Paisius of Pechenga

Venerable Martyr Paisius of Pechenga (in the world Pavel Varlaamovich Ryabov) was abbot of Saint Tryphon's Monastery at Pechenga (Petsamo) from 1932 to 1939 and was shot in 1940. He has been numbered among the saints only by the Orthodox Church of Finland (autonomous within the Ecumenical Patriarchate), by a decision of 15 December 2000, as Paisius of Pechenga. The Russian Orthodox Church did not count him among the new martyrs of Murmansk, on the ground that he had been against the Soviet power. He is commemorated on 28 December, the day he was shot.

Beginnings

He was born on 5 December (18 December by the new calendar) 1881 into a peasant family in the Arkhangelsk governorate, near the rural community of Shegovary, in the Predtechensky volost of the Shenkursk district. At two he was orphaned. At 15 he went to study, together with 200 pupils of the same age from all the White Sea region, at the cultural and educational centre of the Solovki monastery, where in two years he learned grammar, arithmetic, history, chant, the Law of God and Church Slavonic. From 1898 he chose to remain as a novice at the Transfiguration Monastery of Solovki, where he studied and worked six more years, learning the monastic life.

In 1908 he went to accompany the abbot, Archimandrite Jonathan (Baranov), to Saint Tryphon's Monastery at Pechenga, in the Arkhangelsk governorate, where he stayed to work in the monastery office. The monastery had been restored from 1885 and, being remote, needed workers. On 7 April 1913 he was tonsured a monk, and on 13 August ordained hierodeacon.

Pechenga under Finland

After Finland declared war on Soviet Russia on 15 May 1918, and after the Peace of Tartu, the Petsamo territory and the monastery passed to Finland on 14 October 1920. In order not to lose the right to hold the land, the members of the monastery, among them Paisius, took Finnish citizenship. In 1921 they adopted the new Gregorian calendar and passed to the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

At the assembly of the brotherhood on 16 February 1932 Father Paisius was elected abbot of Saint Tryphon's Monastery at Pechenga. The rank of abbot was confirmed by Archbishop Herman (Aav) of Karelia and All Finland, who ordained him hieromonk at the Transfiguration Monastery of New Valamo, on the day of commemoration of Saints Sergius and Herman of Valaam (28 June 1932). The monastery was the northernmost in Finland and shepherded in Orthodoxy the Kolta Sami, whose winter camps were near it. It had a Russian-⁠language school, an orphanage and a livestock farm.

Persecution and martyrdom

During the Soviet-⁠Finnish Winter War the territory was occupied by the Soviet army and, around 9 December 1939, Paisius was arrested on the charge of assisting the White Finnish authorities. The course of his interrogations can be followed, first at Pechenga, then at Murmansk, Moscow and Leningrad; other monks were arrested later. After the end of the war the Petsamo region remained with Finland.

Father Paisius was kept in prison, and on 19 November 1940 the Military Tribunal of the Leningrad Military District sentenced him under Article 58-4 to the supreme penalty for assisting the international bourgeoisie seeking the overthrow of the communist system. On 28 December 1940 he was shot at the Levashovo Wasteland near Leningrad. After more than half a century, in 1992, on the initiative of the Murmansk prosecutor's office, he was acquitted and rehabilitated posthumously, as a Finnish citizen.