the holy new martyrs of eastern russia - Coptic Orthodox teaching

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of January 14/27, 25 monastics from the closed monasteries of the Kazan area
assembled as usual at the Raithu Desert. This used to happen every year on
that day. Some of the monks were working as workers, while others were too
old to work and lived with those close to them. The nuns were laundresses
and workers in the factories and workshops, and in the kitchen gardens. On
the morning of January 14/27 they all arrived at the Vasilyevo station, from
where it was ten kilometres on foot to the monastery. They were allowed to
open the church and celebrate the Liturgy. Monastics of both sexes and
several laymen communed in the Holy Mysteries. It seemed as if a
community of Christians of the first centuries had gathered in the snowcovered
monastery among the elegant pines.
After the Liturgy and a touching moleben during which many of those
present wept, the GPU detachment that had surrounded the church pushed
their way into the altar, and dragged out the deacons who were consuming
the Holy Gifts. All present were arrested and accused of unlawful assembly.
The monks and nuns were interned into one room, and the laypeople into
another. Then, after each person had been interrogated individually, all the
monks and nuns and several of the laypeople were taken to Kazan, where
they were put in prison.
The investigation lasted 23 days, and on February 20, 1930 a troika of the
GPU of the Tatar autonomous republic sentenced the following to be shot in
“The Case of the Raithu Monks, Kazan, 1930”: Hieromonks Joseph
(Gavrilov), Sergius (Guskov), Barlaam (Pokhilyuk), Job (Protopopov) and
Anthony (Chirkov), Novice Peter (Tupitsin) and the laymen Basil Gavrilov
and Abram Stepanov. The sentence was carried out on Hieromonks Joseph,
Job, Barlaam and Anthony, and on Novice Peter, on the feast of the
Annunication, April 7, 1930.
The other worshippers who had been arrested in Belo-Bezvodnaya and
Raithu, including the former novices of the Kazan Mother of God and St.
Theodore monasteries, were scattered to various concentration camps in the
north with sentences of five or ten years.
Hieromonk Joseph (Illarionovich Gavrilov) was born in 1888 in the village
of Usad, Kazan uyezd into a peasant family. He went to the village school. On
entering the monastery, he was at first a novice in the guest-house and in the
apiary. In 1910 he was enlisted in the army as librarian of the Officers'
Assembly. In 1914 he was demobilised, and, having lived in the monastery for
two or three months, was again conscripted as a cook. "During the
revolution," he said at his interrogation, "I was at the front. My attitude to the
coup was that nothing good would come of it." In 1917 he returned home, but
in 1918 and at the beginning of 1919 he was forced to work in a workers'
battalion unloading carriages. From 1919, however, he never again left the
monastery. He received the rank of hierodeacon in 1920, and of hieromonk in
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