Elias Chetverukhin

The holy hieromartyr Elias (Ilya) Chetverukhin (1886-1932) was an archpriest of the Russian Orthodox Church and rector of the church of Saint Nicholas at Tolmachi in Moscow. Arrested in 1930 on the charge of taking part in a counter-⁠revolutionary monarchist organization, he was sentenced to three years in a labour camp and died in the Vishera camp. The Russian Church canonized him in 2002 as a hieromartyr, and his memory is kept on 5 December in the old calendar (18 December in the new).

Childhood and studies

He was born in Moscow on 14 January 1886 (old style), in the family of Nikolai Mikhailovich and Maria Nikolaevna Chetverukhin. His father was a teacher of Russian literature, from a family of teachers of soldier stock, and served for more than forty-⁠five years as a teacher, in his last years at the military medical-⁠assistants' school in Lefortovo. In 1904 Elias graduated with a gold medal from the Second Moscow Gymnasium and entered the faculty of history and philology of Moscow University. Later, interested in the spiritual life, he left the university, passed externally in 1907 the examinations of the theological seminary course and entered the Moscow Theological Academy. There he worked on the legacy of Saint Isaac the Syrian; his candidate's thesis, "The Ascetic Worldview of Saint Isaac the Syrian", earned the praise of the rector, Bishop Theodore Pozdeevsky, who noted the union of scholarship with simplicity of exposition, and of Professor S. I. Sobolevsky.

In 1908 he married Evgenia Leonidovna Grandmaison, born in Yaroslavl in 1883, the daughter of an officer. According to church sources, in 1911 he graduated from the Academy with the degree of candidate of theology and was ordained priest (family memoirs give 1912). Evgenia sang and read in the choir, and her faith played a part in his decision to leave the university.

Service at Tolmachi

After graduating he served at the church of the Ermakov almshouse in Sokolniki and was a catechist at the Elizabeth Institute for noble girls and then at the city school in Sokolniki. In autumn 1918 the almshouse was closed and its church destroyed. He was artistically gifted, painted pictures on religious subjects and took part in the religious-⁠philosophical "Circle of Seekers of Christian Enlightenment" of Mikhail Novoselov, which Father Pavel Florensky and Sergei Bulgakov also joined.

In June 1919 he was elected rector of the church of Saint Nicholas at Tolmachi. The parish was in a grave state: some of the former parishioners and benefactors had died or left, the deacon and reader had resigned, there were no people to bake the prosphora, keep the church, ring the bells, and there was a shortage of candles, flour, wine and lamp oil, and in the first winter the church was not heated. Nevertheless he introduced daily services. At first his wife and children helped him, then parishioners joined in reading, singing, bell ringing, baking prosphora and caring for the church. The order of services was kept as fully as possible, with calm and clear reading, and he preached not only at the liturgy but at other services, explained texts of Holy Scripture and read the works of the Holy Fathers to his people. Confession was heard individually and with care.

In the years of universal labour duty he worked as a researcher at the Tretyakov Gallery, serving in the church outside working hours. At the beginning of 1924 the authorities demanded that he either leave the church or give up his work at the gallery. He refused to stop his service and was deprived of civil rights, some rooms of his house were confiscated, and the rest of his living space was heavily taxed. On 24 June 1929 the church at Tolmachi was closed under the pretext of enlarging the Tretyakov Gallery's exhibition. His application to the Moscow City Soviet was rejected, and an appeal to the Presidium of the All-⁠Russian Central Executive Committee was not examined. After that he served at the church of Saint Gregory of Neocaesarea in Derbitsy on Bolshaya Polyanka.

There were six children in the family: Sergei, Serafim, Andrei, Nikolai, and Ivan and Maria, who died in infancy. His son Serafim was arrested in 1936 for taking part in a circle of religious youth, served time at Vorkuta and was rehabilitated in 1957; his son Andrei fell at the front in 1943. Around the church a circle of parishioners and spiritual children formed, called the "Tolmachevtsy", among them the art historian Vladimir Georgievsky, the botanist and future martyr Nikolai Rein, the deacon and future hieromartyr Pavel Ponyatovsky, and the future professor Vera Borodich.

Arrest and camp

In 1923 he was arrested on the charge of spreading counter-⁠revolutionary rumours about the authorities' attitude to Patriarch Tikhon and spent about three months in Butyrka prison. The second arrest was linked with the case of his spiritual daughter Maria Ivanovna Mikhailova, after her speech at a meeting on "wrecking". At interrogation he said he had no contacts abroad, had withdrawn from politics, did not share monarchist ideas and did not approve of wrecking.

On 26 October 1930 he was arrested and held in Butyrka, charged with taking part in a counter-⁠revolutionary monarchist organization. He did not plead guilty and refused to implicate others. On 23 November 1930 a special board of the OGPU sentenced him to three years in a labour camp, which he served at Vishera. In the camp he worked as a digger, an unskilled construction labourer, at a sawmill, as assistant clerk at the hospital of the chemical plant, as an orderly and at the zonal experimental station. His confessor in the camp was Archimandrite Arkhip (Ivanov) of the Donskoy monastery. According to his Life, at the end of January 1932 he was put in the isolation cell, where he spent twenty days. He kept up a correspondence with his wife.

His end and veneration

On 18 December 1932, on the eve of the day of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker, Father Elias died in a fire at the camp club. After the fire his remains were not found, and the place of burial is unknown. On 20 March 1933, after his death, the special board of the OGPU issued a new decision, sentencing him to three years of exile in the Northern Region and ordering that he be sent to Vologda.

On 12 March 2002 the Holy Synod of the Russian Church decided to include Archpriest Elias Chetverukhin in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia of the twentieth century, on the proposal of the diocese of Moscow. His memory was set for the day of his death, 5/18 December. His memory is bound especially to the church at Tolmachi. In 2019 an evening, "Spiritual Tolmachi", was held there, a hundred years after the beginning of his service, and the saint's icon is in the church. Also in 2019 his name was put on the memorial plaques of university saints on the facade of the church of Saint Tatiana at Moscow State University. A service to him, with stichera, canon, a troparion in tone 4 and a kontakion in tone 6, is published on the site of the church of the Holy Trinity at Goretovo, but no official approval of it has been found. Together with his wife he wrote a book on the hieromonk Alexis, the hermit elder of the Zosima Hermitage near Smolensk, published in 1995 and again, in another edition, in 2003.