On December 24, the 40th anniversary of the consecration of the Intercession Church was solemnly celebrated in the Northern capital. The festive service was led by His Grace Bishop Evfimiy (Dubinov), who cares for the St. Petersburg and Tver diocese. He was concelebrated by Bishop Vikentiy (Novozhilov) of Yaroslavl and Kostroma and the entire clergy of St. Petersburg. The youth Mikhail Toran was ordained as candle-bearer, and his brother Daniil Toran – as a reader. After the service there was a festive meal, and at the end of the day – an evening of memories.
Not many participants of those events are still alive. At the consecration ceremony of the church in 1983, Valentin Nikolaevich Novozhilov from Kostroma (now Bishop Vikenty) was present. Among active participants in the restoration of the church were brothers Yevgeniy and Gennadiy Chunins, now both archpriests, as well as Igor Karvanen, now a priest, rector of the Church of the Ligovskaya community.
The defaced church next to the “Cemetery of the victims of January 9” on the outskirts of Leningrad was handed over to the Old Believer community on the eve of Easter in 1983. All summer and autumn, daily restoration works were performed there, and by December 25, 1983, the priests from the capital arrived. They performed a prayer service and a minor consecration of water, and then the first liturgy. The Church of the Intercession in Leningrad on the Prospekt of the Alexandrovskaya Farm became the first officially opened Old Believer church on the territory of the USSR after many years of godless Soviet prohibitions.
The wave of Perestroika relaxations, opening of communities and return of churches, which passed across the country a little later, highlights the importance of the return of the church in St. Petersburg and the feat of those who put their labors to this. To understand this feat, we need to remember the main milestones in the life of the St. Petersburg Old Believers in the twentieth century.
To understand the sequence of events we should start in April 1932, when, after the Standing of Mary service, mass arrests of parishioners of Leningrad churches took place. NKVD officers knocked on the doors of believers – sometimes an hour or two hours after the service, sometimes early in the morning. According to some reports, about 180 people were arrested. A third of them were members of the youth brotherhood named after Archpriest Avvakum – students, youth – the very flower of the Christian society. Death sentences were not yet given in those days. The “ringleaders,” including the head of the St. Petersburg diocese, Holy Hierarch Gerontiy (Lakomkin), were sentenced to ten years of concentration camps. Already in the camps some of them were given another “ten” in the camps – that was the usual practice. For example, the son of Bishop Gerontiy, Gennadiy, received such a double sentence. Gennady Lakomkin did not survive that term – he died in 1944. Dozens more of those arrested in 1932 did not return from the camps.
Mass arrests were followed by the closure of churches. The Intercession Cathedral at the Gromovskoye Cemetery, consecrated in 1915, the pearl of Old Believer St. Petersburg, having served people for only 20 years, was blown up and dismantled; only the foundation remained. All other churches were closed and destroyed, and the diocese suffered total destruction. The polar night has arrived in the spiritual life of the Old Believers of St. Petersburg. It took half a century to come out into the light again.
War, evacuation, blockade and famine weakened the already bloodless Leningrad community. One of the first people to return from prison was Archpriest Vasiliy Kosmachov. Already before the war, he unsuccessfully tried to attain to the opening of a church for the Old Believers. After the war, other believers returned to Leningrad from the fronts and evacuation and continued the work of Fr. Vasiliy. Post-war petitions of the St. Petersburg Old Believers to the Soviet government are preserved in the archive of Holy Hierarch Gerontiy (Lakomkin). Unfortunately, they did not produce results. In 1948–1949 these efforts faded away.
In the 60s, a new generation of Leningrad Old Believers took on the task of opening an Old Believer church; for several years they wrote petitions and collected signatures, but all those efforts were in vain: nothing was achieved.
In 1979, an application to register the community was submitted by a new group of Leningrad Old Believers, the core of which consisted of the Dmitrievs and Chunins – the sisters of Bishop Alexander (Chunin) Antonina, Yevgenia and Marya. They seek advice from the Gomel priest Archpriest Evgeniy Bobkov; Boris Aleksandrovich Dmitriev is in contact with him.
Thanks to the wise advice of Fr. Evgeniy Bobkov, letters, petitions, and complaints are filed by the Old Believers community almost daily; telephone calls are organized and various meetings with officials are held with the request to open the community. This exhausting marathon continues for more than three years. Letters with petitions and complaints from Leningrad Old Believers were sent to all possible authorities: the Leningrad Commissioner for religious affairs and the Leningrad City Executive Committee, Council for Religious Affairs of the USSR and the congress of the Communist Party, the Council of Ministers and the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the Politburo, and the Central Control Commission of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Meetings with dozens of officials in Moscow and Leningrad took place, and the fight did not stop.
For a long time, all appeals received negative responses, but from the increasing irritation that sounded in them, it was clear: the efforts of the Old Believers had some impact on the officials. Finally, the Leningrad authorities gave in: in October 1982, the Leningrad City Executive Committee decided to register the Old Believer community, and in the spring of 1983, the Old Believers received the destroyed church building on the Prospekt of the Alexandrovskaya Farm. The first service in this dilapidated building was conducted on Easter. People prayed with tears of joy. Immediately after the Bright Week, intense work began: the roof was repaired, the dome and cross were installed, the floors and the iconostasis were made, the walls were plastered.
Back then, no one still knew that a few years later Perestroika would come and everything would become much simpler. At that moment it was a real victory, won by the strong faith and unprecedented efforts of those people. And we should preserve the memory of their feat.
