Gurias Samoilov

Holy Venerable Martyr Gurias Samoilov, a hieromonk, was born in 1880 in the village of Pesya, Medyn district, Kaluga province, in the family of the labourer Mikhail Samoilov, who in his last years worked at a weaving factory in Moscow. At baptism he was named George. He was a disciple of the Optina Monastery and died a martyr, shot on 20 December 1937.

His calling

After the church school in his native village he lived with his mother until he was fifteen, then went to Moscow and became an apprentice at a printing house, where he worked until 1903. Acquaintance with the famous Optina Hermitage, in Kaluga province, and the longing of his heart led him to resolve to enter the monastery and, if God willed, to remain there for ever. In August 1903 he crossed the threshold of the monastery. Until his ordination he did his obedience in the bookbinding workshop, a trade he knew from life in the world.

On 11 August 1905 he was received into the brotherhood of the monastery, and in 1910 he was tonsured a monk with the name Gurias and ordained hierodeacon. On 20 April 1913, on the Saturday of Bright Week, he served, with the skete's superior, Hieromonk Theodosius (Pomortsev), with the hieromonks Nectarius (Tikhonov) and Kuksha (Stepchenkov), the Liturgy and then the memorial service in concelebration, twenty days after the death of Archimandrite Barsanuphius. Elder Barsanuphius had been loved by all who knew him as a man of God who sincerely sought salvation.

In 1917 the godless Bolshevik revolution came. Hierodeacon Gurias was mobilised into the rear militia of the Red Army and attached to the military commissariat at Kozelsk, where he was a copyist in the mobilisation department. In 1921 he was demobilised and returned to Optina, which had in fact been closed by the Soviet authorities, and in its place an agricultural artel had been formed of the monks, which he joined. The same year he was ordained hieromonk.

Priestly ministry

In 1923 the artel was dissolved, and Father Gurias went to the village of Nizhnie Prysky, where he was priest at the Transfiguration church. He preached zealously at the services, served with diligence and often performed the services free of charge for the peasants, helping many in their poverty, remembering the apostle's word that true piety is to help orphans and widows. In 1929 came the time when the godless proceeded to the final destruction of the monasteries and the arrest of monks, most of whom served in parish churches, as a last support of Orthodoxy in the raging sea of militant godlessness.

In 1929 a note reached the OGPU plenipotentiary of the Kozelsk district from a cultural worker, who wrote that the priest was agitating against the reading hut and Soviet power, and that the children who go to church had stopped going to the reading hut, saying that the priest had said all kinds of heresy is spread there. The reading-⁠hut keeper of Nizhnie Prysky wrote a similar statement. On the evening of 28 January 1930 Father Gurias was arrested and imprisoned in Kozelsk. He was interrogated almost at once. Asked whether he admitted guilt, he answered that in Nizhnie Prysky he had had no other contact with the peasants apart from religious services, that those who came to him came on church business, that he had not talked politics with them and had not agitated against the measures of Soviet power in the village.

On 14 February 1930 several witnesses were interrogated. One, a candidate member of the party, said that in March 1929 Father Gurias often preached sermons in which he touched on Soviet power, saying: We must not fight and press forward, but live according to God. Another said that the priest incited women and children against the reading hut, so that the peasants no longer went there, and that before Pascha 1929, when a speaker came from Kozelsk with an anti-⁠religious talk, the peasants, prepared by the priest, did not listen to him and dispersed. After hearing the witnesses, the investigator charged him with anti-⁠Soviet agitation. The priest answered: I do not admit guilt. Living in Nizhnie Prysky since 1923, I have not preached on political themes. I have not agitated against self-⁠taxation or the reading hut. The peasants respect me because I treat them well and do not demand payment for services. There have been cases when I helped the poor with food, but I did not incite them to anything. On 23 March 1930 the troika of the OGPU sentenced him to eight years in a concentration camp, and on 31 March he was sent on transport to Khabarovsk.

After the camp, Father Gurias returned to the European part of Russia, before the new terrible persecution. He settled first in the town of Medyn, then, on 15 March 1937, in the village of Volovo in Tula region, where he served in the church of the Sign icon of the Mother of God. The period of the cruellest persecution of the Church was approaching, and his ministry was an unbroken confession.

Arrest and martyrdom

In November 1937 the chairman of the village council gave the Volovo section of the NKVD a statement about the priest, saying that he agitated against Soviet power, that it robs everyone and will soon end. In the middle of November the head of the Volovo NKVD section interrogated peasants, some of whom agreed willingly to lie, others being brought to do so by the investigator's tricks. Most said that the nine people they were asked about were active churchmen, members of the parish council, who did not wish to join the collective farm. The investigator attributed to the members of the council terrorist plans that they supposedly intended to carry out under the leadership of their parish priest, Hieromonk Gurias, who was charged as the tenth accused, as head of an anti-⁠Soviet church group of peasants. None of those arrested admitted guilt.

Hieromonk Gurias was arrested on 22 November 1937 and interrogated the next day. He denied that he had carried on counter-⁠revolutionary agitation or gathered people in his house, saying that parishioners sometimes came, and also the churchwarden and the sacristan, on church business. Asked where he was on 7 November, he said that from six in the morning to two in the afternoon he was serving in the church, because on that day there were many penitents and communicants. On 26 November he was interrogated again, and he rejected the charges that he had said that the antichrist Stalin would soon come to an end and that the peasants were tormented and robbed. He was sent to the Tula prison. On 7 December 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced all the members of the parish council to ten years in a camp, and the hieromonk to death. Hieromonk Gurias Samoilov was shot on 20 December 1937 and buried in an unknown common grave.

He is commemorated on 20 December, on 7 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 31 July, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kaluga, on 5 October, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tula, and on 24 October, in the Synaxis of All Saints Who Shone Forth at Optina Hermitage (new style, some days movable).