Michael Okolovich

Holy Hieromartyr Michael Okolovich was an archpriest at Irkutsk and was shot on 26 March 1938 in a camp of the Far East.

Youth and priesthood

He was born on 15 October 1888 at Polotsk, in the family of the priest Theodore Okolovich of the Spaso-⁠Euphrosynian convent. He finished the theological school at Polotsk, the Vitebsk seminary (1904-1910) and the Theological Academy of Saint Petersburg (1914), with top marks. His parents thought he would become a monk and reach a high church office, but in 1914 he married Maria Maximovna Mastryukovich, a student at the Bestuzhev courses. On 23 November 1914 he was ordained priest and appointed teacher of religion and inspector of the theological school of Irkutsk. In 1915 he was elected to the school council, in 1917 to the diocesan school council, and in the same year was chosen delegate to the Local Council of the Russian Church. After the school closed, in 1918 he served at the church of the Exaltation of the Cross in Irkutsk, where he became one of the best known and best loved pastors of the city, for his fervent service, warm preaching, mercy and readiness to help. Because of his popularity the Cheka kept him under watch.

In February 1921 cartridges, gunpowder and a grenade were found in the attic of the church, and he and the watchman were accused of keeping weapons; both denied it. On 26 May 1921 the revolutionary tribunal could prove nothing and, on the fourth anniversary of the October revolution, they were released. In the time of the Renovationists he went to Patriarch Tikhon at Moscow, sent by the clergy of Irkutsk, and told him that no negotiations should be held with the Renovationists. He preached at the services of Bishop Cyril Sokolov of Nizhneudinsk; in a speech of 1924 he praised an old priest of the city who had been the axis of church life in the time of the schism. In a public debate with an atheist, Kalinovsky, he spoke of the knowledge of God through the heart, beyond the limits of science.

Arrests and death

The political police summoned him repeatedly, proposed that he give up the priesthood, become a teacher or an informer, support the Renovationists, but he refused and was arrested on 17 February 1925 together with other pastors of the city, just raised to archpriest. At the investigation he said that he had no definite political convictions, was not fully sympathetic to Soviet power and rejected the communist party as anti-⁠religious. On 13 November 1925 he was sentenced to three years in a camp, which he served at Vishera, in the Solovki camps, as an accountant. Then Irkutsk was forbidden to him, and from June 1928 he lived at Minusinsk, where he sang in the choir and lived by selling what they still had. On 26 February 1933 he was arrested with eighty-⁠one other persons and denied any counter-⁠revolutionary organization. On 10 June 1933 he was sentenced to ten years in a camp, at Dallag, at the Balyn point, where Komsomolsk-⁠on-⁠Amur was being built. Of his letters one survives, of 24 July 1935, to a spiritual daughter, in which he speaks of ten years of wandering.

In 1937-1938 a new persecution began, and an informer wrote on 7 March 1938 that he, with a teacher from Ishim and a peasant from Tambov, his barracks companions, were friends, and that he, as a priest, said that everything written in the Bible comes true. On 11 March he was questioned and did not admit guilt. On 26 March an NKVD troika sentenced him and the two to death, and Archpriest Michael Okolovich was shot the same day and buried in an unknown common grave.

The saint is commemorated on 20 May and, in the new style, on 7 February (movable) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 23 August in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Solovki and on 18 November with the Fathers of the Local Council of 1917-1918.