Herman Kokel

Saint Herman (in the world Grigory Afanasievich Kokel, 1883-1937), hieromartyr, was Bishop of Blagoveshchensk, a missionary among the Chuvash and a defender of the Patriarchal Church in the time of the Renovationist schism. He passed through exile and camp and was shot in a Bamlag camp on 2 November 1937. He was numbered among the New Martyrs of Russia in 2001.

Childhood and priesthood

He was born on 23 November 1883 in the village of Tarkhany in Simbirsk province, into a large family of Chuvash peasants, as the brother of the painter Alexei Kokel. He lost his parents early. He finished a second-⁠class church school, taught at the parish school in Batyrevo (1895-1898) and worked as a clerk on an estate (1898-1900). On 12 March 1901 he was received as a novice in the bishop's house at Simbirsk, then became a psalm-⁠reader, and in 1903 passed the examination to teach in Chuvash schools. He attended the missionary courses at Kazan and, after finishing them, was ordained priest on 26 July 1909.

He worked as a missionary in Chuvash villages, among people influenced by Islam and pagan superstitions. He translated and published Orthodox books, opened a school for Chuvash psalm-⁠readers and carried Christian books by the cartload from Simbirsk, so that hardly a family was left without a Gospel, a Psalter or a Canon book. He explained the vanity and danger of sorcery and sent sermons, copied at home, to the parishes. When people began to understand the faith he would move to another parish, never staying in one more than two or three years. In 1921 he began studies at the Theological Institute in Petrograd, which he completed in 1924.

The bishop

In the autumn of 1924 a group of Chuvash priests who wanted their own organization of Chuvash parishes, because the Renovationists had seized church power, proposed him as bishop. By that summer the supporters of Patriarch Tikhon kept control of only 37 parishes. On 28 November 1924 he wrote to Patriarch Tikhon asking his blessing to administer the Orthodox parishes of the region temporarily. Tonsured into the mantle, he was consecrated on 9 December 1924 Bishop of Ibresi, vicar of the Ulyanovsk diocese, by Patriarch Tikhon himself.

On 17 December he arrived at Ibresi and visited all the parishes in turn, urging the priests to return to the Patriarchal Church. Reports of the secret police showed that with his arrival the clergy of the Tikhonite side were stirred to renewed activity and that within a few months most of the Orthodox of Chuvashia had turned away from the Renovationists. The Renovationist bishop Timothy denounced him to the GPU. In 1925-1926 he temporarily administered the Alatyr vicariate and then the Ulyanovsk diocese, struggling against the Gregorian movement. In 1926 he was arrested and sentenced to three years of exile, and was then given assignments in places of exile: Bugulma (1926), Buguruslan (1927), Kuznetsk (1928), Omsk and Pavlodar (1930-1931), Nikolsk-⁠Ussuriysk (1931), Barnaul and Biysk (1931), and from 2 October 1932 Blagoveshchensk.

Arrest and martyrdom

On 11 February 1933 he was arrested at Khabarovsk and sentenced to ten years of imprisonment, served in the town of Svobodny in the Amur region, where he worked as an accountant and continued his religious activity. Tried by the NKVD troika of the Amur region on a charge of counter-⁠revolutionary propaganda, he was sentenced to death and shot on 2 November 1937 in one of the Bamlag camps.

Glorification

On 17 July 2001 the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church included Bishop Herman's name in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. At the end of 2012 it became known that his name, among 36 other new martyrs, had been removed from the general calendar for 2013, without official explanation and without any decision of decanonization by the Synod or the Council of Bishops.