the holy new martyrs of eastern russia - Coptic Orthodox teaching

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which took place on May 31, 1921, people looked for the bodies in order to
bury them, but could not find them.
Fr. James’ fate may be linked with that of Alexandra Petrovna Pronina,
who was born in Vladimir (?). She came from a family of church servers, and
her father was an iconographer. She was a deeply believing person, kind and
responsive. With her husband, who was an artist, she came to Tsaritsyn before
the revolution. During the civil war her husband was called up into the army.
Alexandra Petrovna had to look after their two children in a time of famine, so
she had to take work as a prison supervisor. At that time they had already
begun to imprison clergy, and, of course, Alexandra Petrovna began to help
the priests who were in the prison where she worked. Through her the
arrested priests received letters from their loved ones, and sent notes back.
Among them was Fr. James, whose letters to his wife were taken by Alexandra
Petrovna’s daughter, the ten-year-old Vera. In April, 1921 Alexandra Petrovna
was caught with a letter of an imprisoned priest, and was herself arrested and
cast into prison. A few days later, her demobilized husband returned home.
Just the night before he had had a portentous dream, from which it was clear
to him that he would never see his wife again. And he and the children could
not obtain any news about her. Then they were told that she was supposedly
in hospital. But when they came to find out if this was true, they discovered
that they had buried her already three days before in a mass grave with other
people who had died from illness or been killed. Probably, Alexandra
Petrovna had passed through the same case as Fr. James, and had been shot
with him and six others on May 31, 1921.
Vera recalls: “My father took my brother and me to the cemetery to look for
the common grave. He was madly digging in the earth with his hands. The
earth at one spot seemed to him to be warm – it was the month of May - and
he said: ‘Here is where your holy mama lies.’ After this he was ill for a long
time… I often remember a childhood dream which I had when mama was still
alive. My mama was standing in a crowd in a ship going down the Volga. She
was waving at me with her hand. At the helm stood Jesus Christ with a halo
over His head, and He was blessing me with a cross. In the morning I told this
to mama, and she, putting me on my knees, wept and said: ‘That means that I
will soon be no more, and you will be my little orphan…’”
*
Protopriest Euthymius Alexeyevich Ilyinsky was born in 1868 in the
village of Chadayevka, Aktarsk uyezd, Saratov province, and went to Saratov
theological seminary. He served in Tsaritsyn, in the Transfiguration church.
On February 2, 1921 he was arrested, and on June 20 was convicted of
“counter-revolutionary activity expressed in the fraudulent renovation of
icons”. He was sentenced to death and shot.
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