Vladimir Ambartsumov

Saint Vladimir Ambartsumov, Hieromartyr, was a Moscow priest of Armenian and German origin, who passed from Lutheranism to the Baptists and then to Orthodoxy, and was shot at the Butovo range near Moscow on 5 November 1937. He was born at Shemakha, in present-⁠day Azerbaijan. He was glorified as hieromartyr by the Council of Bishops in August 2000. He is commemorated on 23 October (5 November New Style).

Family and path to Orthodoxy

The roots of the Ambartsumov family go back to the Armenian Ambartsumyants family. His father, Ambartsum Egorovich, honorary citizen of the town of Shemakha, a benefactor, a co-⁠worker of the founder of education for the deaf-⁠mute in Russia, Fyodor Rau, and founder of a private school for the deaf-⁠mute at Saratov, was a nephew of Sarkis Ambartsumyants, who founded the first Lutheran community in Shemakha. His mother, Carolina Andreevna Knobloch, was German by birth, Lutheran. His parents' spiritual traditions raised in Vladimir an unshakable faith. After the family's move to Moscow, at the end of the 1890s, he studied at the Petropavlovsk school beside the Lutheran church of Saints Peter and Paul.

After graduating, in 1911, he entered the faculty of physics and mathematics of Moscow University, where he studied three semesters; in March 1913, at his mother's insistence, he went to Germany to continue his studies, but after a year in Berlin he returned to Russia, on the last train from Germany, before the First World War broke out. In July 1914 he enrolled again at the university. As a student he joined the Christian Student Circle and passed from Lutheranism to the Baptists; at the circle he met Valentina Alekseeva, whom he married in 1916. At the end of 1919, because of famine in Moscow, the family moved to Samara, where Vladimir worked at a museum and drew close to Vladimir Martsinkovsky, who, with Patriarch Tikhon's blessing, carried on missionary activity among young students. In 1920 he was arrested and taken to Moscow, but released after five weeks, forbidden to leave the capital.

In the middle of the 1920s he met Valentin Sventsitsky and, under his influence, in 1926 received Orthodoxy. At the end of 1927 he was sent to Glazov, to Bishop Victor Ostrovidov, from whom he received on 4 December ordination as deacon in the Transfiguration cathedral, on 11 December as priest, and served at the church of Saint George at Glazov. After two weeks he was moved to the Moscow diocese, rector of the Prince Vladimir church in Starosadsky, and from 1929 of the church of Saint Nicholas at Solomennaya Storozhka. Not agreeing with the church policy of Metropolitan Sergius, in 1931 he asked to be retired.

Arrest and martyrdom

In 1937 he was arrested and held at Butyrka, interrogated on 20 and 21 September and 12 October. From the record one sees how he answered. Asked in which counter-⁠revolutionary organizations he had been, he said never in any. He said he was deeply convinced that Soviet power had not understood and does not understand believing people, so it was natural that suspicion arose that the Christian student circle, which preached the faith among young people, was engaged in counter-⁠revolutionary activity, and he rejected this categorically. He said he had been leader of the circle at Samara and refused to give the names of ordinary members, saying he did not want to compromise them by his fate. He denied holding secret services at home: from 1931 he had ceased to serve, though he had not renounced his rank. On the circle's character he said that by its statute both the organization and its members had to be apolitical. When he was forced to admit that he had met in 1935 and 1936 with Fr Mikhail Shik, he acknowledged that their talk was about the hard state of the Orthodox Church in the USSR, about the fact that, if the Church is separated from the state, the state must not meddle in its affairs, and about cases in which servants of the cult are condemned unjustly; he said of the new Constitution that he did not believe priests would be elected to the soviets and of Soviet power "that it is a passing phenomenon, like any power". As the records show, to questions about acquaintances and fellow priests he named only the dead, people out of reach of the authorities, or refused to answer.

On 2 November the case was concluded: he was accused of being an active participant and organizer of a counter-⁠revolutionary monarchist organization of clergy, followers of the "True Church", for the overthrow of Soviet power and restoration of the monarchy. The troika of the NKVD of the Moscow region sentenced him to death on 3 November 1937 and on 5 November Hieromartyr Vladimir was shot at Butovo. The relatives were told he had received ten years without the right of correspondence.

Veneration and descendants

The Jubilee Council of Bishops of 13 to 16 August 2000 numbered him among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia as hieromartyr. His children were Evgeny (1917 to 1969), archpriest, from 1967 to 1969 rector of the Prince Vladimir cathedral in Leningrad, Viktor (1919 to 1920) and Nun Georgia (Lidia Kaleda, 1922 to 2010), widow of Archpriest Gleb Kaleda. His nephew was the political scientist and diplomat Evgeny Arshakovich Ambartsumov, a deputy of the State Duma in 1994. Among his grandchildren are priests, among them Archpriests Alexy and Dimitry Ambartsumov, John and Cyril Kaleda, and Abbess Juliana (Maria Kaleda), abbess of the Conception convent in Moscow. The saint has over fifty great-⁠grandchildren, among them several priests and deacons.