Ardalion Ponomarev

Holy Venerable Martyr Ardalion Ponomarev, an archimandrite (in the world Alexander Hippolitovich Ponomarev), was born in the 1870s in the family of a village priest. He died of exhaustion on 29 July 1938, in the Adak camp near Vorkuta, after being sentenced to five years in a camp. He was glorified in October 2008. The Russian Church honours him among the New Martyrs and Confessors. He is commemorated on 29 July, on 7 February and in the Synaxes of the Saints of Yekaterinburg and of Komi, on 11 February.

Ministry

He grew up in piety. At twenty-⁠two he finished the Perm seminary with success, married and was ordained priest. Many years of service followed in various village and city parishes. All his life he bore many responsible obediences: he was teacher of religion at parish schools and zemstvo schools, led the missionary work in the Shadrinsk district, headed the Shadrinsk teachers' seminary, was dean of the Nevyansk church district. Whatever service was entrusted to him, he fulfilled "giving it all his energy", as is written in one of his official character reports. After the revolution he behaved as a pastor of the persecuted Church should: despite the terrible famine in the Urals in the 1920s, despite persecutions and oppression, he tirelessly fulfilled his pastoral duty, defended his churches from closing, held them when they were to be handed to the Renovationists, strengthened the spirit of the faithful by his teaching and example. "It must be so; these people do not act out of their own malice, but God wishes through them to test my patience and humility. I will bear all for Jesus Christ," he wrote in the Gospel which he gave to his younger son, Gregory, later a well-⁠known elder in the Urals. Father Alexander did not send Gregory to a Soviet school but taught him himself at home, on the basis of the study of Holy Scripture and the writings of the Holy Fathers.

Arrest and camp

At fifty-⁠six his wife, Mother Nadezhda, died, and then he took the tonsure and gave himself wholly to the service of Christ and the Church. These were the 1930s. A man of sound mind, Father Ardalion could not fail to foresee where his zealous service might lead. He said more than once that the Soviet state, although it proclaims "freedom of religious cults", in fact pursues a policy of destroying the Church. But the faithful son of the Church could not live otherwise and could not give up his service. In 1937 he was arrested. During the investigation, conducted by the NKVD department of the Ufaley district, Father Ardalion, sixty years old, was the only one of the ten accused who "stubbornly" refused to admit "guilt", neither at interrogations nor at confrontations, although by statistics more than ninety per cent of those investigated in church cases gave confessions; few could withstand the NKVD's "methods of work". Asked whether he was a member of a counter-⁠revolutionary organisation, he answered: "I was not a member of any counter-⁠revolutionary organisation and did not know that one existed." A fourth confrontation with witnesses was held; he answered: "I consider the witness's testimony false." The unyielding archimandrite was sentenced to five years in a labour camp. For many years, several decades, the priest's fate remained unknown even to his closest relatives.

The search of the relatives

Father Ardalion's relatives tried several times to learn what had become of him. His granddaughter, Olga Grigorievna Ponomareva, tells: her grandfather was arrested, and only a year later her father was also arrested; her mother was left alone with her, who was less than a year old; her father returned from exile, from Kolyma, and at once tried to learn something of his father, but did not succeed; in the eighties and nineties he sought, with his elder sister, Maria Alexandrovna, where the grandfather was and his grave; they wrote also to Moscow, without answer; her father never learned what had happened to his father. A few years ago the sisters of the Novo-⁠Tikhvin Convent in Yekaterinburg, writing to dozens of archives, learned where the grandfather had been sent: after the sentence, Archimandrite Ardalion was sent to the Arkhangelsk region, to the transit camp at Kotlas, which had a particularly bad reputation. In hastily built earth huts, where in winter the temperature did not rise above four degrees, few prisoners survived; so many died that they could hardly be buried, and the big common graves were not covered with earth until they were filled to the top with bodies. At Kotlas Father Ardalion spent several months, then was sent to Vorkuta. An answer from an archive at Syktyvkar said: "He died on 29 July 1938 of exhaustion in the hospital of the camp point 'Adak'. He was buried in the civil cemetery, in a separate grave. To the right leg a tablet was tied with the surname, first name, patronymic and date of death." The father's life was sent to the Synodal Commission for Canonization, and in October 2008 Archimandrite Ardalion Ponomarev was glorified among the venerable martyrs.