Demetrius Shishokin

Holy Hieromartyr Demetrius Shishokin, a priest of the church of the Kazan prison (1880-1918), received the crown of martyrdom by shooting on 10 October 1918, after he refused to disclose the secret of confession. He was glorified in 2000. He is commemorated on 10 October, the day of his martyr's death, on 7 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, and on 17 October, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kazan.

The pastor

Dmitry Mikhailovich Shishokin was born in 1880. After graduating from the seminary he received priestly rank in 1904, from 1905 was rector of the church in the village of Tikhy Ples, in the Kazan diocese, and from 13 January 1913 priest of the church at the provincial prison in Kazan. The priest was a modest man, far from politics, a wise conversation partner and a good pastor, loved alike by workers and prisoners, who prized in this people's priest the kindness and gentleness with which he received anyone in need and suffering in soul.

The arrest

On 26 September 1918, sixteen days after the Red units took Kazan, Father Shishokin was arrested at the Staff of the External Defence of Kazan and, after insults and abuse, was sent to the Cheka, with a note stating the reason for the arrest. The note was so careless that it had fifteen grammatical mistakes; it demanded the immediate arrest of a prison White Guard agitator against the Bolsheviks, who was said to have called the Bolsheviks robbers, scoundrels and traitors of the Russian proletariat and to have said that all Bolshevik commissars must be shot. The priest was arrested on the denunciation of a militiaman of twenty-⁠five, Mikhail Ts., who said that, imprisoned by the Czechs, he had gone to church one Sunday and there the priest recognised him. Learning that the reason for his arrest was that he was a Communist, the priest was said to have begun to scold him and to propose that he come to him to confess, and then he would forgive him the sin of service to the Bolsheviks and give him communion. Mikhail refused, and Shishokin addressed the prisoners: Orthodox Christians, whoever has served the Bolsheviks, repent. The young man said that on that day Shishokin did not serve but agitated among the arrested against Soviet power. Whether service to an atheist government is a sin or not is a painful question even today; it is understandable what crime the Cheka investigators found in a call to repent of godlessness.

The priest said that before the prisoners he appeared only as a preacher, explaining at the service the Gospels of the day, that he could not go to political demonstrations because of his high rank as a priest, and that for this reason he was respected by people of all convictions, as a tolerant man. He said that when the old administration left Kazan, he did not leave his place of service because he was guilty of nothing; only the guilty man runs and hides. He said he did not belong and had never belonged to any organisation against the authorities. In his defence came the administration and staff of the provincial prison, in a statement of 29 September 1918: Father Shishokin, in six years of service, had never come forward as a counter-⁠revolutionary and had not touched on politics; in the time of the White Guard bands he had behaved as befits a true pastor and had not run anywhere at the restoration of Soviet power. The statement was signed by seventeen employees of the provincial prison and nineteen guards of the correctional section, and the signatures were certified by the stamps and signatures of the commissars. The parishioners of the church of Saint Paraskeva Friday, near the priest's house, also interceded for him: the workers of the Pyatnitsky parish wrote to the commandant of the city, with simplicity and warmth, that the priest was a true people's priest, had often served among them, had walked on patronal feasts with the Holy Cross, and that they had nothing bad to say about him.

The witness

Oral tradition, according to his granddaughter, Elena Konstantinovna Varfolomeeva, says that the Cheka demanded from Father Demetrius the disclosure of the secret of confession, in order to learn the moods of the prisoners. He refused such collaboration with the atheist power. His relatives, according to his wife, Anna Mikhailovna, were indignant and said that the priest had lost his mind, for a single word of agreement would have been enough for him to remain alive. But the priest remembered the words of the Psalm: blessed is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly. One letter of his from prison has survived, to his wife: the choice is made; in a few days everything will be decided; their conditions are impossible to fulfil; do not go anywhere and ask nothing of anyone, it is all useless; I cannot be different; I comfort myself with the thought that this is the will of God and that all of you will survive by His mercy. According to rumour, a group of prisoners, among them the priest, was taken away on a barge along the Volga. A testimony survives that at Sviyazhsk there was in 1917-1920 a slaughterhouse, to which in 1918 prisoners from the Kazan prison were brought for shooting. After the shootings the monastics of the surrounding monasteries buried the clergy by night, in secret, beside the walls of the monasteries. Known with certainty is only that on 9 October 1918, the fourteenth day after the arrest, the chairman of the Cheka, Latsis, approved the resolution of the investigator Babkevich: that Dmitry Shishokin, as a fierce counter-⁠revolutionary who agitated among the arrested, be subjected to the highest measure, and on 10 October the sentence was carried out. His widow was left with four small children.