Priest Becomes a Martyr at the Hands of His Own Son

Priest Suffers Martyrdom at the Hands of His Own Son

(From the lives of the New Martyrs of Russia)

During the time when the executioners Dzerzhinsky and Bahrman were in charge of the prison camp at the former monastery of Solovki, there was exiled a priest by the name of Uspensky and his son. The son soon got a job as a guard. He would escort groups of prisoners from one camp to another; apparently, his cruelty earned him the trust of the NKVD. One winter, during a blizzard, he had to escort a group of prisoners which included his own father. Already old and sick, the father could not

walk straight through the deep snow; he would often stumble and fall and apparently slowed the procession. Then the depraved son ordered his father to step aside into the bushes, and there he shot him. The shots echoed through the forest, and the Solovki blizzard, to the singing of the north winds, buried the new hieromartyr in snow-white vestments. The next spring, they discovered the body of the archpriest with a bullet in the back of his neck. It was incorrupt, the holy relics of a saint.

But the son Uspensky, having performed such an abomination, was rewarded by the NKVD bosses with a promotion and for a while enjoyed their confidence. For the next several years he was the chief in the Bear Hill camp and all

concentration camps beyond the Onega Lake until he was shot in the Yezhov purge.

(Source: I.M. Andreyev, Russia’s Catacomb Saints, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood Press, 1982, pp. 401-402)