What was that part of the Russian Orthodox Church which sprang up in the times of theretofore unheard-of persecution, that part which would not accept the Declaration of Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) and that went underground and became known as the Catacomb Church? In recent years, remarkable documentary books about the Catacomb Church have been published in Russia. They reveal the face of that part of the Russian Church not by means of principled but dry reports, but rather innately memoirs of parishioners and persons instrumental in the work of the underground Church, people such as Archbishop Afanassy Sakharov, S. I. Fudel', and others. Among these powerful testimonies is V. Ya. Vasilevskaya's book The Catacombs of the 20th Century, published in Moscow in 2001. The author was the aunt of Archpriest Alexander Men', who was murdered in the early 1990s. He, by the way, was raised in the Catacomb Church. The Catacombs of the 20th Century consists of extensive recollections by V. Ya. Vasileevskaya and others who took part in the underground Church, including M. S. Zhelnavakova, daughter of S. I. Fudel'. M. S. Zhelnavakova was born in 1931, and now lives in Lipetsk. The following excerpts are taken from her letters, published in The Catacombs of the 20th Century.
20.04.1995 During the first year that the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra was open, there was a tall and gaunt archimandrite named Fr. Veniamin. He would walk, never raising his eyes, and after Divine Liturgy, would always serve requested molebny and akathists on the right kliros. We - Vera, Galya and I - would always rush to sing there. Standing behind him, we would experience some unexplainable feeling of love for this man - one who was old, weak, who had a muffled, indistinct voice, who never raised his eyes to gaze upon us or in fact on anyone else. Yet we loved him. Why? Because he loved all of us, he loved God and people, and because we could apprehend that he was already acquiring the gift of sanctity. It was said that he had come to the Lavra from a camp, where he had spend something like 30 years, an astronomical number!
1997. We were children of the Catacomb Church of those times, a Church to all external appearances apparently weak and persecuted, but in practice powerful and victorious. Its victory was neither loudly trumpeted nor conspicuous. To this day, it has not been marked by anyone. [ ] During that period of general darkness - I know no other way of characterizing it - it consisted of an assembly of people who in their lives were preserving the bases of Christianity, were "overcoming their nature." Their own fate, i.e. the death of the body, was a matter of no consequence to them.
[ ] We prayed in the catacombs, but later, when the churches of the Holy Trinity - St. Sergius Lavra were re-opened, and when vast numbers of people surged in, we mixed in with them, not daring to separate ourselves from them, or to harbor any doubts. We neither debated nor philosophized, but accepted the changes around us as necessary, and we submitted joyously, considering it to have been the will of God. And while standing beside the relics of St. Sergius, what after all was there to argue about? He had summoned us, and we had come. Besides, by then, not one of the catacomb pastors was left in the vicinity. I want to state that the Church in hiding is the very same Church that exists today; it was one of its parts. [ ] After all, the persecuted Church was founded by the Holy Martyrs, the clergy of those awful years, about whose fate it is too painful to think or talk about now.
[ ] As a child, I stood and prayed in a tiny room in which the service proceeded in whispered tones. The windows were tightly sealed, and the light barely flickered. The service was done almost entirely from memory. How could it have been otherwise! An archimandrite, Hieromonk Fr. Seraphim Batiukov conducted the service. The choir was comprised of nuns who had been expelled from their monasteries; among them stood our parents and our nanny (the nun Matrona). Sometimes they would get carried away and raise their voices to above a whisper. Their singing was very beautiful. Then, someone would suddenly realize what they were doing, and would stop the others; again it would become a whisper. From time to time someone would go listen at the outer door, would return and signal that all was quiet, and the service would resume [ ]
Later, everyone was arrested, and the catacomb believers were dispersed - some sent into exile, others to the camps. I don't know about the others, but Maria Alexeevna Sakatova was in the camp for 10 years, and papa was exiled for 5 years. Maria Alexeevna had been batiushka's favorite spiritual daughter. They sang in a whisper, and for that whisper, got 10 years in the camps. Such was the Catacomb Church. Martyrdom envisaging the future. [ ] I saw those neo-martyrs, I talked with them, and I remember their radiant faces.
Batiushka Fr. Seraphim always served at a slow pace, very calmly, with solemnity. A black mantiya, an epitrachilion, and a cascade of snow-white hair. Standing before an analogion on which lay an (Iveron) Icon of the Mother of God, and sometimes illuminated by but a single vigil lamp, he was the personification of the vitality, the life of the Church they were trying to either alter or annihilate. No one knew what each new day would bring; in the heart each knock at the door or at the window would echo as the first step on the path to martyrdom. For some time, this tiny part of the isolated, persecuted Church in hiding existed in our home. While batiushka was still alive, we all remained unharmed. The arrests began three years after his death. They exhumed his body from its grave under the house in which he had lived, and took it to be autopsied. Later, the authorities buried him in a "fraternal," i.e. mass, grave at the cemetery. [The location of] his grave is known to us [ ]
17.01.1997 A sorrowful account of those years, an account of the most-cruel persecution of the Church of Christ, an account of stoicism and courage, of the faith and endurance of many, has yet to be written. Everything I have read is, by and large, of a political nature: the battle near the throne and for the throne in any of its aspects; nothing of Christ. They write about martyrs - a multitude of martyrs, with worthy people among them - but political martyrs; the martyrs for Christ's sake remain silent. What do we all know of them? [ ] Everything about what was simultaneously the most difficult and most wonderful of times must be made known to future generations, for in the light of flaming, desecrated, holy things, the identities of the persecutors and of the persecuted, of the torturers and those being martyred were starkly identified, delineated, and distinguished. Such a clear line of demarcation was laid down between them that to this day, so many years later, we see and physically apprehend the reality of their existence. [ ] This blazing dividing line was drawn by Divine Providence, by God, to Whom belong both judgment and fate, anger and mercy. And He alone knows the hidden purpose of the enormous events to which we were witnesses. M. S. Zhelnavakova
Archpriest V.Potapov, June 2002