Maximus Rumyantsev

Holy Martyr Maximus Rumyantsev (died 1928) was a fool for Christ of the Kostroma region. Born in the 1850s in a peasant family in the village of Vandyshki, he was orphaned at ten and set out wandering at fifteen. After almost thirty years he returned to his native village; he could not read, but knew the church services by heart and had long carried the labour of foolishness.

The form of his foolishness

He went barefoot all year, in several shirts one over another, and never washed; if given boots, he stuffed them with paper to make walking hard. He lived at his brother's, with the Gruzdev family who honoured him, or wherever God led him. His friend the priest Nicholas Zhitnikov once urged him to warm himself in a bath, and he sat in it fully dressed, "since you told me to warm myself, not to wash". People laughed at him and children threw stones, but he bore it gently.

His gifts

He spoke to no one directly, but as if of himself, and yet what he said came true. To Andrei Gruzdev, leaving for the war in 1914, he said goodbye, and Andrei came back alive; Andrei's daughter Vera he called a bride of Christ, and she remained a virgin. To the priest Gregory Averin he foretold his arrest, and the priest was indeed shot in the camp. He sensed a fire in the village before anyone saw it and knew who had taken rusks from his sack. Of the convent at Kineshma he said that all would scatter, and in the twenties it was closed and made a prison. He despised money, had no earthly care, and fled from praise by acting still more foolish.

Bishop Basil of Kineshma held him nearest to God of all the ascetics he had known. Once, finding him smoking and eating before Communion, the bishop doubted and for a time told his spiritual children not to ask him for counsel. At the second summons Maxim came fasting, and after confession the doubts were dispelled. The Paschal service he sang through at home, rejoicing.

Arrest and death

The chairman of the first collective farm in those parts, Vasily Sorokin, and his son disliked him and wrote denunciations. In the winter of 1928 a militiaman came for him, saying he was not sorry for him but that a third request against him had been written. To a woman who asked where he was going, Maxim answered: "To the emperor, for dinner." He was tormented in the Kineshma prison, kept by turns in heat and in cold, then moved to another city, where Father Zhitnikov also was. The priest, witness of his death, wrote to the faithful of Kineshma that Maxim died as a great righteous man.

He is commemorated on 13 August, in the new style, on 20 June in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Ivanovo Metropolis and on the movable day around 7 February in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church.