Pimen Belolikov

Saint Pimen (in the world Pyotr Zakharovich Belolikov), hieromartyr, was Bishop of Semirechye and Verny and vicar of the Turkestan diocese. A former missionary among the Assyrians in Persia, he was killed by the Bolsheviks near the city of Verny (today Almaty) on 16 September 1918. He is commemorated on 16 September.

Family and education

He was born in the village of Vasilievskoe in Novgorod province, into the family of the priest Zakhary Ivanovich Belolikov and his wife Maria Ivanovna. One of his brothers, Vasily, became a professor at a theological academy. From childhood he was spiritually close to Saint John of Kronstadt. He graduated from the church school in Kirillov (1894), the Novgorod seminary (1900) and the Kiev Theological Academy (1904), as a candidate of theology. On 7 August 1903 he was tonsured a monk with the name Pimen and was ordained hierodeacon, and on 3 June 1904 hieromonk.

Missionary at Urmia

On 12 August 1904 he was sent to the Orthodox Spiritual Mission at Urmia, in north-⁠western Persia, and from 1906 he was assistant head of the mission. He quickly learned ancient and modern Syriac and the Turkic languages, preached among the Nestorian Assyrians who had joined Orthodoxy, defended their interests before the Persian authorities, taught at the mission school and translated early Christian Syriac texts, among them the life of Rabbula, Bishop of Edessa, and the life of Blessed Mar Eugenios. He edited the mission's journal, Orthodox Urmia, and wrote a book on Urmia in the years of the Persian disturbances. In 1908 he was raised to abbot.

From 1911 he was rector of the seminary at Ardon, with the rank of archimandrite, where he devoted time to his students, taught the New Testament, restored the disordered budget and worked for the enlightenment of Orthodox Ossetians. Wishing to return to the mission, and since unrest had broken out in Persia, he became assistant head of the mission again in 1912. From 1914 to 1916 he was rector of the Perm seminary beside Bishop Andronik and led the city's temperance movement. When he left Perm it was said of him that he had been a true shepherd, a man without money, who helped on every side. On 7 July 1916 he was named head of the Urmia mission with elevation to the episcopate, and on 6 August he was consecrated Bishop of Salmas at Petrograd.

Bishop in Semirechye

On 3 July 1917 he became Bishop of Semirechye and Verny, vicar of the Turkestan diocese. He arrived in Verny on 11 October 1917. He resumed public readings and talks for the people, and according to the recollections of the Bolsheviks, people came to him from morning till night. His authority was so great that the Soviet power seriously feared a dual rule in Semirechye. He condemned the decree on civil marriage, pressed to keep the teaching of religion in schools and founded a spiritual circle for children. In the summer of 1918 he prevented the confiscation of church valuables from the cathedral.

In the newspaper Free Word, printed in Kuldja in China and secretly distributed in Semirechye, he supported the White movement and called people to join its ranks. In his sermons he urged the people to pray for deliverance from the adversary. He condemned the shooting of the tsar's family. At the same time, at Pascha 1918 he visited wounded Red Guards in the Red Cross hospital.

Martyrdom

On 16 September 1918 Red soldiers from the punitive detachment of Ivan Mamontov, recalled from the Semirechye front, burst into the bishop's house. They put him on a machine-⁠gun cart, took him to a grove outside the city, Baum's Grove, and killed him. His body was buried secretly at midnight by the faithful in the park beside the cathedral, to the right of the family vault of the governor-⁠general Kolpakovsky.

Later representatives of Bolshevik power distanced themselves from the crime, and the writer Furmanov wrote that the bishop was dragged from his house church by a drunken band and shot outside the city without trial. According to other accounts, the murder was agreed with local Soviet leaders by a secret order of the executive committee of Verny and then covered by a decision of a field court.

Glorification

Bishop Pimen's name was entered in the list of New Martyrs in preparing the canonization performed by the Russian Church Outside Russia in 1981, which was not by name. He was glorified as a locally venerated saint of the Alma-⁠Ata diocese on 12 October 1997, and a granite obelisk was set up at the place of his death. In August 2000 the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, for veneration throughout the Church. In 2000 a bell of one hundred poods, named Pimen, was placed on the bell tower of the Ascension Cathedral in Almaty. In November 2023 an exhibition devoted to him was held in Almaty. Several of his brothers were shot in 1937.