Gavriil Yatsik

Venerable Martyr Gabriel Yatsik (1880-1937) was an archimandrite and parish priest of the church of Saints Peter and Paul in Petrovskoye-⁠Lobanovo, near Moscow, and was shot at Butovo on 23 September 1937. The Synod of the Russian Church numbered him among the venerable martyrs, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, on 7 May 2003; he is commemorated on 10 (23) September.

He was born on 20 November 1880 in the town of Borzna, Chernigov province, to the merchant Peter Yatsik, who kept a small tannery. He graduated in 1901 from the teachers' seminary in Kyiv and in 1906 entered the Trinity Lavra of Saint Sergius as a novice, where he worked in the Lavra's printing house, as assistant to the manager. In May 1917 he was mobilised and sent as a soldier to the 56th regiment in the Kremlin barracks. In 1918 he received monastic tonsure at the Lavra with the name Gabriel.

In 1919 he was arrested by the Saratov Cheka, suspected of being a professional soldier and a White Guard; when it was shown that he was not, he was released. In 1920 he settled at the Donskoy Monastery and in the same year was ordained hierodeacon. Within the walls of this old monastery, in the 1920s, Holy Patriarch Tikhon often served, held here for months under house arrest. In 1924 he was ordained hieromonk, in 1929 raised to archimandrite. Soon the Donskoy Monastery was closed, and Father Gabriel was appointed rector of the church of Saints Peter and Paul in Petrovskoye-⁠Lobanovo, in the Krasnogorsk district of the Moscow region.

On 7 September 1937 he was arrested and held in Taganka. In the search of his home two books were found: "The Early Days of Christianity" by F. W. Farrar and "The Great in the Small" by Sergei Nilus. He explained that he had taken them before the revolution from the Lavra's printing house, where he had worked, and that the first book was always on his table, and he used ideas from it in sermons. On 11 September the priest Viktor Rumyantsev was questioned as a witness, who said that Father Gabriel "behaves as if after lives of saints," has a spirit hostile to the authorities and speaks of the Apocalypse and the nearness of the kingdom of the Antichrist, the sign being the spread of unbelief. Asked whether he passed himself off as a "saint, healer of illnesses" in the town of Khimki, he answered: "I did not pass myself off as a saint, but at the request of people I read prayers." On 16 September the priest Nikolai Dokuchaev was questioned, who said that Yatsik was "a fierce enemy of the Soviet power." At no interrogation did he admit guilt.

On 22 September 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced him to death. He was shot on 23 September 1937 at the Butovo firing range and buried in an unknown common grave.