Damascene, Bishop And Hieromartyr Of Glukhov And Those With Him

Bishop Damascene, in the world Demetrius Demetriusevich Tsedrik, was born on October 29, 1877, in the town of Mayak, Odessa uyezd, Kherson province, in the family of a poor postal official. The mark of grace lay on the whole family. His brother Nicholas became a priest at the beginning of the revolution and was soon shot by the Bolsheviks for his fearless denunciation of them.

Demetrius graduated from a theological seminary and from the Eastern Vladivostock Agricultural Institute, becoming an agronomist. Then, under the influence of Archbishop (later Metropolitan) Anthony (Khrapovitsky), he studied eastern languages in the Kazan Theological Academy. After graduating, he was tonsured as a monk.

On being ordained as a hieromonk he went to Bei-Guan, as a member of the Orthodox Mission in Peking. Here he worked so successfully as a missionary that the journal Niva made special mention of the activity of the young hieromonk and a small lifeboat was named "Damasy-khoshen" in his honour.

During the First World War he served in a detachment of the Red Cross on the Caucasian front.

During the revolution he returned to Russia just at the moment when his brother was martyred. Whether together with his brother or on his own, he was arrested for the first time (in Orel or Tula province) and condemned to death. We do not know how he escaped. Perhaps it was through the intervention of the White Armies. In any case, the experience had a lasting effect on him:

"In those minutes the whole of a man's life passes in front of him," he recalled.

In 1919 he arrived in Kiev, where his beloved Metropolitan Anthony appointed him as diocesan missionary. At the same time he became a student at the Kiev Theological Academy and was numbered among the brethren of the St. Michael monastery. Already he had a keen sense of the apocalyptic nature of contemporary events, regarding them as the fulfilment of the prophecies and citing Solovyov's Three Conversations about the Antichrist.

Hieromonk Damascene founded a small brotherhood in the name of St. Vladimir not far from the monastery. Every feastday he would come to the brotherhood at six o'clock, serve a moleben and akathist and give a sermon. One stormy winter evening he was about to leave when gunshots sounded on the street. The door onto the street was instantly locked. After some time, since nothing more was heard, everyone went out onto the street. On the opposite side, against the brilliant white snow, there could be seen the dark figure of a murdered man. Fr. Damascene cried out:

"What kind of Christians we are! Around us they kill people, and we hide instead of helping!"

After the retreat of the White Army, Hieromonk Damascene left Kiev for the Crimea, where Archbishop Demetrius (Abashadze) of Tauris raised him to the rank of archimandrite and made him superior of St. George's monastery near Balaclava. When the Soviet armies captured the Crimea, Archbishop Demetrius and Archimandrite Damascene remained and were arrested, spending many months in prison. However, they were then freed because the Bolsheviks had begun a propaganda campaign aimed at tempting the émigrés to return, and the imprisonment of these notable churchmen was harmful to their plans.

In 1923 Archimandrite Damascene was released from prison and exiled from the Crimea. He went to Moscow where, on September 14/27, his Holiness Patriarch Tikhon consecrated him Bishop of Glukhov, a vicariate of the Chernigov diocese, and gave him the task of ruling the Chernigov diocese while Archbishop Pachomius (Kedrov) was in prison. He also ruled the Starodub diocese at this time.

Bishop Damascene's time in Chernigov was short but eventful. He spent a lot of time travelling round the towns and villages of his diocese. He was arrested several times, and was in prison in Glukhov for a time. Once, after he had spent several weeks in prison, he was released on the eve of a great feast. Vladyka went straight from the prison to the church to serve the all-night vigil. Exhausted by his imprisonment and interrogations, he was not able to stand during the anointing of the people and had to sit on his throne. But the next day he served the Divine Liturgy full of strength.

This was the period of the renovationist schism, when the True Russian Church, led first by Patriarch Tikhon, and then by Metropolitan Peter, was persecuted both by the authorities and by the false "Living Church" of the renovationists. Vladyka said about the "Living Church": "At its base is a lie, its weapon is violence, its aim - the disintegration of the Orthodox Church".

According to one source, Vladyka Damascene was exiled to Kharkov in 1924. According to another source, he was in prison in Odessa at the end of 1924 and beginning of 1925. In 1925, according to a third source, he was exiled to Kharkov. On August 25, 1925 he took part in the consecration of Bishop Basil of Priluky. Then, in September, he was exiled to Moscow, where on November 30 or December 1 he was arrested in connection with the affair of Metropolitan Peter.

From December, 1925 to June, 1926 Vladyka was in the inner prison of the OGPU in Moscow. His only consolation there was an English Bible which someone had given him. He never used to talk about these periods of imprisonment, but on being asked by his cell-attendant usually replied:

"There were good people there, and I'm ready to go there again."

On May 21, 1926 he was condemned to three years exile in Poloi on the banks of the Yenisei in Siberia, 200 kilometres north of Turukhansk and 10 degrees north of the Arctic Circle. On the way there, in September, Vladyka stopped in Krasnoyarsk, where he had to spend some time until the river froze solid. The clergy and the people met him with great honour and offered him a good flat in the city. They invited him to serve in church, and his services were especially well attended.

In November, the bishop set off north, accompanied by a convoy of the GPU. They travelled in long, narrow sleds pulled by six or twelve dogs. The journey to Poloi lasted six weeks. Poloi was a tiny settlement consisting of a single house in which lived the family of a hunter, another little house in which two exiled bishops lived, and, some distance away, a half-ruined cabin, the roof full of holes, with a broken-down stove and holes two inches wide in the board walls. It was in this cabin that Vladyka Damascene settled.

In the spring Vladyka's cell-attendant arrived. He told him how even he, a young novice, had been met with burning love and attention by the local clergy and people on his way through Krasnoyarsk. The two of them then began to repair their dwelling-place.

Vladyka knew a lot about carpentry, and repaired the hole in the roof himself. He taught his cell-attendant how to prepare bricks by hand; with them they reconstructed the stove. They left the holes in the walls - the snow did the best repair job on them. Being a lover of labour and inventive, Vladyka Damascene with the help of his cell-attendant made the things they most needed, including a wooden altar-table, which was glued together with fish glue. Then, using particles from his own pectoral cross, Vladyka was able to make an antimins from a simple cloth with a cross drawn upon it.

The mail, which came from Turukhansk by dog-sled once a month, brought Vladyka several parcels with wheat flour and grape wine from his numerous friends and admirers. Now he was able to celebrate the Divine Liturgy every day in a place where previously there had not stepped a single Christian foot. And he wrote to his clergy: "I see all of you, my near and dear ones, standing with me at the altar-table."

When the Liturgy was celebrated for the first time, the few inhabitants of the village of Poloi attended. They had no idea of Christianity, being for the most part pagans of Mongol blood. However, on hearing the church chanting, the children leapt up and down and began to chant themselves, and it required much effort to quiet them down.

Bishop Damascene had some knowledge of medicine and was able to give the local inhabitants medical help.

With the coming of sunny days they cultivated a small kitchen-garden. The greens from this garden and the parcels which came to him from his Chernigov flock, who remained devoted to him, gave Vladyka the ability to survive in this remote arctic settlement and to save, not only himself, but also the local inhabitants from the scurvy which usually raged there. Gradually his health, which had been severely undermined by his cruel trials in prison, recovered.

It was in Poloi that Vladyka Damascene wrote his famous inspired epistles, which made him well-known and loved, not only in the whole of believing Russia, but even far beyond her borders. The first of these that are known to us was written in the spring of 1927 with regard to the closing of a church in Nizhin. In August, 1927, Vladyka received news of Metropolitan Sergius' notorious declaration, in which he placed the Russian Church in submission to the God-hating Bolsheviks. This declaration made a terrible impression on Bishop Damascene; he understood immediately that the Russian Church had been dealt the heaviest of blows. About 150 of his epistles are devoted to the denunciation of the declaration.

In the best-known of these he wrote: "There is one important thing we need to know: does Metropolitan Sergius, and do those with him, all believe what they say and write? Could Metropolitan Sergius swear, before the Cross and the Gospel, that what he writes, including his giving thanks to Soviet power, is truly the voice of his conviction, the witness of his unconstrained and pure pastoral conscience? We are convinced and we affirm that Metropolitan Sergius and his co-pastors could not do this without oath-breaking. But can anyone, in the name of the Church, from the height of the ambon, proclaim something that he could not swear to be the complete truth?

"What will those who have come to the Church say? What will they fell when, even from there, from the height of the last refuge of righteousness rejected by the world, from the height of the ambon, there sound words of hypocrisy, of man-pleasing and slander? Will it not seem that falsehood is achieving its final victory over the world, and that there, in the place where the image of Incarnate Truth flashed for them with the Unwaning Light, there now laughs in a disgusting grimace the mask of the father of lies?

"It is one or the other: either the Church is truly the immaculate and pure Bride of Christ, the Kingdom of truth, in which case the Truth is the air without which we cannot breathe, or, like the whole world which lies in evil, it lives in lies and by lies, in which case everything is a lie, every word is a lie, every prayer, every sacrament.

"It seems to us that Metropolitan Sergius and those with him are enslaved by a terrible fantasy, the fantasy that it is possible to build the Church on man-pleasing and untruth. But we affirm that a lie can give birth only to a lie, and that it cannot be the foundation of the Church. Before our eyes we have the shameful path of "the church of the evil-doers" - renovationism. And this shame of the gradual immersion in the engulfing mud of ever more terrible compromises and apostasy, this horror of complete degradation awaits the community of the Church if it goes along the path marked out for it.

"It seems to us that Metropolitan Sergius has wavered in his faith in the omnipotence of the All-conquering Truth, in the omnipotence of God. And this wavering has been transmitted in the form of a terrible jolt to the whole body of the Church, making it shudder. There will be more than one heart that on hearing the words of untruth within the walls of the church will shake in its faith and perhaps be wounded in its most secret sanctuary; it will tear itself away from the Church that has deceived it and will remain outside her walls. The silence of thousands will utter a terrible word to the very heart of the people, wounding their much-suffering soul, and the rumour will spread to all the ends of the earth that the Kingdom of Christ has become the kingdom of the beast.

"What a pitiful and unworthy existence. Truly it is better to die than to live in this way. A black cloud has come to threaten the Church. There in the heavenly dwellings the Russian hierarchs, the champions of the Church in past ages, together with the martyrs and confessors of the recent past, are weeping over our earth. There in the underworld the dark forces are preparing to celebrate a new and decisive victory. O Lord, my heart sinks at the fate of Your Church. And yet she is still Your Bride..."

It was unthinkable to send this epistle and all 150 letters on this same theme by Soviet post. So Bishop Damascene decided to sacrifice what was most valuable for him - the company of his friend and brother cell-attendant. He dispatched him to Moscow with the mission of delivering some of them personally to their addressees and distributing others by post in various towns on his way.

"Soon after the publication of Metropolitan Sergius' declaration," writes E. L., "Bishop Damascene had thought about the fate of the Russian Orthodox Church in the image of two of the churches of the Apocalypse: those of Philadelphia and Laodicea. The Church of Patriarch Tikhon was the Church of Philadelphia.. And next to the Church of Philadelphia was the Church of Laodicea - that of Metropolitan Sergius."

In his essay, "The Seal of Christ and the Seal of the Antichrist", Bishop Damascene wrote: "Why is it that the seal of the Antichrist, as St. John the Theologian affirms, will be placed not upon the forehead and the hand simultaneously, but upon the forehead or the hand? Likewise, St. Andrew, archbishop of Caesarea, writes: 'He will strive so that the mark might be place upon everyone... In some it will be on the right hand, so as to instruct those who have been deceived to be bold in their deception and darkness.' This will occur because at that time there will be people who will affirm that it is possible and permissible to recognize the God-fighting authority of the Antichrist if only one remains a Christian in one's soul. From such ones the Antichrist will not demand that they share his way of thinking; in other words, upon all such ones he will not place the seal on their forehead, but will demand of them only the recognition of his authority, which is, according to St. Hippolytus, the seal on the hand, since through the recognition of the human authority which will be God-fighting and against God, lawless and filled with every impiety, a Christian by this very fact will cut off from himself every possibility of doing good and righteous deeds, for in his faith there will be missing the chief sign of uprightness - the confession of God as God and the recognition of Him as the Being Who stand above all. All such ones, even though they might bear the name of Christian, in very deed will be, according to the works of their hands, true servants of the Antichrist, who has deceived them by the worship of his image, which is the mark of the beast. Repentance is impossible for such ones, according to the teaching of the Holy Church; and it is impossible only because the seal of Christ and the seal of the Antichrist are incompatible with each other. The banishing of the Grace of the Holy Spirit through the mark of the beast fills the heart of all such ones with the first sign - fearfulness - which will bring them to an easy destruction. St. Hippolytus writes: 'On the contrary, if anyone is deprived of the Holy Spirit, that is, if he does not have upon himself or has lost the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit which was given in Holy Chrismation, he will fight with fear in a cowardly manner, will hide, will be afraid of the present temporal death, will conceal himself from the sword, will not endure chastizement, since he is constantly thinking about this world..."

In the winter of 1928, the greatest of all the contemporary Russian martyrs, Metropolitan Cyril of Kazan, passed by Poloi on his way still further north. The two holy champions of God's truth met and from that time on were bound by the closest bonds of spiritual friendship and complete mutual understanding. This meeting of the two martyr-hierarchs had the greatest significance for the future history of the Russian Church, for it was precisely then, in the course of these few days of Metropolitan Cyril's stay in Poloi, that the foundations were laid and the principles set out of that movement which refused to make any compromise with the God-fighting authorities or with the church administration that had been enslaved by them.

In November, 1928, Bishop Damascene's term of exile came to an end. He arrived in Krasnoyarsk and there for the first time met that corrupting atmosphere that had infected the Church of Metropolitan Sergius, the consequence of his compromising politics. Instead of the courage and decisiveness and fearless loyalty to the Church and her martyrs which had reigned there two years before, now in the Church circles of Krasnoyarsk there reigned fear, double-mindedness and indecisiveness. The believers of Krasnoyarsk had fearlessly confessed their unity with the exploit of the exiled hierarch. But in November, 1928, these same people were frightened and avoided him.

That which Vladyka had so clearly foreseen was coming to pass; the wavering in the truth of the official head of the Church, Metropolitan Sergius, was being passed on with a terrible jolt to the whole body of the Church. Vladyka wrote about these bitter impressions from Krasnoyarsk: "I have absorbed a lot of bitterness in this short period while observing the church life of Yeniseisk and Krasnoyarsk. What shall I meet in Moscow and beyond?"

He was forbidden to return to Chernigov province. But he received an invitation from the nearby town of Starodub, which belonged to the Chernigov diocese but by Soviet law was in Bryansk province. On the way there he stopped in Moscow, where he fell ill with pneumonia. This illness gave him the chance to have a long conversation with Metropolitan Sergius on December 11.

As he wrote: "I see something providential in my illness - otherwise I could not have gone to Moscow, while now I not only have been there and have seen some necessary people, but I even had a prolonged conversation with Metropolitan Sergius. As for the result of this conversation, I will say the following: If from afar I still assumed the possibility of facts which might justify his conduct, now these assumptions also have been destroyed. Now for me there is no justification whatsoever for Metropolitan Sergius and company!"

Arriving in Starodub early in 1929, Bishop Damascene adopted an uncompromising position. As Archbishop Stephen (Protsenko) of Chernigov said in the course of his interrogation by the NKVD in August, 1936: "Damascene Tsedrik worked in such a way that they did not recognize not only Metropolitan Sergius, but also Metropolitan Constantine [Dyakov, exarch of Ukraine] and myself, the ruling bishop. This fact became concretely known to me from the village of Bereza in Glukhov region."

On May 29, 1929, Bishop Damascene wrote from Starodub: "I received an invitation from Metropolitan Seraphim (Chichagov) of Petrograd to be his helper, and of course I refused, as before I refused all the offers of the sergianists."

In this period he entered into secret contact with Metropolitan Peter of Krutitsa, the locum tenens of the Patriarchal Throne and legal head of the Russian Church, who was in exile in the remote village of Khe, Obdorsk region. He sent Metropolitan Peter twenty-two documents, including letters from Metropolitan Cyril to Metropolitan Sergius, in which he painted a terrible picture of ecclesiastical collapse and inner enslavement to the atheist government. Vladyka also gave Metropolitan Peter copies of all the orders and speeches of Metropolitan Sergius from July, 1927 to the summer of 1929, and asked him to raise his voice against the anti-ecclesiastical actions of his deputy.

It was with great difficulty that Bishop Damascene's messenger, Deacon K., reached the little village situated 200 kilometres from the railway. Nor was it easy, when he reached the village, to find the old, sick monk, who was sheltering in the corner of a log-cabin amidst the numerous family of his samoyed landlord. The inhabitants of Khe, Nentsi-samoyeds, were pagans and semi-pagans, and had no idea who it was that was living in their midst.

Metropolitan Peter had not received any news or money or parcels from Russia since 1927, although he knew that such things addressed to him arrived in Tobolsk. So what Bishop Damascene had sent was complete news to him. As Bishop Damascene wrote from the words of Fr. K.: "After acquainting himself with the contents of the documents, granddad [that was what Bishop Damascene called Metropolitan Peter in his letters] spoke about the situation and the further consequences deriving from it in almost my own words."

However, Bishop Damascene did not succeed in obtaining a written reply from Metropolitan Peter; for Fr. K. could not stay longer than 24 hours in Khe without risking being discovered by the unsleeping eye of the GPU and subjected to arrest, which could have had disastrous consequences both for him and for many clergy.

Bishop Damascene continued to wait for Metropolitan Peter's reply. But in October, 1929 he wrote: "What actually am I waiting for? I am coming to the conclusion that even a decisive word from Metropolitan Peter would not substantially change the situation, because the essence of the great sin which is being committed is not understood by many."

And yet the revealing to Metropolitan Peter of the true state of affairs in the Church was not completely fruitless. In 1930 Metropolitan Peter managed, by means unknown to the GPU, to get a letter to Metropolitan Sergius in which, after expressing his negative attitude towards his compromise with the communists, he demanded: "If you don't have the strength to defend the Church, step aside and give your place to a stronger person." Metropolitan Sergius never published the letter, apart from the cited phrase. The GPU did everything in their power to find out how this letter reached Metropolitan Sergius, but without success. As a punishment, Metropolitan Peter's exile was extended by three years.

In the summer of 1929 Fr. Gregory Seletsky visited Bishop Damascene, and established that there were only "insignificant" differences between him and the Josephites, since Bishop Damascene mistakenly thought that Archbishop Demetrius considered that all those who did not belong to the True Orthodox Church, including those who did not agree with Metropolitan Sergius, were graceless. It was while Fr. Gregory was with Bishop Damascene that the latter sent his envoy to Khe to Metropolitan Peter's place of exile.

In October and November, 1929, there matured in Bishop Damascene a clear thought which he would repeat in all his later epistles: "Christianity in Rus' must go underground." It had become impossible to exert influence on the broad masses of the people. Only a small flock could be saved from moral corruption and the gangrenous disease of the lie. The masses would at any rate know that somewhere there existed "a refuge for the righteousness that the world has rejected, where the Unwaning Light still shines."

At the end of October, 1929, Bishop Damascene was again arrested and accused of "counter-revolutionary opposition to Metropolitan Sergius". He had been betrayed by a member of the sergianist church, Protopriest N. He denounced Bishop Damascene before the GPU, declaring that he had given counter-revolutionary sermons.

He was exiled to Solovki. There he met many clergy who thought as he did and whom he had known up to then only by correspondence. But it was very difficult to correspond with prisoners at that time, and letters neither reached Bishop Damascene nor were received from him. Igumen Barsonuphius (Yurchenko) arranged for material help to be sent to him.

On his release in 1934 (according to another source, 1933), Bishop Damascene said almost nothing about his time in Solovki, except that hunger had often forced him and the other prisoners to collect mussels and snails on the sea-shore.

His fellow-prisoners said that he used every moment of his freedom during work to leave the working group and pray in the depths of the forests. They said that when the martyr-bishop was praying not far away, an atmosphere of unusual peacefulness and quiet radiance reigned in the crudest of the working groups, although they were not inclined to any form of piety.

On returning from Solovki to Starodub, Vladyka was no longer able to write long epistles, or address large assemblies, or serve in crowded churches, although it is known that he celebrated secret services in flats in Kiev. A friend of his quoted him as saying:

"The general anti-religious degeneration, including intra-ecclesiastical degeneration, has forced me to think of the salvation, not of the majority, but of the minority."

And again he said: "Perhaps the time has come when the Lord does not wish that the Church should stand as an intermediary between Himself and the believers, but that everyone is called to stand directly before the Lord and himself answer for himself as it was with the forefathers!"

He went round the towns known to him, visiting those of like mind with him and calling on priests to join the Catacomb Church. One of these was a venerable protopriest, a professor in the Kiev Theological Academy. The latter's refusal to join Bishop Damascene's underground flock so grieved Vladyka that he suffered a heart attack, and his health began to decline.

Some time after this, the protopriest who had refused to join the Catacomb Church was arrested by the authorities and died in prison, having become convinced from his own experience that honourable church work necessitated departing into the underground, however difficult that was in Soviet conditions.

During his travels, Vladyka visited towns which he was forbidden to enter, without registering with the local organs of the NKVD but staying with members of the True Church. And he never took off his rasson or shaved his long beard, as almost all the secret clergy in Russia did. Moreover, he would walk around Kiev with his bishop's staff even though he was not allowed to show himself anywhere in Ukraine.

E.L., writing about the Bishop Damascene, comments: "He warmed the hearts of many, but the masses remained.. passive and inert, moving in any direction in accordance with an external push, and not their inner convictions... The long isolation of Bishop Damascene from Soviet life, his remoteness from the gradual process of sovietization led him to an unrealistic assessment of the real relations of forces in the reality that surrounded him. Although he remained unshaken himself, he did not see.. the desolation of the human soul in the masses. This soul had been diverted onto another path - a slippery, opportunistic path which led people where the leaders of Soviet power - bold men who stopped at nothing in their attacks on all moral and material values - wanted them to go.. Between the hierarchs and priests who had languished in the concentration camps and prisons, and the mass of the believers, however firmly they tried to stand in the faith, there grew an abyss of mutual incomprehension. The confessors strove to raise the believers onto a higher plane and bring their spiritual level closer to their own. The mass of believers, weighed down by the cares of life and family, blinded by propaganda, involuntarily went in the opposite direction, downwards. Visions of a future golden age of satiety, of complete liberty from all external and internal restrictions, of the submission of the forces of nature to man, deceitful perspectives in which fantasy passed for science.. were used by the Bolsheviks to draw the overwhelming majority of the people into their nets. Only a few individuals were able to preserve a loftiness of spirit. This situation was exploited very well by Metropolitan Sergius..."

In the late autumn of 1934 Vladyka Damascene was again arrested, in the city of Kherson (according to another source, Starodub), and sentenced to three years in a hard labour camp in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. At that time not only was correspondence with prisoners forbidden, but also the sending of parcels. News about the prisoners only came from people who had been in prison with them and had later been released. According to one of these reports, Vladyka Damascene worked as an accountant and even as an agronomist.

He was transferred sometimes to the north, sometimes to the south. During one such transfer, when weakened exiles were falling exhausted onto the road and the armed guard were shooting stragglers, Vladyka Damascene heaved his fellow-prisoner and spiritual son, Fr. John S., onto his shoulders. And then, although he was himself exhausted, he carried him all the way to the station.

Fr. Andrew B., a priest of the Catacomb Church led by Bishop Damascene who was himself shot by the Bolsheviks in Ukraine just before the arrival of the Germans, told his fellow-prisoners that Bishop Damascene had been in one of the Siberian prisons, but had been taken out of the common cell and put into a punishment cell without windows or lighting. There was ice on the floor of this cell, and hoar-forst covered the walls. He was put there "for preaching and prayer", that is, because he had had spiritual conversations with his fellow-prisoners. According to Fr. Andrew, Bishop Damascene contracted frostbite in his feet, which then became gangrenous and led to his death.

According to another witness, Vladyka had been transferred north when he was already ill. Perhaps he was taken out of the punishment cell referred to by Fr. Andrew. In late autumn the convoy stopped on the bank of a great Siberian river, waiting for a ferry. At the last minute a priest dressed only in a light cassock was brought onboard. He was shivering from cold. Then Bishop Damascene took off his own outer rasson, and with the words: "Whoever has two garments, let him give to him who has none," put it on the priest. But his ruined health could not endure the cold, and there on the ferry, on which the convoy was to travel for several days, he died. His body was dropped to the bottom of the river.

According to one source, Vladyka Damascene was in the northern camps in 1935-36, in a Siberian camp in 1935-36, was arrested in 1936 and sentenced to several more years in the Karaganda camps. He was arrested in camp and sentenced to be shot on September 10, 1937. The sentence was carried out on the same day.

(Sources: M.E. Gubonin, Akty Svyatejshego Patriarkha Tikhona, Moscow: St. Tikhon's Theological Institute, 1994, pp. 856-57; Pravoslavnaya Rus', N 10 (1204), 15/28 May, 1981, pp. 8-11; I.M. Andreyev, Russia' Catacomb Saints, Platina: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1982, chapter 14; Russkiye Pravoslavnye Ierarkhi, Ispovedniki i Mucheniki, Paris: YMCA Press, 1986, p. 30; Pravoslavnaya Zhizn', N 9 (536), September, 1994, pp. 6-12; E.L., Episkopy-Ispovedniki, San Francisco, 1971; Lev Regelson, Tragediya Russkoj Tserkvi, 1917-1945, Moscow: Krutitskoye patriarsheye podvorye, 1996, pp. 535, 578-579; Bishop Ambrose (von Sievers), "Episkopat Istinno-Pravoslavnoj Katakombnoj Tserkvi 1922-1997g.", Russkoye Pravoslaviye, N 4(8), p. 5; Za Khrista Postradavshiye, Moscow: St. Tikhon's Theological Institute, 1997, pp. 360-361; M.V. Shkarovsky, "Istinno-pravoslavniye na Ukrainye", Pravoslavnaya Zhizn', 48, N 9 (585), September, 1998, p. 18; I.I. Osipova, Skvoz' Ogn' Muchenij i Vody Slyoz…", Moscow: Serebryanniye Niti, 1998, p. 280)