Cyprian Yatsenko

Saint Cyprian Yatsenko, martyr (1878 to 1935), was a peasant and psalm reader in the village of Bogolyubovka, in the Ufa region, a defender of the village church against its closing, who died in a camp in 1935. He was canonized by the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church in August 2000 (13 to 16 August). He is commemorated (Old Style) on 7 February. The Russian source gives the years 1865 to 1866 for his birth, but his life shows 1878.

Life

He was born into a peasant family in the village of Svinarnya (today Sosnovka), in the Hadiach district, Poltava province. He finished church school, married and in 1900 moved with his family to the Ufa province, to the village of Bogolyubovka, where he bought a plot of land and set up a farm. In 1914 he became psalm reader at the church of the Protection in the village. In 1916 he was called up and in 1917 sent home, and with the priest's blessing he resumed the duty of psalm reader.

In 1929 it was decided to close the church of the Protection, and Cyprian was accused of being the organizer of the believers' resistance. In the spring of 1929, on the basis of denunciations by atheists, he was arrested and spent thirty-⁠six days in the prison at Ufa, under investigation for organizing the parishioners in defence of the church; the believers denied that he had a part in the gathering at the church and in the petition to the Bashkir executive committee to leave the church, and he was released. The priest proposed that he go for a time to his homeland, in Ukraine, and then, on returning, receive the rank of deacon, and he agreed, but did not have time to be ordained. Back home, he learned that his family had been dispossessed and driven out in winter into a dugout. On 6 March 1930 he was arrested again, accused of counter-⁠revolutionary agitation, sentenced to ten years in a camp and sent to a camp near Perm. In 1935 he died, crushed by stacks of logs fallen from the steep bank onto him and other prisoners as they unloaded logs from a barge. He was rehabilitated on 11 July 1989 by the prosecutor's office of Bashkiria. On 13 to 16 August 2000 he was canonized by the Council of Bishops.