Sergius Rodakovsky

Holy Hieromartyr Sergius Rodakovsky was an archpriest in Belarus and was shot in April 1933 for not agreeing to promote collectivization.

He was born in 1882 in the town of Zhitkovichi, Mozyr district, Minsk province, in the family of the psalm-⁠reader Peter Rodakovsky. He graduated from the Minsk Seminary in 1904, was ordained priest and served at the Dormition church in the village of Lavrishevo. In 1915 he moved to Pereyaslav, was priest of a hospital train, and in 1916 was sent to the front as priest of the 4th Dragoon Regiment, until it was disbanded in April 1918. In the same year Bishop George (Yaroshevich) named him rector of the Holy Trinity church in the village of Tal, Bobruisk district, and raised him to archpriest.

He was arrested on 20 February 1933 on a charge that at the start of collectivization in Tal he had carried on counter-⁠revolutionary work to undermine it: that he had spread the rumour that the Pope of Rome would come to Belarus and gather great processions, that in February 1933 he had complained of the hard life in Soviet times, and that at the funeral of the church warden he had told weeping women not to weep, since he had suffered for Christ and died in prison. At his interrogation he said he did not admit guilt; as a priest he knew the Gospel well, but he found in it no indication of any form of state organization, still less of land organization, so he could not have agitated against collectivization on its basis; he had carried out no agitation against the authorities, he considered false the accusation relating to 30 April 1932, and he pointed out that people did not enter the collective also because the representatives of the authorities had struck at the religious feelings of believers from the beginning, and that persuasion should be done by persuasion, not by force. Of the rumour about the Pope he said that he had heard it but had only laughed at it. On 24 March he was questioned for the last time.

On 21 April 1933 an OGPU troika sentenced him to death; he was shot and buried in an unknown place.

The saint is commemorated on 21 April and, in the new style, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and on 11 July (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Belarus.