On September 16 (September 3 on the Julian Calendar) we commemorate St Pimen, Bishop of Semirechensk and Vernoye, New Martyr of the Communist Yoke, who reposed in the Lord in 1918.
Hieromartyr Pimen, Bishop of Semirechensk and Vernoye (in the world Pyotr Zakharyevich Belolikov) was born on November 5, 1879 in the village of Vasilyevskoye, Cherepovets district, Novgorod province, into a large pious family of priest Zakhary Ivanovich and his wife Maria Ivanovna Ornatskaya, the daughter of priest John Ornatsky. The famous St. Petersburg priests Filosof and John Ornatsky were his cousins. Through Father John, Pyotr Belolikov was related to the great pastor of Kronstadt, Saint Righteous John of Kronstadt.
The holy father's entourage, which lived a vibrant church-social life, and he himself were the environment in which the future holy martyr was spiritually formed. Metropolitan Arseny of Novgorod spoke of Peter as a pupil of the shepherd of Kronstadt.
In 1900, after graduating from the Novgorod Theological Seminary, Peter continued his studies at the Kyiv Theological Academy, where he graduated among the top of his class in 1904. His diploma thesis, "The Attitude of the Ecumenical Councils to the Works of Church Writers," examined the dogmatic contribution of patristic literature to the work of the seven Ecumenical Councils.
While still a student, on August 7, 1903, he took monastic vows with the name Pimen in honor of the Kiev-Pechersk Venerable Pimen the Much-Ailing, who is in the Near Caves.
His spiritual father, Metropolitan Flavian (Gorodetsky) of Kiev and Galicia, blessed him for missionary work. On June 3, 1904, Hierodeacon Pimen was ordained a hieromonk and assigned to the Urmia Orthodox Spiritual Mission in Northwest Persia (in the city of Urmia). Before leaving for Urmia, Father Pimen met in St. Petersburg with the former head of the mission, Bishop Kirill of Gdov (Smirnov, commemorated November 7), who enjoyed the special love and respect of Saint Righteous John of Kronstadt.
A total of nine years of the bishop's short life were devoted to missionary service. A missionary by vocation, he soon mastered the Old Syriac and New Syriac languages, the Turkic dialects and preached among the Syrian Nestorians who had converted to Orthodoxy, defended their interests before the Persian authorities, taught at the mission school, finding time for scientific works, translations of early Christian Syriac texts, and published the missionary journal "Orthodox Urmia".
In 1911, Hegumen Pimen was appointed rector of the Ardon Theological Seminary of the Vladikavkaz Diocese and elevated to the rank of archimandrite. In Ardon, he worked on the spiritual education of the Ossetians for a year. However, regret about leaving the Urmia mission prompted Father Peter to ask his superiors to return him back. At this time, Father Pimen began his correspondence with the famous missionary, Saint Nicholas (Kasatkin, commemorated on February 3), who worked in distant Japan. The request was granted, and the next two years of service as assistant to the head of the mission were marked by the blossoming of his missionary talent. The beginning of the First World War stopped the further unification of the Syrians with Orthodoxy.
Since 1914, Father Pimen had served in Perm as the rector of the Perm Theological Seminary, where he became a companion and reliable support in all endeavors of the ardent champion of Orthodoxy, the future holy martyr Archbishop Andronicus of Perm (commemorated on June 7), who hoped to see Father Pimen as his vicar.
In one of his speeches in Perm, Archimandrite Pimen gave a sagacious warning: "Take care of your precious heritage - the Orthodox faith and its sacred memories... Otherwise, you will not raise a meek and patient soul in the people, but the soul of a beast, which will bring innumerable troubles to itself and to you." Father Pimen also led the temperance movement in the city.
On August 6, 1916, his episcopal consecration took place in Petrograd with his appointment to the border diocese of Salmas in Persia. Bishop Andronik presented him with his panagia, which Bishop Pimen never parted with for the next two years of his life.
In the chronicle of the farewell of Bishop Pimen from Perm, to which all of Orthodox Perm came, it was stated: "He was a true shepherd, he was unmercenary, he helped right and left." When the Bishop got on the train, the people standing on the platform uncovered their heads. In the remaining minutes, people sang church hymns.
The third visit to Urmia, already as a bishop, brought many sorrows: the impoverishment of the mission, its forced inaction in helping those starving due to crop failure, the intrigues of heterodox missions. This situation caused sorrow in the heart of the Bishop. Nevertheless, the commander of the Urmia detachment noted the beneficial influence of the bishop on the spirit of the Russian soldiers.
A year later, the Bishop was recalled from Persia at his request. He was then appointed Vicar of Turkestan in the city of Verny (now Alma-Ata) to the newly created Semirechye and Vernoye diocese. The Bishop arrived in his cathedral city of Verny, the center of the Semirechye region, on October 11, 1917.
There, the 38-year-old bishop resumed public readings and discussions, explaining to those present the current situation in Russia. The bishop gave very restrained assessments of the February Revolution, and with the Bolsheviks coming to power, the active, intelligent, pro-monarchist archpastor was doomed to perish. According to the memoirs of the Bolsheviks themselves, people came to him from morning until evening. His authority was so great that the "Soviet power" seriously feared "dual power" in Semirechensk. With his peacekeeping efforts, he prevented the policy of inciting class discord between the Cossacks and the peasantry, condemned the decree on civil marriage, and sought to preserve the teaching of the Law of God in schools. He often taught children in his home and organized a children's spiritual circle. In the summer of 1918, the bishop prevented the confiscation of church valuables from the cathedral.
Bearing responsibility before God for all the people of Semirechye, the Saint consoled and admonished the wounded of both sides in the civil war that had begun. But on the pages of the newspaper "Free Word," published in China, in Kuldzha, and illegally distributed throughout Semirechye, he gave a Christian assessment of the lawlessness committed by the new authorities, supported the White movement, and called for participation in its ranks. He spoke about this in open sermons, calling on the people to pray "for deliverance from the adversary."
Already in August 1918, he learned of the execution of the Tsar and from the pulpit of the Bishop's Church he condemned this atrocity. At the same time, he remained in Verny, virtually alone in his opposition to the rampant evil. The integrity and purity of his nature, his strong will, the intellect of a scientist, coexisting with a habit of physical labor and a sensitivity to beauty, the talent of an orator with a complete lack of pretension to external self-affirmation, the ascetic way of life of a man accustomed to a life on the march alongside officers of the Caucasian Front - all this spoke of the depth of the spirit of the Saint.
The circumstances of Vladyka's death are as follows. On the eve of his arrest, he was conducting a children's spiritual circle in his home. In the evening of September 3 (16, new style), 1918, Red Army soldiers from Mamontov's punitive detachment, recalled from the Semirechye front specifically to arrest Vladyka, burst into his chambers. Insulting and humiliating the Saint, they demanded that he go with them. After some thought, Vladyka complied. They put him on a cart and took him to the Baum grove outside the city. Even the soldiers of the punitive detachment, called to Verny to "establish revolutionary order", hesitated for a long time to shoot the Saint. Vladyka was killed with a point-blank shot by a well-known bandit in the city, who served in the city police, and, falling from his horse, broke his leg there.
The clergy, whom the Bishop ordered to ring the bells in case of his long absence to rouse the people, did not fulfill the request of their Archpastor. Having agreed to go with the Red Army soldiers, the Bishop consciously made a great sacrifice: he gave his life so that the reprisal against him would become a signal to the Orthodox people to show their unity and strength. But his ears searched for the sounds of the alarm in vain: the clergy decided not to ring them, citing one argument more cowardly than another...
But it is known that there was a rally and a protest demonstration in the city demanding the release of the body of the murdered man, which was dispersed with weapons. Only the next day, children who went to the grove for nuts saw the murdered bishop in the clearing. The body of the Bishop was secretly buried by believers in the middle of the night in the park next to the cathedral in the old family crypt of the Semirechye Governor-General. In the place where the body of the Bishop lay after the execution, a smooth rectangle of red moss, the size of a man, was recently visible. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the entire ancient grove. Now there is a granite obelisk here.
Next to the cathedral, not far from the secret burial place of the holy remains, in 1999 a baptismal church named after the holy martyr Pimen was founded.
Bishop Pimen was canonized as a locally venerated saint of the Alma-Ata diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church on October 12, 1997. He was added to the ranks of the holy new martyrs and confessors of Russia at the Bishops' Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in August 2000 for church-wide veneration.
