-range aviation base situated in the village in the middle of 2013. Hundreds of military men together with their family members left the village. As a result, the heating system was turned off, kindergartens closed, and air communication with the so-called “large earth” broke down. Having been united by Hegumen Agafangel (Belykh), the worker of the Synodal Missionary Department, the people who stayed built the missionary camp with support of benefactors. As if a reply to their faith, the army command decided to restore the village. |
| The sound came from the dawning recognition of freedom. Lt. Col. Walter Fellenz of the US Seventh Army described the greeting from his point of view: Several hundred yards inside the main gate, we encountered the concentration enclosure, itself. There before us, behind an electrically charged, barbed wire fence, stood a mass of cheering, half-mad men, women and children, waving and shouting with happiness—their liberators had come! The noise was beyond comprehension! Every individual (over 32,000) who could utter a sound, was cheering. Our hearts wept as we saw the tears of happiness fall from their cheeks. Rahr’s account continues: Finally all 32,600 prisoners join in the cry as the first American soldiers appear just behind the wire fence of the camp. After a short while electric power is turned off, the gates open and the American G.I.’s make their entrance. As they stare wide-eyed at our lot, half-starved as we are and suffering from typhus and dysentery, they appear more like fifteen-year-old boys than battle-weary soldiers. . . . An international committee of prisoners is formed to take over the administration of the camp. Food from SS stores is put at the disposal of the camp kitchen. A US military unit also contributes some provision, thereby providing me with my first opportunity to taste American corn. By order of an American officer radio-receivers are confiscated from prominent Nazis in the town of Dachau and distributed to the various national groups of prisoners. The news comes in: Hitler has committed suicide, the Russians have taken Berlin, and German troops have surrendered in the South and in the North. But the fighting still rages in Austria and Czechoslovakia. . . . Naturally, I was ever cognizant of the fact that these momentous events were unfolding during Holy Week. But how could we mark it, other than through our silent, individual prayers? A fellow-prisoner and chief interpreter of the International Prisoner's Committee, Boris F., paid a visit to my typhus-infested barrack—“Block 27”—to inform me that efforts were underway in conjunction with the Yugoslav and Greek National Prisoner's Committees to arrange an Orthodox service for Easter day, May 6th. |
| The coming “second wave” of the revolution will be a vicious military machine with alleged legitimacy provided by the predominantly Islamists parliament. This simply means that the revolution’s shape must also evolve to meet these new challenges. Several observers today call Egyptians to bring the winds of revolution to the Egyptian street as well as its legislative body, the most influential body in the Egyptian regime. Finally, I would like to add, as a liberal Christian Egyptian, that the emergence of Islamists in the parliament is good for several reasons. First, it will show patently how these groups cannot run the country with their idealist religious principles that cannot deal sufficiently with the economic and political challenges today. Recently, Islamist parties have already compromised their very fundamental principles by meeting American delegations and assuring them that they won’t cancel the Camp David peace agreement with Israel. Secondly, the ambiguity of the Islamists’ place on the Egyptian political map helped them to swing between the two camps, for and against the revolution, whenever they need. This gave them the political momentum which brought them to the parliament. Now they are outside the Tahrir square camp and this will limit their legitimacy from the Egyptian street’s perspective. Therefore, to sum up, the coming year will not be less momentous than the previous one and all the possibilities are present on the table. The coming process of change will require cooperation between the different groups to avoid neglecting the rights or hopes of any particular group, especially in the coming process of drafting the new constitution and procedures for the presidential election. Code for blog Since you are here… …we do have a small request. More and more people visit Orthodoxy and the World website. However, resources for editorial are scarce. In comparison to some mass media, we do not make paid subscription. It is our deepest belief that preaching Christ for money is wrong. |
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