Brief information about the life of Fr. Arseny

Father Arseny was born in Moscow in 1894, and in 1911 he graduated from the gymnasium and entered the Faculty of History and Philology of the Moscow Imperial University. In 1916 he graduated from the university, suffered from endocarditis for more than eight months. At this time, he painted his first works on the art of ancient Russian architecture. At the beginning of 1917, after a period of spiritual searching, he left for the Optina Hermitage, where he was a novice of two elders, Anatoly and Nektarios. Here he took monastic vows, then he was ordained a hieromonk. In 1919, Father Arseny, with the blessing of the elders, returned to Moscow and was appointed the third priest in one of the Moscow churches. This required a special permission from St. Patriarch Tikhon, since the service of hieromonks in parishes was usually not allowed. At the beginning of 1921, Fr. Arseny became the second priest, and at the end of 1921, when the rector of the church, Father Pavel, was transferred and soon arrested, Father Arseny became the rector. Over the course of eight years of service, he gathered a significant community in his church, for which he became a beloved pastor and spiritual father. In 1927, at the end of December, Father Arseny was arrested for the first time and exiled to the Arkhangelsk region for two years. After the end of his term of exile, Father Arseny served in a church near Moscow (outside the hundred-kilometer zone). In 1931. he was again arrested and exiled to the Vologda region for five years. Now Father Arseny received permission to live in the Vologda, Arkhangelsk and Vladimir regions. It was impossible to serve in church, I served at home. Several times he secretly came to Moscow, met with Vladyka Athanasius (Sakharov), asked him to ordain several of his spiritual children to the priesthood, to which he received the consent of Vladyka Athanasius. He secretly ministered to his spiritual community. Then the third arrest in 1939, a new exile to Siberia, then to the Urals. Fr. Arseny spent about a year in exile in the village of Troitskoye, Arkhangelsk region. was arrested again and imprisoned in the Ural camp. In March 1941, he was transferred to a high-security camp, correspondence and visits of spiritual children almost stopped, and in 1942. to a special regime camp, where correspondence and visits were finally prohibited. Only in the spring of 1958, Father Arseny was released from the special regime camp and settled in the city of Rostov the Great with Nadezhda Petrovna. Father Arseny died in 1975 and was buried in the cemetery of Rostov. On his grave was laid a granite stone with the inscription:

Father Arseny

1894-1975

Then this stone disappeared; In what condition and where the grave is located is now unknown, because all those who took care of it have already died.

Part One. CAMP

In recent years, many memories have emerged of the lives of political prisoners during the cult of personality.

Scientists, military men, writers, old Bolsheviks, intellectuals of various professions, workers, collective farmers write. They write about their life in camps and prisons, about interrogations, but no one has yet told us about the millions of believers who died in these camps, prisons or experienced unprecedented suffering during interrogations.

They suffered and died for their faith, because they did not renounce God and, dying, glorified Him, and He did not abandon them.

To put a seal on one's lips means to consign to oblivion the sufferings, torments, selfless labor and death of many millions of martyrs who suffered for the sake of God and for us living on earth.

We must not forget, but tell about these sufferers, this is our duty to God and people.

The best people of the Russian Orthodox Church perished in this difficult time: priests and bishops, elders, monks and simply deeply religious people, in whom burned the inextinguishable fire of faith, equal in its power and sometimes surpassing the power of faith of the ancient Christian martyrs.

In these memoirs, only one of the many ascetics appears before us. And how many of them there were who died for us!

For twenty centuries mankind has been accumulating numerous knowledge, Christianity has brought Light and Life to people, but in the twentieth century people have selected only evil from the numerous arsenal of knowledge and, multiplied by the achievements of science, have brought millions of people the greatest and longest suffering and painful death. The Lord led me to walk a small part of the camp path with Father Arseny, but even this is enough to find faith, to become his spiritual son, to follow his path, to understand and see his deepest love for God and people, and to know what a true Christian is.