Holy Hieromartyr Nikodim, Archbishop of Kostroma

Saint Nikodim of Kostroma

The twenty-first of August in the Orthodox Church is the feast-day of the martyr under Stalinist repression, Archbishop Saint Nikodim of Kostroma. As one of the martyrs glorified by the Russian Orthodox Church in the early 2000s, Saint Nikodim is particularly important to the modern Church for his insistence on serving his flock despite having the opportunity to flee. Much like Patriarch Saint Tikhon, Saint Nikodim was an advocate of Church unity and of peaceful action; and so he deserves to be remembered alongside the other saints who suffered under Soviet repression for reasons which were (on the part of the sufferers) non-political: such as Saint Valentin of Kansk and Saint Andrei of Ufa.

The martyr-bishop Nikodim, in the world Nikolai Vasil’evich Krotkov, was born on the twenty-ninth of November, 1868, in the village of Pogreshino, southwest of the town of Kostroma. His father, Vasilii Fedorovich, was a poor rural priest, one of the generally underfed, underpaid, underappreciated ‘black clergy’. He chose to follow in his father’s footsteps and entered the Kostroma Theological Seminary, from which he graduated in the year 1889. Around the same time he married a woman named Apollinariya Uspenskaya, and began teaching at a parish school in Olesh’. In February of the following year he was ordained a priest, and appointed to serve in the Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in the rural Ivanovo Kineshemskii region.

In 1896, the priest Nikolai lost both his child and his beloved wife. He undertook to join the Kiev Theological Seminary, and three years later took monastic vows and was tonsured under the name of Nikodim, after the righteous Pharisee and secret follower of Christ. He graduated from seminary and quickly became a priestmonk and an archimandrite; he sat for his doctorate in 1900, and then served consecutively as sexton of the Vladikavkaz Theological School, and as rector of the Pskov Theological Seminary.

In 1907, Saint Nikodim was appointed to be the bishop of Cetatea Albă in Bessarabia, which was then called by its Gagauz name of Akerman. In this position he also served as vicar to the Metropolitan of Chișinău. In 1911 he was ordained bishop of Chigirin in central Ukraine, vicar to the Kiev Diocæse and abbot of Saint Michael’s Monastery ‘of the Golden Domes’ in Kiev. In this position he headed several humanitarian and philanthropic projects, including missionary societies and the charitable Brotherhood of Saint Vladimir. In May of 1916 he personally made a trip to the Eastern Front in the Great War with gifts for the Russian soldiers.

The one consistent political instinct shown by Saint Nikodim through these turbulent years was the instinct for unity, both political and cultural. He opposed the Provisional Government of 1917, and was a signatory of a letter from the clergy to the Tsar calling for the State Duma to be dissolved. (He faced a brief three-month stint of exile to Saratov for this signature.) He also supported the hetmanship of the White general Pavlo Skoropadskii in 1917 also because he thought it would promote cultural unity, but he soon came to oppose many of Skoropadskii’s cultural policies in following years for precisely the same reason.

During the Russian Civil War, as well, he refused to take sides. In February of 1918, in response to a call from the new Patriarch Saint Tikhon and with the blessing of Metropolitan Vladimir (Bogoyavlenskii) of Kiev, he was instrumental in creating the Council of United Parishes – a union headed by AD Samarin which attempted to peacefully organise Orthodox believers at the grassroots level in the Soviet model, in order to protect the rights and promote the well-being of Orthodox under the new government.

Saint Nikodim was, like Metropolitan Antonii (Hrapovitskii) a steadfast and vociferous opponent of Ukrainian autocephaly. And even more strenuously than Metropolitan Antonii, he was one of three Kiev bishops who upheld the Petrine anathema on Ivan Mazepa despite the danger to his career from such a stance from the new government. Both of these activities put him at odds not only with the Soviet government, but also with the advocates of Ukrainian independence and – to a lesser but still noteworthy extent – the Whites. Later, under questioning from Soviet interrogators for his rôle in these events, he said in his defence: ‘I stood for one indivisible Church and Motherland, regardless of what kind of power it would have.’

Bishop Nikodim was captured and mistreated by the pro-independence followers of Symon Petliura in 1918, and shuttled from Galicia to Poland where he was held in confinement alongside Metropolitan Antonii (Hrapovitskii) and Metropolitan Evlogii (Georgievskii). After his release, he was released to White Army-held Kiev, from which he went to Crimea to serve as an auxiliary bishop in charge of the cathedral in Simferopol. When in 1919 the Whites under Anton Denikin offered him the chance to flee Russia, Saint Nikodim refused at once – in what would ultimately prove to be a path of martyrdom.

He was sent to Crimea in 1920, which was then under the control of Baron Pyotr Vrangel’. Saint Nikodim was appointed as an auxiliary bishop in the cathedral of Simferopol’, and organised the churches along the Black Sea coast that were under the political control of the White Army. After the Reds seized Crimea in 1921, again Saint Nikodim refused to flee. After Archbishop Dmitri of Crimea went into a semi-forced retirement later the same year, Patriarch Saint Tikhon appointed and blessed Bishop Nikodim as Archbishop in his place.

In November 1922 he was arrested by the Soviet government on charges of resisting the confiscation of Church property, tried at an open trial and sentenced to eight years in prison. He fell ill and was released on probation to Moscow, where Patriarch Saint Tikhon elevated him to the Holy Synod. Here, at the Donskoi Monastery, he concelebrated the Divine Liturgy with the Patriarch, all the while intending to return to his Crimean flock and keeping up a sustained correspondence with them, in a spirit of self-giving pastoral care. He spent the next ten years of his life under surveillance, his travel curtailed, arrested, sent into exile or thrown into prisons. He was sent to Kazakhstan twice (once to Túrkistan, once to Qyzylorda) and once to Tórtkól in Uzbekistan during the space of that ten years. When he was released from his exile he settled again in Ivanovo, in the Kineshemskii region in which he had begun his career as a priest. On the sixth of October, 1932 he was ordained Archbishop of Kostroma.

He served here for four years before he was arrested again, in 1936, on charges of communicating with clergy in White-held territories, hosting a monastery with ten monks, and possessing two homiletical volumes printed under the Tsarist régime. He was sent to Krasnoyarsk in 1937 on political charges, and his health declined precipitously. A prison doctor described multiple problems with Saint Nikodim’s heart and lungs, and recommended against sending him into exile in his present condition. Repeated interrogations by the NKVD and accusations of political crimes (which, considering Saint Nikodim’s temperament, read as overtly ludicrous) further took their toll on the archbishop’s health, and he died in NKVD custody of cardiopulmonary complications on the twenty-first of August, 1938.

In 1995, the Diocæse of Kostroma proclaimed Archbishop Nikodim a local saint. This was followed in August 2000 by a formal glorification by the Russian Orthodox Church, among the Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. He is remembered in the local Synaxes of Saints of Kostroma, of Rostov and of Odessa. In Moldova Saint Nikodim is considered to be one of the national saints, because of his early service as bishop of Cetatea Albă and as vicar in Chișinău.

Saint Nikodim of Kostroma, in his life, had two primary concerns: ‘for the unity of the faith and for the communion of the Holy Spirit’. He lived and served under a White government and under a Red government – under the subtle distrust of one and under the open persecution of the other – but his fundamental orientation to the faith and his two central commitments did not change, whether in poverty, in war, in revolution, in counter-revolution, in prison or in exile. As we hold Saint Nikodim in reverence, we should also take account of political upheavals, and act to discern the time. Holy hieromartyr Nikodim of Kostroma, witness for Christ amidst the fires of war and revolution, pray unto Christ our God for the salvation of our souls!

Apolytikion for Saint Nikodim of Kostroma, Tone 4:

Adornment of the region of Kostroma, New Martyr Nikodim,
Firmly confessing the faith you were unrighteously condemned by the godless;
In prison having endured much suffering, you received the martyr’s crown.
Now standing before the throne of God
With the Most Pure Theotokos and all the saints,
Pray earnestly to Christ to grant us
The steadfast faith of the Fathers, peace and great mercy!

Костромскаго края украшение, новомучениче святителю Никодиме,
Веру православную твердо исповедуя, от безбожных неправедно осужден бысть.
В заточении многая страдания претерпев, венец мученический восприял еси.
Ныне же предстоя престолу Божию
Со Пречистою Богородицею и всеми святыми,
усердно Христу молися даровати нам
Веры отеческия утверждение, мир и велию милость.