Varus Shmarin

Saint Varus (Uar, in the world Pyotr Alekseevich Shmarin, 1880-1938) the hieromartyr was the first bishop of Lipetsk, vicar of the diocese of Tambov, in the Russian Orthodox Church. He died a martyr on 23 September 1938 in the camps of the Karaganda region, beaten by common criminals. He was glorified by the Jubilee Council in August 2000. He is commemorated on 10 (23) September.

Family and studies

He was born on 11 October 1880 in the village of Novositovka, Tambov governorate, in a poor peasant family, of Alexei and Marfa Shmarin, who had thirteen children, of whom only two reached adulthood, Pyotr and his sister. After his father's early death, from the age of six he helped his mother with the household. His wife, Claudia Georgievna, née Strelnikova, from a rich merchant family, died of typhus in 1918. They had six children, four sons and two daughters. His daughter Claudia Petrovna (born 1909) lived in Voronezh and died there in 2012.

On the advice and at the expense of the local priest, he finished the four-⁠year village school. Then the priest petitioned the authorities for the continued schooling of the gifted boy. He was educated at state expense at the gymnasium in Tambov and at the church-⁠teachers' seminary in the village of Novo-⁠Aleksandrovka, Kozlov district. The saint did not regard the education he received as sufficient and educated himself all his life. He gathered at home a large library, both spiritual and secular. He was well informed on the religious-⁠philosophical currents of his time, on politics and the social order, had wide knowledge of medicine and a large specialist library. He never turned to doctors and treated his children himself, except in cases that required surgery. Peasants of all the surrounding villages came to him for medical help.

Deacon and priest

After the seminary he was a teacher. From 21 March 1904 he served as deacon in the diocese of Saratov. In February 1910 church authority proposed that he go to serve either in America or in Finland. He chose America, but his wife and her brother and sister opposed it, and Father Peter submitted to his relatives' wish and told the authorities he was ready to serve in Finland. From 28 October 1910 he was priest of the church of the Exaltation of the Cross on the island of Mantsinsaari on Lake Ladoga, and after a time was moved to the church in the village of Mustamäki near Vyborg. From 1913 to 1915 he published and edited the newspaper "Karelian News". After the revolution, Finland separated from Russia, and he with his family and relatives left for Petrograd, taking only what was necessary for the children. He took his wife and children to the village of Novositovka, to his mother, and himself stayed in Petrograd.

From 1918 he served at the church of the Great Martyr Nikita in the village of Tyutchevo near the town of Lebedyan, Tambov governorate. He was arrested several times, briefly, among them in 1924. He was told to give up the priesthood, in exchange for a good job and housing, but each time answered with refusal: "What you want from me you will never get. I am such a man: what I believe, I will never betray, so all your efforts are in vain." In 1922-1923 he strongly opposed the Renovationist movement. In a letter to Patriarch Tikhon of 28 July 1923, Archpriest Nikolai Skrizhalin writes that the agents of the Renovationists make plain use of the civil power's help, and that only this explains the arrest of the priest Pyotr Shmarin of Tyutchevo, who celebrated the feast of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul by the old style and in his sermon renounced the Renovationist bodies and regarded their leaders as heretics.

Bishop

On 20 August 1926 the priest Pyotr Shmarin was tonsured a monk with the name Varus and consecrated bishop of Lipetsk. He served first at the Nativity of Christ cathedral in Lipetsk and, after its closing in 1931, at the Dormition church. He became an unshakeable bulwark of Orthodoxy in the Lipetsk land and an implacable fighter against the Renovationists. In 1932 his eldest son, the priest Nikolai Shmarin, was arrested and, after refusing to give up the priesthood, was sentenced to three years in a Siberian camp. On 25 December 1934 an informer of the Lipetsk NKVD wrote that Bishop Varus's activity was growing stronger and stronger, that his popularity was rising, that he was becoming beloved of the people of Lipetsk and the villages as far as sixty versts around, and that he was a great unifying force. In the first days of April 1935, in Great Lent, the faithful of the church of the Nativity of Christ in the village of Studenki resisted the removal of the bells and did not let the scrap-⁠collecting brigade into the church. The priest, deacon, churchwarden and the most active parishioners were arrested.

Arrest, trial and martyrdom

On 8 June 1935 Bishop Varus was arrested, charged with conducting anti-⁠Soviet agitation, using the religious prejudices of the peasantry, and with being an active participant in the counter-⁠revolutionary group that organized at Studenki on 19-20 April 1935 a mass demonstration of women against the removal of the bells. He rejected the charge: "I do not plead guilty. I never carried on agitation against Soviet power and its measures." On 11 September 1935, at a visiting session of the special college of the Voronezh regional court, he was sentenced under articles 58-10-2 and 58-11 to eight years' imprisonment. At the meeting with his children he said: "Do not weep and do not grieve. Live as you have lived. Live honestly. Do not take revenge for me. The main thing is to live worthily."

The next day, 12 September 1935, he was sent to prison in Michurinsk, where he stayed until March 1936, then to the camps of Karaganda, where he arrived on 8 February 1937. In the camp he was first put to paving roads, and later, because of physical weakness (he had myocarditis and chorea), was moved to be an accountant. In the same camp was held the churchwarden of the Lipetsk cathedral, sentenced in the same case, who wrote to relatives: "Our master has a very hard time now, he is sick and weak, and they make him do heavy work. But you all know him, he never loses heart, he braces himself and supports all of us." From the camp he wrote to his relatives, to encourage them, that he was living, thank God, with nothing to complain of, that physical labour was good for him, and that the food was cabbage soup and porridge, our own peasant food.

In 1938 he was moved to the Merke section, to a barracks where common criminals were held. On 23 September 1938, after many days of beatings by them, Bishop Varus died. He was buried in the cemetery of the Samara section of the camp. In early 1991 his daughter Claudia Shmarina applied to Gorbachev for the rehabilitation of her father, and by decision of the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the RSFSR of 20 November 1991 Pyotr Alekseevich Shmarin was rehabilitated "for lack of a crime". In August 2000 the Jubilee Council of the Russian Church glorified him among the New Martyrs and Confessors for veneration in the whole Church. In Lipetsk, in the new districts, a church is being built in honour of the hieromartyr Varus, the first bishop of Lipetsk; the decision was taken in 2007 and the church, in the New Athos style, with five Greek domes, will be 36 metres high.