Theodore Belyaev

Holy Hieromartyr Theodore Belyaev, a priest, was born on 12 November 1867 in the village of Vezgum in the Belozersk district of the Novgorod province (today the Vologda region), in the family of the priest Eugene Belyaev. He received the crown of martyrdom by shooting on 3 November 1937. He was numbered among the saints in the year 2000.

Priest at Uloma

In 1889 he finished the Olonets theological seminary and was ordained priest. He served in the Trinity church in the village of Uloma in the Cherepovets district. There he was arrested in 1919 by the Cherepovets Cheka, but was soon released.

The events of 1922

In March 1922 the faithful of Uloma learned that the authorities would send a commission to confiscate the property of the church. Most of the women of the parish, who thought that the church's wealth would not reach the hungry, decided to form their own commission for the defence of the church and chose Olga Vasilievna Levina as their leader. They wrote resolutions, in the name of the faithful of almost twenty villages, that they would not give up the church's valuables. Some of the women came to Father Theodore and told him they had founded a women's parish council to keep the church clean, watch over order and guard the valuables. The priest approved the initiative of the faithful, saying that they were the ones who should decide, according to how dear the church was to them.

On 28 March a rumour spread that the commission from Cherepovets had arrived, and in several villages the bells were rung. In front of the district executive committee in Uloma a crowd of two thousand people gathered, mostly women, demanding the commission and shouting that they would not give up the church's valuables. That day Father Theodore had left early in the morning for firewood, then to a funeral and a baptism in neighbouring villages, and returned late. Summoned to the committee, he was asked to go out to the people and calm them, but he refused, saying people would think he spoke from fear and would not listen. When he was reproached for not preaching about donations for the hungry, he said he did not read newspapers and did not know the appeals. Then he went into another room, where twenty women were gathered, and told them they ought to give, and they answered that they had given almost everything. The priest said that, as people were saying, not everything would be taken from the church, only the surplus, and then went home. The crowd did not disperse until a militia detachment came.

The same day the chairman of the district council drew up a report asking for harsh punishment of the priest, who he said had stirred up a counter-⁠revolutionary movement. On 29 March Father Theodore Belyaev, Olga Levina, members of the church council and others, eight in all, were arrested and put in Cherepovets prison. At the inquiry, Father Theodore said that giving up church property was a matter for the faithful and not for the clergy, that he had undertaken nothing to calm the crowd, being absent, and that he had written that the sacred vessels should be of precious metal, if available. On 17 May 1922 the Revolutionary Tribunal of the province of Cherepovets sentenced him to four years' imprisonment.

Years of confession

After his release Father Theodore returned to serve in the same village, but in 1931 he was arrested again for failing to meet an arbitrarily set grain-⁠procurement quota, and was sentenced to five years of exile. He returned in 1933 and began to serve in the church of Saint Macarius in the village of Makarovo in the Vesyegonsk district of the Tver region. Of fifteen years of service, from 1918 to 1933, eight years he bore the cross of confession, in prison and exile. Back, he had no home and no property and lived in the church watchman's hut, together with the watchman. All his life he was zealous only for the church and the service and feared nothing: when the means for the upkeep of the church and for firewood ran short because of the taxes laid on the parish, he went himself to collect money from the faithful.

At the end of 1936 and the beginning of 1937 a new wave of persecution began: on 17 March the village soviet closed the church. Father Theodore tried to obtain its reopening, wrote a complaint to the All-⁠Russian Central Executive Committee and gathered signatures from the faithful, and while the church was closed he went round the parishioners' homes to serve prayers and the needed services. When the authorities forbade him to go round the villages on the pretext of a typhus epidemic, he kept on going. When the chairman of the soviet tried to convince him that God does not exist, he answered, "I will never abandon the faith and I will die serving as a priest."

Arrest and martyrdom

On 8 October 1937 he was arrested and put in prison at Vesyegonsk; he was seventy years old. At the arrest they took the last things he had, nineteen spiritual books and a portrait of Saint John of Kronstadt. On 12 and 13 October "witnesses" were questioned, but Father Theodore's authority among the people was so great that no one wished to say much against him. On 15 October the investigator questioned the priest, who answered that he had not conducted anti-⁠Soviet propaganda, admitted that in April 1937 he had said that soon all the churches would be closed and the authorities would forbid believers to believe, and that at the bread queue he had said that in the tsar's time there was everything and now one stands in line. On 1 November the troika sentenced him to death, and Father Theodore was shot two days later, on 3 November 1937.

Veneration

He is commemorated on 3 November (new style), in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church on 7 February, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vologda on 11 July, and in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver on 18 July, these three being movable. He was glorified in 2000 at the Jubilee Council of the Russian Church.