Maxim Zhizhilenko

Saint Maxim (in the world Mikhail Alexandrovich Zhizhilenko, 1885-1931), hieromartyr, was a physician and then bishop of the Josephites at Serpukhov, a man of prayer and mercy toward the sick and prisoners, shot on 4 June 1931. He was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church on 11 March 2020, together with Bishop Sergius (Druzhinin), with commemoration on 22 May by the old calendar, which is 4 June by the new.

The physician

He was born in the city of Kalisz in Russian Poland, in the family of the nobleman Alexander Grigorievich Zhizhilenko, prosecutor of the district court. He studied at the gymnasium in Kalisz, lost his father in 1905 and his mother in 1906, then moved to his elder brother, Professor Alexander, in Saint Petersburg, and in 1908 entered the medical faculty of Moscow University. As a student he married a fellow student, who died after half a year, in 1910, unable to bear the pregnancy. Both had trusted in God's will and in no case wished to end the pregnancy, though they knew it threatened her with death. He graduated in medicine in 1912, worked as a psychiatrist at Sokolniki, then as a physician of the Ministry of Railways at Blagoveshchensk and Moscow. In the First World War, until January 1918, he was physician of a Plastun battalion in Galicia, then held various medical posts, among them in the Red Army. In August 1919 he was a prisoner of General Mamontov's Cossacks. From 1922 to December 1928 he was chief physician of the Taganka prison hospital in Moscow, where he was nicknamed the guardian angel of the prison. He was a spiritual son of the priest Valentin Sventsitsky. He knew Patriarch Tikhon, who blessed him for secret monastic life. Ivan Andreevsky recalled that Bishop Maxim took a more pessimistic view of the times than the Patriarch, thinking they had entered the last days of the period before the Apocalypse.

The Josephite

At the end of 1927 he broke communion with Metropolitan Sergius and his Synod. He took part in drawing up the act of 30 December 1927 of the clergy and laity of Serpukhov, which said that they could no longer remain on the slippery and ambiguous path onto which the Metropolitan's declaration had set the whole Church and were breaking canonical and prayerful communion. On 20 May 1928 he was secretly ordained deacon in the Resurrection Cathedral in Leningrad by Archbishop Demetrius (Lyubimov), the actual leader of the Josephite movement, the next day priest, and in September he was tonsured with the name Maxim. On 12 October 1928 he was secretly consecrated Bishop of Serpukhov by Archbishop Demetrius and Bishop Sergius (Druzhinin), the first secret Josephite episcopal consecration. The title was chosen because at Serpukhov almost half the churches joined the Josephites, and the town became the centre of the movement in the Moscow diocese. From January 1929 he led the diocese, with 18 parishes in Serpukhov and others in Kolomna, Zvenigorod and Pereslavl-⁠Zalessky, and after the arrest of Bishop Alexis (Buy), he also looked after the Josephites of Voronezh and Ukraine. Metropolitan Sergius sent Bishop Manuel (Lemeshevsky) to Serpukhov to combat Josephitism.

Arrest and martyrdom

On 24 April 1929 he was arrested by the OGPU, and on 5 July was sentenced to five years. At the end of November he reached the Solovki camp, where he worked as a physician and ran the typhus barracks. Together with Bishops Victor, Nectarius and Hilarion and other clergy he served secretly in the forest. Professor Andreevsky, also at Solovki, said that in less than a year all his colleagues understood that he was not only a remarkable physician but a great man of prayer. On 28 October 1930 he was sentenced by a collegium of the OGPU to another five years for "counter-⁠revolutionary agitation in the camp", was moved to Kem, and in December 1930 was arrested and taken to Butyrka in the case of an organization called True Orthodoxy. On 18 February 1931 he was sentenced to death and was shot on 4 June 1931. He was buried at Vagankovo, a place unknown today.

Canonization

In preparing the canonization of the New Martyrs made by the Church Abroad in 1981 his name was entered in the provisional list, published at the end of the 1990s. On 11 March 2020 the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church included him among the new martyrs.