Maximilian Marchenko

Holy Venerable Martyr Maximilian Marchenko, a hegumen, came from a Cossack family, his father being a priest. He received monastic tonsure in the Lavra of the Holy Trinity and Saint Sergius. In 1914, as a hieromonk, he was sent to the army at the front, and the protopresbyter George Shavelsky tells that Father Maximilian was simple, unlearned, but kind, big-⁠hearted, obliging, gentle to all and talkative, and soon became the beloved of all, of the sick and of the medical staff of the military hospital where he served. In 1915 he returned to the Lavra, which after the revolution was made a museum, and he worked there as a watchman. At the same time he was appointed regulator of services of the Trinity cathedral and later raised to the rank of hegumen.

He was arrested in 1928 as a "former monk unsympathetic to the building of socialism". At first he was held at Butyrka, then sent to the special-⁠purpose camp at Solovki. After serving his three-⁠year term, the hegumen Maximilian served in the church at Kukuevo in Zagorsk. There he was arrested in 1935, with several other servants of the Church, on a charge of forming a "counter-⁠revolutionary monarchist group of clergy and churchmen". The indictment said that Father Maximilian "during the imperialist war served as a priest at the headquarters of the former tsar Nicholas II" and that those arrested had spread "false rumours about a persecution of believers in the USSR", calling believers to unite and defend the Orthodox Church. He was sentenced to three years of exile in Kazakhstan. In exile he was arrested again in 1937 and sentenced to ten years of camp. Almost at once after his arrival at the labour camp in the settlement of Chemolgan, in the Alma-⁠Ata region, the venerable martyr Maximilian Marchenko died.

He is commemorated on 27 October, in the new style, on 19 July in the Synaxis of the Saints of Radonezh, on 23 August in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Solovki, on 10 December in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Radonezh and, on movable days, near 7 February in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and near 5 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.