The New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church: From Patriarch Tikhon to Butovo, the 1927 Declaration and Reunion

In 1917 the Russian Orthodox Church was a vast Church, recently freed to restore its patriarchate. Within a few years its bishops were being shot, its patriarch was under arrest, and its faithful were learning that the state which now ruled them meant to end the Church altogether. For seventy years the Church lived under persecution, compromise and silence, and out of it came a company of martyrs and confessors, well over a thousand of whom the Church has now named as saints. This article tells that history without taking cheap sides: what happened, how the Church split over the question of how to survive, how it was healed, and why the Orthodox honour these people as the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.

It is a story of heroes, and of a wound that is not purely political. For the first persecutions see Why Did Rome Persecute Christians?; for why the Church venerates martyrs, Why Orthodox Christians Venerate Relics; how a person is added to the calendar is explained in How Does Someone Become a Saint? and the Church's many jurisdictions in Why Are There So Many Orthodox Jurisdictions? The faith that carried these martyrs is gathered on Why Orthodoxy.

In brief

The All-Russian Church Council of 1917-1918 restored the patriarchate and elected St Tikhon. The Bolshevik state then killed bishops and priests, seized Church property, jailed the patriarch, backed a schismatic "Living Church," and in the late 1920s and 1930s moved to destroy organised church life. In 1927 Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) issued a Declaration of loyalty to the Soviet state, which he saw as the way to keep a legal church alive; it split the faithful, and the Church Abroad (ROCOR) refused it and went its own way. ROCOR glorified the New Martyrs in 1981 and Moscow in 2000, and the two restored communion in 2007.

Thesis: the New Martyrs are real martyrs, among the greatest witnesses of the Church's history. The Church honours them whichever side of the 1927 argument they stood on, and she can say this without pretending that the argument was small or that either side was without sin.

A Church restored, then struck (1917 to 1922)

The All-Russian Council opened in Moscow in August 1917 and restored the patriarchate, which had been abolished under Peter the Great two centuries earlier.¹ In November 1917 the Council chose Tikhon, Metropolitan of Moscow, by lot from three candidates; the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) dates his election to 5/18 November and his enthronement to 21 November/4 December.²

The first bishop to die was Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev, killed on 25 January 1918 (Old Style; 7 February in the civil calendar). The OCA says he was "the first bishop to be tortured and slain by the Communists" and that armed men came for him at half past six that evening; it was Vladimir who had announced Tikhon's election. The Council, still in session, set 25 January, the day of his death, as the yearly commemoration of Russia's martyrs and confessors, and the Synaxis of the New Martyrs is kept on or near that day.³ Metropolitan Philaret of the Church Abroad later wrote that Vladimir "occupies a special place of honor" among the New Martyrs "as the first martyr who placed the beginning of this glorious choir."⁴

The great test of 1922 was the seizure of Church valuables during the famine. Patriarch Tikhon offered unconsecrated treasures and promised to raise the sum from the faithful; he refused to give up consecrated vessels, and was imprisoned on 12 May 1922. In his absence a state-backed group, the Renovationists or "Living Church," took over the Church's administration; they met in council in May 1923 and tried to depose him. He was released in June 1923, the OCA notes, "upon making a statement of loyalty to the Soviet government," "a step he felt he had to take for the good of the Church."¹

In Petrograd, Metropolitan Benjamin had agreed that the Church's valuables be turned over, wanting the gift to be voluntary. He was put on trial. Asked to speak for himself, he told the court that whatever it decreed he would thank God, saying: "Glory to Thee, O Lord, glory to Thee for all things." The OCA's life of the saint records that at nine in the evening on 5 July the tribunal announced that ten defendants, Benjamin among them, would be shot. Benjamin and three others were executed on 31 July 1922 by the Church's calendar, which is 13 August in the civil one.⁵⁶ The patriarch himself died on 25 March/7 April 1925; the OCA records his last words as "Glory to Thee, O Lord, glory to Thee."²

The camps and the confessors

Many bishops were exiled rather than shot, and some were killed later. Archbishop Hilarion (Troitsky) of Verey, consecrated bishop in 1920, spent six years (1923 to 1929) in a labour camp near Solovki, catching fish and mending nets. The OCA records his dry remark: "Formerly, the fishermen became theologians. Now the theologians have become fishermen." Sent into exile in 1929, he reached Petrograd ill with typhus and died in a prison hospital there on 15 December 1929, aged forty-four; his relics were found in 1998, and he was glorified in 1999.⁷ A ROCOR chronicle counts 117 bishops in prison or exile during 1926, the figure the historian Ann Shukman also gives for those years.⁶⁸ The Church calls such people confessors, those who suffered for the faith without being killed outright.

This was not an accident of history. It is what the Lord told His followers to expect: "Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:10), and "be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life" (Revelation 2:10).⁹ The word "martyr" means witness; the Church has honoured the martyrs from her earliest centuries, and the Soviet period added a great company to them.

The 1927 Declaration

With the patriarch dead and Metropolitan Peter, the locum tenens, arrested in December 1925, the leadership passed to Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) as his deputy.⁶ On 16/29 July 1927 Sergius and eight members of his Temporary Patriarchal Holy Synod issued the Declaration of loyalty to the Soviet state. In Ann Shukman's translation its best-known sentence reads: "We want to be Orthodox and at the same time recognise the Soviet Union as our civil motherland, whose joys and successes are our joys and successes, and whose failures are our failures." The state had threatened to remove every legal form of church life, and the Declaration bought legal recognition for the Church's central administration.⁸¹⁰

The reaction was immediate. Shukman writes that the Declaration "split the ROC immediately" into those who followed Sergius and stayed legal and those who went underground as the "catacomb church."⁸ Many bishops, some of them in prison or exile, refused it; Metropolitan Joseph of Petrograd, moved from his see after he refused, gave his name to the "Josephites."⁶¹¹ On 9 September 1927 the Council of Bishops of the Church Abroad declared its loyalty to Metropolitan Peter and refused to accept the Declaration, and later that month bishops exiled on Solovki wrote to Sergius criticising it.⁶

The bishops abroad had governed themselves since 1920 under a decree of Patriarch Tikhon (Ukaz 362), meeting from 1921 at Sremski Karlovtsy in Serbia. In May 1922 Tikhon abolished their administration (Ukaz 348), at the Soviet government's categorical demand according to a memoir that ROCOR's chronicle cites; that August the bishops abroad complied in form and set up a temporary Synod under the 1920 decree.⁶

What did the Church itself later conclude? A joint commentary of commissions from both the Moscow Patriarchate and ROCOR, published on the ROCOR Synod's site, is unusually balanced. It says the Declaration "was written under unprecedented pressure from the militantly atheistic state, which threatened to completely eliminate all legal forms of church life," and that Metropolitan Sergius's policies "were doubtless aimed towards the preservation of the church hierarchy." It also says the Declaration "introduced a sharp rift within the people of the Church," and that it was and "is to this day, a temptation for many children of the Russian Orthodox Church." And it adds that "never did those people who made compromises for the sake of preserving the legal existence of the Church, nor, of course, those who disagreed with such a policy, ever deem the path of compromise as normal." In 1991 Patriarch Alexy II said of it: "Today we can say that there is untruth mixed into... the Declaration." The commentary's seventh point is the one that matters most to this article: "The martyrs and confessors who gave their lives for Christ and His Church were numerous, both among those who accepted the 'Declaration' and among those who rejected it. From among one group and another, many are now among the host of saints."¹⁰

That is the honest account: a hard choice made under crushing pressure, defended by some as the only way to keep the sacraments alive and condemned by others as a betrayal, with martyrs on both sides. The Church does not need to settle every question of motive to say that.

The Terror, and how many died

The worst years were 1937 and 1938. At Butovo, a firing range south of Moscow, mass shootings ran from August 1937 to October 1938. The church of the New Martyrs that now stands there counts about 20,760 people buried at the site; 935 of them were shot for their Orthodox faith, among them seven bishops, a great number of clergy and monastics, and nearly two hundred laypeople.¹² Patriarch Alexy II called Butovo "one of the many Russian Golgothas."¹³

No honest article can give a single total, and this one does not. Published estimates differ widely, depending on who is counted, what counts as a death for the faith, and how the Soviet archives are read. The OCA's history states that at least 28 bishops were murdered in the three years after January 1918 and that some 12,000 laymen were killed for religious activities, without naming a source for the figures.¹ The ROCOR epistle of 1981 spoke of "not merely hundreds or thousands, but millions of sufferers for faith," a pastoral statement, not a count.⁴ Church leaders have cited much larger figures for arrests and shootings of clergy in 1937 and 1938, but I could not check them against a named scholarly study with its method, and so they are left out.¹⁷ The one count that is firm is of a different kind: the number the Church has named as saints, given below.

Between the Terror and Khrushchev came a reprieve. In 1943, in the middle of the war, Stalin allowed a council that elected Sergius patriarch, and set up a state Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church to oversee it.¹⁸ Under Khrushchev, the OCA's history says, open churches fell "from 22,000 churches open in 1960 to 7,000 in 1964."¹

Glorification abroad: ROCOR, 1981

The Russian Church Abroad could glorify the New Martyrs while Russia could not speak freely. Its Council of Bishops decided in principle in 1971 and took further steps in 1974, 1976 and 1978; on 23 February 1981 its Synod fixed Sunday 1 November 1981 for the solemn glorification at the Synodal Cathedral in New York.¹⁴ The 1981 epistle of Metropolitan Philaret said: "the Russian land is being purified of this defilement by the sacred blood of the New Martyrs." He named first Patriarch Tikhon and Metropolitans Vladimir and Benjamin, and gave "an entirely special place" to the Royal Family.⁴

The path was not smooth. Archpriest Serafim Gan's account on the ROCOR Synod's site records that there was "no complete unanimity" among the faithful: some asked whether the time was right, and whether the Church Abroad had the authority to canonise at all while the Church in Russia was not free. Metropolitan Philaret answered that it was the Church Abroad's duty "to do that which in Russia cannot be done." The bishops debated a draft that spoke of the martyrs "headed by the Tsar-Martyr"; the text they adopted unanimously said instead that "a special place in the host of holy New Martyrs is occupied by Tsar-Martyr Nicholas." On the Sergian question, the Council resolved that the final list should include those who suffered before the Declaration of 1927, with "special circumspection" for later victims, whose names would be commemorated in prayer "for the time being"; in the event the list included some who died later, such as Archbishop Hilarion (Troitsky).¹⁴

Glorification in Russia: the Jubilee Council, 2000

The Moscow Patriarchate acted at its Jubilee Bishops' Council in Moscow on 13 to 16 August 2000. At a press conference the day after the Council ended, Metropolitan Juvenaly, who chaired the Synodal commission for the canonization of saints, said that "in total 1154 holy people will be canonized, among them 1090 Russia's new martyrs and confessors." He also announced "the glorification of the last Russian Emperor and his family among the holy passion-bearers."¹⁵ It counted the Royal Family among the passion-bearers, and it included leading opponents of Sergius, among them Metropolitan Kirill (Smirnov), whom a historian at St Tikhon's Theological Institute called "the spiritual head of the anti-Sergi faction."¹⁶

A point to keep straight: 1,090 is the number of names the Church glorified in that act, not the number of those who suffered, and the list has grown since. By 2017, Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev) said, "more than 1,760 New Martyrs and Confessors" had been glorified.¹⁷ For a hierarch of the Church Abroad in the same age, see Who Was St John Maximovitch?

Reunion, 2007

On 17 May 2007, the feast of the Ascension, Patriarch Alexy II and Metropolitan Laurus signed the Act of Canonical Communion in Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow, and the clergy of both Churches served the liturgy together.¹⁸ The OCA's Fr Leonid Kishkovsky, who was present, described it as ending "the 80-year division within Russian Orthodoxy"; two days later the two primates served together at Butovo, where the new stone church was consecrated.¹³¹² The Act restored communion without merging the two bodies. In its own words the Church Abroad "remains an indissoluble, self-governing part of the Local Russian Orthodox Church" and is "independent in pastoral, educational, administrative, management, property, and civil matters."¹⁹

In 2000 a ROCOR priest, Fr Viktor Potapov, said that Moscow's canonisation of opponents of the Declaration "removed one of the impediments to eventual rapprochement between our churches."¹⁶ The commentary of the joint commissions, quoted above, shows the sort of mutual honesty that made reunion possible.

What this means for the faith

The Orthodox Church does not honour the New Martyrs because of their politics. She honours them because they confessed Christ when it cost them everything, in the manner of the martyrs of the first centuries: "Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses" (Hebrews 12:1). The martyr's reward is Christ's own promise. The martyr's prayer is, as with the first martyr St Stephen, forgiveness for the persecutor (Acts 7:60; Luke 23:34). And the Church's claim is the claim of the Creed, that she is the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, which the gates of hell did not overcome even when her leaders were shot and her churches were closed.

The New Martyrs also help us read our own times. We are not asked to be Soviet-era martyrs, but we are asked to hold the faith without compromise and without hatred, and to remember that fidelity is often quiet: keeping the services, teaching a child the Creed.

What we can say confidently

• The Council of 1917-1918 restored the patriarchate and elected Tikhon by lot; Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev (January 1918) and Metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd (1922) were killed by the new regime, and Patriarch Tikhon was imprisoned in 1922-1923.
• Archbishop Hilarion (Troitsky) and many other bishops suffered years of camp and exile; at Butovo alone, 935 people were shot for their Orthodox faith in 1937-1938, among some 20,760 buried there.
• Metropolitan Sergius issued the Declaration on 16/29 July 1927; it split the Church, and both the Moscow Patriarchate and ROCOR in a joint commentary now call it a compromise made under unprecedented pressure, and recognise martyrs on both sides of it.
• ROCOR glorified the New Martyrs and Confessors, with the Royal Family, on 1 November 1981; the Moscow Patriarchate's Jubilee Council in August 2000 glorified 1,090 of them within a total of 1,154 holy people; the two Churches restored communion on 17 May 2007.

{{very-strong: The Russian Church suffered organised, state-directed persecution from 1917 into the 1960s, and has formally glorified a large company of its martyrs and confessors (ROCOR, 1981; Moscow Patriarchate, 2000).}}

{{strong: The Declaration of Metropolitan Sergius, dated 16/29 July 1927, was a compromise made under heavy pressure; the Church's own commissions now describe it as such, and as a cause of division that is no longer the barrier it was.}}

What remains disputed

• How many were killed: estimates range widely, and this article relies on no single total.
• How to judge the Declaration of 1927. Some regard it as a necessary act of prudence that kept the sacraments alive; others as a betrayal that tied the Church to an atheist state. The joint commentary acknowledges "untruth" in it and also that Sergius sought in earnest to preserve church life; historians and churchmen continue to weigh it.
• Where some saints stood on it. Keston News Service (2000) reported conflicting accounts of whether Archbishop Hilarion (Troitsky) signed the Solovki bishops' letter against the Declaration.
• The authority of ROCOR's 1981 act before Moscow's own. The Church Abroad's own faithful debated it at the time (Fr Serafim Gan's account), and the Moscow Patriarchate made its own act of glorification in 2000.
• How to name the Royal Family's sanctity. ROCOR glorified them among the New Martyrs in 1981, after debating the wording; Moscow glorified them as passion-bearers in 2000.

None of these touches the teaching of the Church on martyrdom or the reality of the sacrifice.

Conclusion

The Orthodox Church of the twentieth century was struck as few Churches have been, and she did not die. The New Martyrs are the proof: priests at Butovo, bishops on Solovki, a patriarch under arrest, countless ordinary believers whose names are known to God. Some of their Church's leaders compromised and some refused, and the Church now says, in her joint voice, that many from both groups are among the host of saints. We can learn from the quarrel and still bow before the witness. The cloud of witnesses is larger for them, and the road of the Church is the same road: "be thou faithful unto death." To see how the apostolic faith has stood through every age, continue to Why Orthodoxy.

Notes

1. "The Orthodox Faith, Volume III: Church History, Twentieth Century: The Orthodox Church in Russia," Orthodox Church in America (OCA), https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/church-history/twentieth-century/the-orthodox-church-in-russia: the Council convened in Moscow in August 1917; the patriarchate "was abolished under Emperor Peter I in 1721"; "On May 12, 1922, Patriarch Tikhon was imprisoned for his refusal to give up consecrated Church vessels"; his release in June 1923; the Renovationist council of May 1923 "attempted to depose Patriarch Tikhon"; "at least 28 bishops were murdered, thousands of clergy were imprisoned or killed," "some 12,000 laymen were killed for religious activities" (no source is given for these figures); the 1943 council; "from 22,000 churches open in 1960 to 7,000 in 1964."
2. "The 100th Anniversary of St. Tikhon's Election, Enthronement," OCA, https://www.oca.org/history-archives/100th-anni-st.-tikhons-election-enthronement (the patriarchal system "abolished by Czar Peter the Great two centuries earlier"; elected by lot on 5/18 November 1917; enthroned 21 November/4 December 1917); and "Repose of Saint Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow, Enlightener of North America," OCA, https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2021/04/07/101016-repose-of-saint-tikhon-patriarch-of-moscow-enlightener-of-north (the three candidates; Metropolitan Vladimir announced the election; repose 25 March/7 April 1925; last words "Glory to Thee, O Lord, glory to Thee"). This page dates his imprisonment from April 1922 to June 1923; the OCA's church-history page (note 1) gives 12 May 1922.
3. "Saint Vladimir, Metropolitan of Kiev and Gallich," OCA, https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2015/01/25/100311-saint-vladimir-metropolitan-of-kiev-and-gallich: he "was the first bishop to be tortured and slain by the Communists"; "At six thirty on the night of January 25" (January 1918) armed men came for him; he announced Tikhon's election on 5 November 1917; the Council set 25 January for the annual commemoration of Russia's martyrs and confessors; the Synaxis is kept on the Sunday closest to 25 January (the OCA's life of St Benjamin, note 5, says "January 25 or the Sunday after"); glorified in 1992. In the twentieth century the Old Style date ran thirteen days behind the civil one.
4. Epistle of Metropolitan Philaret (ROCOR), from "Orthodox Russia," 14 June 1981, in "The Canonization of Russia's New Martyrs," Orthodox America, https://roca.org/oa/volume-ii/issue-11/the-canonization-of-russias-new-martyrs/ ("not merely hundreds or thousands, but millions of sufferers for faith"; "purified of this defilement by the sacred blood of the New Martyrs"; Tikhon, Vladimir and Benjamin named first; "an entirely special place in the choir of the New Martyrs is taken by the Royal Family").
5. "Hieromartyr Benjamin, Metropolitan of Petrograd and Gdovsk, and those with him," OCA, https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2026/07/31/102157-hieromartyr-benjamin-metropolitan-of-petrograd-and-gdovsk-and-th (the valuables; his words to the court; the sentence of 5 July; execution on 31 July 1922 with Archimandrite Sergius, George and John).
6. Monk Benjamin (Gomarteli), "Timeline of the Orthodox Church 1917-1998," ROCOR Studies, https://www.rocorstudies.org/2019/10/25/timeline-of-the-orthodox-church-in-the-xxth-century-part-i-1917-1927/ (a ROCOR chronicle written before the reunion, critical of Sergius): Ukaz 362 ratified 20 November 1920; first session at Sremski Karlovtsy, 26 July 1921; Ukaz 348 of 22 April/5 May 1922 and Vinogradov's memoir; resolution of 31 August 1922; Benjamin's trial from 10 June and execution on 13 August 1922; Peter arrested 10 December 1925; "117 Russian bishops were in prison or in exile" in 1926; Metropolitan Joseph transferred to Odessa after refusing the Declaration (31 August 1927); the ROCOR Council of 9 September 1927; the Solovki bishops' appeal of 14/27 September 1927. The timeline dates the Declaration "June 16/29, 1927"; Shukman (note 8), the joint commentary (note 10) and Gan (note 14) all give July 16/29, which this article follows.
7. "Hieromartyr Hilarion, Archbishop of Verey," OCA, https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2025/12/15/103704-hieromartyr-hilarion-archbishop-of-verey (consecrated 20 May 1920; six years, 1923 to 1929, in a labour camp near Solovki; the "fishermen" remark; reached Petrograd ill with typhus; died 15 December 1929 at forty-four; finding of relics 1998; glorified 1999). Keston News Service (note 16) adds that his relics are venerated at the Sretensky Monastery in Moscow.
8. Ann Shukman, "Metropolitan Sergi Stragorodsky: The Case of the Representative Individual," Religion, State & Society 34.1 (March 2006), pp. 51-61, https://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/rss/34-1_051.pdf: "at that time 117 Orthodox bishops were in prison"; the Declaration "dated 16/29 July 1927 and signed by Metropolitan Sergi and eight members of the Temporary Patriarchal Holy Synod"; her translation of the quoted sentence (she notes that "the 'joys, successes and failures' refer to the 'Motherland'"); Sergius "had won legal recognition for the central authority of the ROC"; the split into legal and "catacomb" church; the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church (1943).
9. Scripture is quoted from the King James Version (1769 text), checked against the KJV text served by this site's Bible reader (https://honestapologist.com/api/bible/connections/texts?v=kjv); words the KJV prints in italics are given without brackets.
10. "Commentary on the Joint Document of the Commissions of the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia Entitled 'On the Relationship Between Church and State,'" Synod of Bishops of ROCOR website, https://synod.com/synod/engdocuments/enmat_commentary.html (points 1 to 9; the Declaration "dated July 16/29, 1927"; the Alexy II quotation is cited there to Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, 1991, no. 10, pp. 5-6). The page shows no date; Shukman (note 8) describes it as a recent document of the reunion talks.
11. "Patriarch Sergius of Moscow," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarch_Sergius_of_Moscow (secondary; the name "Josephites" after Metropolitan Joseph of Petrograd, citing Mikhail V. Shkarovskii, "The Russian Orthodox Church versus the State: The Josephite Movement, 1927-1940," Slavic Review 54.2, 1995, which was not opened).
12. "Butovo" (English booklet), Church of the Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia at Butovo, https://martyr.ru/buklet/english ("According to the available data, 20,760 people are buried there"; "In approximately fifteen months, 935 people were shot, whose only guilt was the confession of their Orthodox Faith"; seven hierarchs; "nearly 200 lay people"; the stone church consecrated on 19 May 2007, "two days after the signing" of the Act).
13. Leonid Kishkovsky, editorial in The Orthodox Church magazine, Summer 2007, OCA, https://www.oca.org/holy-synod/statements/fr-kishkovsky/after-80-plus-years-the-moscow-patriarchate-and-the-russian-orthodox-church (the Act "ending the 80-year division within Russian Orthodoxy"; the liturgy at Butovo on 19 May 2007 with Patriarch Alexy and Metropolitan Laurus and the consecration of the new church's altars; Patriarch Alexy "has called the Butovo site one of the many Russian Golgothas").
14. Archpriest Serafim Gan, "The Canonization of the New Martyrs by the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia in 1981: How It Happened," trans. Nicholas Ohotin, ROCOR Synod website, https://synod.com/synod/engdocuments/enart_protserafimgannewmartyrs.html (decisions of 1971, 1974, 1976 and 1978; Synod of 23 February 1981; "no complete unanimity"; Metropolitan Philaret's epistle; the drafts on the Tsar-Martyr; the resolution of Archbishop Anthony (Medvedev) naming "the declaration of Metropolitan Sergius of July 16/29, 1927"; the inclusion of Metropolitan Arseny (Stadnitsky) and Archbishop Hilarion (Troitsky)).
15. "Press-conference on the results of the Jubilee Bishops' Council," Moscow Patriarchate (Department for External Church Relations) archive, https://old.mospat.ru/archive/en/2000/08/s2000e36/ (Council of 13 to 16 August 2000; press conference of 17 August; Metropolitan Juvenaly's figures; the passion-bearers).
16. Geraldine Fagan, "Russia: Opponents of Church Servility to Soviet Regime Recognised as Saints," Keston News Service, 6 November 2000, https://www.keston.org.uk/kns/misc/kns-russia-canonised-opponents-of-church-servility-to-soviet.html (Aleksandr Mazyrin of the Recent History Department of the Orthodox St Tikhon Theological Institute on Metropolitan Kirill (Smirnov) and other anti-Sergian bishops canonised in August 2000; the conflicting accounts of Archbishop Hilarion and the Solovki letters; Fr Viktor Potapov's comment).
17. "For centenary of revolution Church calls to immortalize those who suffered for faith in Soviet years," OrthoChristian, 26 April 2017, https://orthochristian.com/103026.html, reporting Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev): "more than 1,760 New Martyrs and Confessors have been officially glorified by the Russian Orthodox Church." The same report gives his figures for clergy repressed and executed in 1937 and 1938, which this article does not use.
18. "Act of Canonical Communion is Signed ...," ROCOR Synod website, https://mail.synod.com/synod/enrt07/enakt.html (17 May 2007, the Ascension; signed in Christ the Saviour Cathedral by Patriarch Alexy II and Metropolitan Laurus).
19. "Act of Canonical Communion," ROCOR Western European diocese, https://orthodox-europe.org/english/rocor/act/ (the text of the Act, points 1 and 2).

Bibliography

Church documents and histories

• Joint commissions of the Moscow Patriarchate and ROCOR. Commentary on "On the Relationship Between Church and State."
• Gan, Serafim. "The Canonization of the New Martyrs ... in 1981."
• Moscow Patriarchate. Press conference on the Jubilee Bishops' Council, August 2000.
• ROCOR Synod. "Act of Canonical Communion is Signed"; the text of the Act.
• Gomarteli, Benjamin. "Timeline of the Orthodox Church 1917-1998." ROCOR Studies.
• Orthodox America. "The Canonization of Russia's New Martyrs." 1981.
• Church of the New Martyrs at Butovo. "Butovo" (English booklet).

Scholarship and reports

• Shukman, Ann. "Metropolitan Sergi Stragorodsky: The Case of the Representative Individual." Religion, State & Society 34.1 (2006): 51-61.
• Fagan, Geraldine. Keston News Service, 6 November 2000.
• Kishkovsky, Leonid. "After 80-plus Years ..." The Orthodox Church, 2007.
• OrthoChristian, 26 April 2017.

Lives and reference

• OCA. "The Orthodox Church in Russia," and lives of Sts Tikhon, Vladimir of Kiev, Benjamin of Petrograd, Hilarion of Verey.
• Wikipedia, "Patriarch Sergius of Moscow" (secondary, flagged).

Scripture

• The Holy Bible, King James Version (1769 text).