the holy new martyrs of eastern russia - Coptic Orthodox teaching

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activity of the participants in our grouping’, and these points were transferred
in the same words into the ‘Concluding Indictment’. Apparently, such
testimonies were demanded of Bishop Victor, but Vlayka did not recognize
his guilt in the writing of the ‘novel’ thought up by the investigation.”
On March 23 Bishop Victor and six others were formally accused that: “(a)
they were active participants in a counter-revolutionary grouping of
administratively exiled clergy and churchmen in the village of Ust-Tsilma; (b)
they took part in group meetings conducted by the leadership of the grouping
in which general methods and tactics of counter-revolutionary work were
worked out; (c) in the mass of the peasantry they conducted daily anti-soviet
agitation directed at the undermining of the enterprises of Soviet power; and
(d) they spread provocative rumours about the inevitability of a war and the
destruction of Soviet power with the aim of strengthening defeatist
sentiments.”
On May 10, 1933 he was sentenced in accordance with articles 58-10 and
58-11 to another three years in exile. First he spent at least another three
months in an isolator in Syktyvkar, where he miraculously found an icon of
Christ lying on the ground – it was a copy of the wonder-working icon from
the Holy Trinity – St. Stephen monastery in Ust-Sysolsk uyezd. Vladyka
brought it into his cell and prayed: “Lord, Thou has appeared to me. So
intercede for me!” Soon he was freed.
After prison Vladyka served several liturgies with other exiled priests in
the flat of the exiled Fr. Nicholas in Arkhangelsk. “What a joy it was for us!”
said Vladyka. “And then the icon was with us.”
Then he was sent to the village of Neritsa, some thirty kilometres from Ust-
Tsilma. Here he was surrounded by atheists, who followed his every
movement. Vladyka arrived in a sad mood. But the believers in Ust-Tsilma,
who were now free, promised not to abandon him. Although no parcels could
be sent directly to him in Neritsa, the Vyatka and Glazov parishioners
constantly sent him things, which he immediately distributed to the needy
villagers (there was a famine in the winter of 1933-1934). He prayed for the
sick twelve-year-old daughter of the man in whose house he lived, and she
recovered. Vladyka’s neighbour, a communist, was constantly playing
something on the gramophone very loudly. Vladyka went up to the wall,
made the sign of the cross on it – and the gramophone fell down. There was
no more noise…
A little more than two months before his death, on February 23, 1934,
Vladyka wrote a letter to Ekaterina Pavlovna Peshkova of the Political Red
Cross asking for help, since he was in a difficult situation. Peshkova’s reply
was dated May 8. In August it was returned again to Moscow with the note:
“Returned to the sender because of the death of the addressee”.
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