Who are the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia?
The phrase refers to Orthodox Christians who were put to death or made to suffer for the faith after the 1917 revolution, chiefly in the Soviet Union. A martyr (the Greek word means witness) is someone who died for Christ. A confessor is someone who bore witness through imprisonment, exile or torture but survived, or who died of the consequences rather than by execution. The word "new" distinguishes them from the martyrs of the early Church, with whom the Church places them in one family.
They were not only bishops and priests. The lists include monks and nuns, teachers, peasants, soldiers, doctors and children's nurses, along with members of the imperial family. The Church has never claimed that every victim of the repression is a saint, and many millions of people of every belief suffered. The Church glorifies those whose life and death can be shown to have been a confession of Christ, and it does so after the facts of each case have been examined.
The scale is hard to grasp. The OCA says the new martyrs far outnumber those of the first three centuries, and the Russian Church lost millions of members in the persecution. So the Church keeps a common feast for all of them, known and unknown.
When did the Church glorify them?
Glorification, the Orthodox term for canonization, came in stages. The Russian Church Outside of Russia, formed by Russian emigrants, glorified the New Martyrs and Confessors in 1981. Inside Russia the process was impossible under the Soviet state. After 1991 a synodal commission began collecting archival evidence, and individual saints were glorified in the 1990s, including Metropolitan Vladimir of Kyiv and Grand Duchess Elizabeth in 1992 and Metropolitan Seraphim (Chichagov) in 1997.
The decisive act was the Jubilee Council of Bishops of the Moscow Patriarchate in August 2000. It glorified the family of Tsar Nicholas II as passion-bearers and added a very large number of new martyrs to the calendar, in the OCA's summary more than one thousand named saints. Glorifications have continued since then by decisions of the Holy Synod, so the list keeps growing as archives are opened and the stories of individuals are verified.
The Church had in fact anticipated this feast. The Local Council of 1917-1918, which restored the Patriarchate, set 25 January (Old Style) as a day of prayer for those who suffered for the faith, a date taken up in the later common feast. Today the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors is kept on the Sunday nearest to 25 January Old Style, which is 7 February in the modern calendar. You can check the exact day on the church calendar.
Butovo, Solovki and Lubyanka: where they suffered
Butovo is a former estate on the southern edge of Moscow, where a firing range operated in the 1930s. According to the Orthodox Church in America, about 20,765 people were shot there between July 1937 and August 1938, in the period known as the Yezhov terror, and roughly a thousand were killed for fidelity to the faith. Other accounts give slightly different date ranges for roughly the same total. More than 300 of them have since been glorified. Today a church stands on the site, a place of annual prayer led by the Patriarch.
Solovki is an archipelago in the White Sea, where the fifteenth-century Solovetsky Monastery was turned into a prison camp in 1923. At its height tens of thousands of prisoners were held on the islands, among them many bishops and priests. The camp was closed in 1939, and the monastery was reopened by the Church in 1992. Hieromartyr Hilarion (Troitsky), a bishop and theologian who was imprisoned on Solovki in the 1920s, is among those remembered.
Lubyanka, the Moscow headquarters of the security service, stands near the Sretensky Monastery, which the Soviet state closed in 1925 and demolished in part. The monastery was re-established as a stauropegial monastery in 1995. In 2017 the Patriarch consecrated a large church there dedicated to the Resurrection and to the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church. It belongs to the Russian category of "churches on the blood", built where Christians suffered.
Some of the saints: a royal family, an abbess and a metropolitan
The Holy Royal Passion-Bearers are Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, their five children and several attendants, who were shot in Yekaterinburg on the night of 16-17 July 1918. The Church calls them passion-bearers rather than martyrs, because they are glorified for the Christian meekness with which they accepted suffering.
Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, the sister of the Empress, founded the Convent of Martha and Mary in Moscow after the assassination of her husband, and devoted her life to the poor and the sick. She was arrested in 1918 and killed with other members of the imperial family near Alapayevsk, in the Urals, on 17-18 July 1918, together with her companion, Sister Barbara. The Moscow Patriarchate glorified her in 1992, and the Church Outside of Russia in 1981.
Metropolitan Vladimir (Bogoyavlensky) of Kyiv was killed at the Kyiv Caves Lavra on the night of 25 January 1918, and the OCA calls him the first bishop to be killed by the new authorities. Metropolitan Seraphim (Chichagov), a former naval officer who became a bishop, was arrested at his family dacha in 1937 and shot at Butovo on 11 December 1937. Patriarch Tikhon, who guided the Church through the first years of persecution, is also venerated; you can read more about him in the life of Patriarch Tikhon.
Why does the Church venerate those who were killed?
From the first centuries the Church has believed that a martyr's death is a witness to Christ so complete that the martyr is joined to him. The Book of Revelation shows the souls of those slain for the word of God beneath the altar (Revelation 6:9 listen in the Audio Bible), and Christ himself blesses those who are persecuted for his sake (Matthew 5:11 listen in the Audio Bible). The Psalter says that the death of his saints is precious in the sight of the Lord (Psalm 115:6, which is 116:15 in the Hebrew numbering listen in the Audio Bible), and Christ warned his disciples that the world which persecuted him would persecute them (John 15:20 listen in the Audio Bible). Paul, near the end of his own life, wrote of having fought the good fight and kept the faith (2 Timothy 4:7 listen in the Audio Bible).
Veneration is not worship, and it is not a political judgment. Orthodox Christians ask the saints to pray for us, because they are alive in Christ, as explained in asking the saints to pray for us and the communion of saints. The martyrs are venerated for what they confessed, not for the faction they belonged to. This is why the Church honours simple village priests next to imperial figures, and why the lists include people who disagreed with one another about many things.
A saying of the African writer Tertullian, at the end of his Apology, is often summarised in the claim that the blood of Christians is the seed of the Church. In a society that tried to abolish religion, the memory of those who would not renounce it has become a source of strength for many believers today.
How should we speak about this history carefully?
The new martyrs raise difficult questions about the relationship of the Church to the state, and the Church itself is not of one mind about every detail. Some clergy made compromises under pressure, and some of those compromises were themselves a form of suffering. The fuller history is told in the Church under Soviet rule, and it is best read without hasty judgments of those who lived through it.
It is also worth saying that the canonization of a person is not a verdict on everything they did. It recognises that they were faithful to Christ in the hour of trial, and that their intercession is trusted. For a closer look at how the Church recognises a saint, see what makes a saint in Orthodoxy. Where a miracle or a healing is reported in connection with a new martyr, the Orthodox response is to report it as the testimony of witnesses and the tradition of the Church, not as a proven fact.
Finally, the new martyrs are not only a Russian concern. Their memory is kept by Orthodox Christians in many countries, including those far from Russia.
How can I learn more and keep the feast?
The simplest way to begin is to attend the Divine Liturgy on the day of the Synaxis, when the New Martyrs are commemorated by name; see the liturgy page for the services at our parish. Ask your priest about the hymns and prayers used on the feast.
You can read the lives of individual saints on the website of the Orthodox Church in America, which gives short biographies for each commemoration on the calendar. If you prefer to listen, the Scriptures that the martyrs themselves heard and loved are available in the Audio Bible, and the Psalms and Gospels are good companions for the feast.
If you are visiting Moscow, you can go to Butovo and to the church by Lubyanka. Both are places of quiet prayer, where the custom is to light a candle and remember the names before God.
