Michael Yedlinsky

Saint Michael Yedlinsky, hieromartyr (1 August 1859 to 17 November 1937), was an archpriest of the Russian Orthodox Church, a candidate of theology, writer and spiritual father of the clergy of Kyiv, friend and companion of Archpriest Alexander Glagolev, shot at Kyiv in 1937. According to the Russian source he was numbered among the new martyrs by the Russian Church Outside Russia, in 1981 or, according to other data, in 1989; the source does not say that he was also canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church of Moscow, so his veneration is known only from that canonization. He is commemorated (Old Style) on 22 March.

Life

He was born on 1 August 1859 in the village of Yushkovo, in the Orsha district, Mogilev province, in the family of a village psalm reader. In 1879, on the recommendation of the rector of the Mogilev seminary, he entered the Theological Academy at Kyiv and finished it in 1885 (or 1894), with the title of candidate of theology, with the work "Anatoly Martynovsky, Archbishop of Mogilev, and his Literary Works". He was offered to teach church history at the seminary at Kyiv. From 1886 he also taught at the First Commercial School and at a private girls' gymnasium. On 22 July 1887 he married Anna Nikolaevna Kozlovskaya. In 1889 his book on Anatoly Martynovsky appeared, with a good review in the Journal of the Ministry of Public Education. In 1893 he was ordained priest, and in 1900 received the rank of archpriest. From 1897 he was a member of the deanery council of the second circle of Kyiv. From 1905 he was a member of the Kyiv Religious and Educational Society. In 1905 he opposed zealously the pogrom against the Jews at Kyiv: according to a journalist, in the harsh autumn of 1905, a small procession entered the infuriated crowd, in vestments, with cross and banners, led by Archpriests Alexander Glagolev and Michael Yedlinsky, who urged the people not to do this evil and unchristian deed; many took off their caps, and the crowd wavered and dispersed, and not once only.

In 1910 he received the mitre, in 1913 the order of Saint Anna second class. For forty years he served at the church of Boris and Gleb at Podil, where from donations he built a four-⁠storey kindergarten and a shelter for abandoned infants, later a school. According to tradition, people were healed by his prayers. A choir singer, M. Dubinin, recalled: Father Michael was very sensitive and compassionate toward the grief and need of others, above all toward the poor of Trukhaniv Island, cut off from Podil by the main channel of the Dnieper, part of the parish, where he went in storm, in ice-⁠drift or on thin ice to give communion to the dying. Regarding drunkenness as the root of need and spiritual fall, he gave special attention to the fight against alcoholism; with the alcoholics who came to him he usually withdrew into the prayer room of his house or the church. From 1933, when the church of Boris and Gleb was closed, he served at the church of Saint Nicholas the Good, of which Alexander Glagolev was rector, and after its destruction, in 1935, both moved to the church of Saint Nicholas on the Embankment. He wrote a three-⁠volume work on ascetics and sufferers for the Orthodox faith, which went through three editions in his lifetime.

Arrest and martyrdom

On 21 October 1937 he was arrested, accused of "participation in an anti-⁠Soviet fascist organization of churchmen". In the same month Glagolev and Metropolitan Constantine were arrested on similar charges, both died in prison in November. Yedlinsky was sentenced to death on 13 November 1937, and the sentence was carried out four days later. He was buried in a common grave at the Lukianivka cemetery, the exact place unknown. His son, George, expelled from the university after the execution, later became a priest.