Holy New Hieromartyr Seraphim Chichagov of Leningrad

Saint Seraphim of Leningrad

The eleventh of December [N.C.] is also the Orthodox feast day of the holy hieromartyr and sufferer under the Bolshevik yoke, Saint Seraphim of Leningrad. I plan to be paying careful attention to some of these ones who have been glorified by the Russian Church in the wake of the fall of Communism, both because they stood bravely for the faith during a time of intense persecution, and because they have unfortunately been coopted by ideological elements particularly in parts of the Russian ‘far diaspora’ which they would likely find objectionable. Saint Seraphim was a devoted follower of Saint John of Kronstadt, and held fast to the same fervent love of Christ over any ideology. That said, he insisted on love of neighbour in such a way that renders him a problem for any apologist for an earthly ideology. His prophetic words were issued more against the modernising, industrial-capitalist society that was breeding the Bolsheviks, against a Russian society that had lost its unique and vital and God-loving spirit, than against the Bolsheviks themselves.

Saint Seraphim [Ru. Серафим] was born Leonid Mikhailovich Chichagov, on the ninth of January [O.C.], 1856 in the city of Saint Petersburg. He came from an illustrious military family, and most of the male members of his extended family had served in the Russian armed forces. His father, Mikhail Nikiforovich, was a Colonel in the artillery corps. Admiral Pavel Vasil’evich Chichagov and his father, the famed Arctic explorer Admiral Vasilii Yakovlevich Chichagov were members of Saint Seraphim’s extended family.

Young Leonid Mikhailovich followed in his family’s footsteps and joined the Imperial Page Corps. Immediately upon graduating he, like his father, became an artillery officer and saw action in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 (the same which concluded at San Stefano and resulted in Bulgarian independence), where he took part in nearly every major engagement, and fought with distinction. After the war he was made responsible for organising aid and medical care to war orphans, veterans and military families who had suffered losses. This assignment awakened his pity, and furthered his desire to study medicine. It was in this capacity that he met with a local priest, Saint John of Kronstadt – a meeting that influenced the entire course of his remaining life.

Leonid met and courted another young aristocrat, Natal’ya Dochturova, and married her when he was twenty-three years old. The two of them had four daughters together. He was not, however, a ‘freethinker’ following the spirit of the times, and even though he was an aristocrat he made sure that he himself, along with his wife and daughters, strictly observed the Orthodox prayers and fasts at home. He visited France and made a tour of the artillery units there, reporting on his findings to his superiors. He also began his medical studies in earnest, and conducted researches into applied herbalism in military field medicine.

Leonid Chichagov retired from active service in 1891, moved his family to Moscow, and – under Saint John’s advice and blessing – entered seminary in preparation to enter the priesthood. After two years of prayer and study, Leonid was ordained a priest at the Moscow Church of the Twelve Apostles. His first years as a priest were very difficult, however, as his wife Natal’ya suffered from an illness that claimed her life in 1895. Father Leonid had her buried in the Diveevo Monastery graveyard.

Much of Fr Leonid’s efforts in those early years were invested in his work on an ecclesiastical history of the Diveevo Monastery, and in particular his scholarly treatment of Seraphim of Sarov, which figured out to be the most important factor in that holy man’s glorification in Russian Orthodoxy. Saint Seraphim Chichagov considered this history of Diveevo to be one of his life’s most important monastic obediences, and in historical terms it is certainly one of his most significant works. Here is what he himself had to say about it:

After many years of being in the civil service, I became a priest in a small church located behind the Rumyantsev Museum. I decided to visit the Sarov monastery, the place of Venerable Seraphim’s spiritual struggles. I spent a few days in prayer and, while staying there, visited all of the memorable sites related to Venerable Seraphim’s life. From there, I moved to the Diveyevo monastery, which I liked a lot and where Venerable Seraphim, who cared so much about its nuns, was deeply loved. The Hegumenia received me warmly; we had lengthy conversations and she mentioned in passing that there were three monastics still alive who remembered the venerable father. They were two nun elders and nun Pelagia (born Paraskevi, Pasha). I was escorted to Pasha’s dwelling. As soon as I entered, Pasha, who was resting on her bed (she was really old and ailing by then), exclaimed: “It is so good you came, I have been waiting for you: Venerable Seraphim asked me to tell you that you have to report to the Emperor that the time has come to uncover his relics and announce his glorification.” I retorted that I have no social status to be accepted by the Emperor and relay to him in person what she has just told me. To that, Pasha responded: “I do not know anything as I am just the messenger delivering the Venerable one’s words.” Soon afterwards, I left the Diveyevo monastery. On my way back to Moscow, I kept coming back to what Pasha had told me. All of a sudden, a thought pierced my mind: I could write down all the nuns’ memories of Venerable Seraphim. I could also find other contemporaries and let them share their stories about him, or delve into the Sarov and Diveyevo monastery archives to find everything relating to his life and events that happened after his death. I could systematize all the memoirs, factual data and archival documents and materials chronologically, presenting a complete picture of the venerable father’s life and ascetic endeavors and their meaning for the religious life of the people. This work could then be printed and gifted to the Emperor thus fulfilling the venerable father’s will that Pasha so expressly delivered to me. My resolve was further cemented by the fact that the Tsar’s family, over their evening tea, would customarily share spiritual readings. I therefore hoped my book would be one of them. That is how an idea of writing the “Chronicle” was conceived.

Fr Leonid left his four daughters in the charge of a family friend, and discharged his duties to them for care and education. He also retired from the military chaplaincy. Having put his worldly affairs in order, he left the world in order to become a monk, and was tonsured with the monastic name of Seraphim, after the same Saint Seraphim of Sarov upon whose life he had lavished so much obedient attention. This happened at Trinity-Sergius Lavra in Moscow on the fourteenth of August, 1898. A year later, in 1899, he was appointed by the Russian Church to become the abbot of a run-down monastic house in Suzdal, the monastery of St Evfemii. He held this office for five years. Abbot Seraphim’s sound sense, administrative skill, and heartfelt love for the monks caused that monastery to flourish again, both materially and spiritually, for a time prior to the Revolution.

At this time he was given a vision of Seraphim of Sarov, whom he saw as though he were still alive. The saint thanked Archimandrite Seraphim for the chronicle of his life and of the life of the Diveevo Monastery, and then bade him ask whatever he would desire for his work. But the archimandrite merely held him and told him that so great was his rejoicing, that he desired nothing more than to be with him always. Seraphim gave him a nod and then vanished, after which Archimandrite Seraphim understood that he had been given a vision.

After this, the Archimandrite Seraphim began working in small steps toward the glorification of his namesake, of whom he had received a vision. Having listened to Archimandrite Seraphim’s discourse on the many virtues and the saintly character of Seraphim of Sarov, Tsar Nikolai II ultimately authorised a commission to conduct an examination of Seraphim of Sarov’s cause, and appointed the Archimandrite Seraphim to coordinate provisions for the pilgrims who would appear at the glorification. The uncovering of Seraphim of Sarov’s relics occurred on the twenty-ninth of January, 1903, and his glorification took place on the seventeenth of July the same year.

In April of 1905, Seraphim was consecrated a bishop of Sukhumi in the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow. The monastic father dedicated himself totally to the service of his flock, no matter where he went. In short order he became the bishop of Orël in 1906, and then the bishop of Chișinău in Moldova in 1908. His service in Moldova in particular is warmly and fondly remembered. Again he displayed his remarkable administrative skills, good sense and warm pastoral care for the people of Moldova, and a see that had been poor and underserved was put into good order and transformed from the ground up in the spirit of Christ.

It is while Saint Seraphim (Chichagov) was serving as bishop of Chișinău that he demonstrated his amazing spiritual insight and prophetically foresaw the revolution which was to come, which would engulf Russia and do horrendous damage to the Church. Although Russia was in a period of material flourishing, Saint Seraphim saw no cause for rejoicing. Within the Church Seraphim saw moral complacency, lax discipline, abuse of alcohol, corruption and collusion with money and power. He grieved to see that the spirit of capitalism had infected even the bishops and the clergy. He foresaw even that the common folk would revolt against the Church, and that the Church had missed its moment to repent and to call the state to repentance:

Everything has fallen apart. Educated society has lost all understanding of what Christianity is. Every day I can see before my eyes the ongoing corruption of our clergy. There is no hope at all that they will come to reason or understand their condition. Everywhere is drunkenness, debauchery, simony, extortion, and secular interests. The last remaining believers are trembling with repugnance over the condition of their clergy. And there is no one to finally realize just what brink of destruction the Church is standing on, or what is happening. The opportune time was missed. A disease of the spirit has taken over the entire state organism. The moment of recovery cannot recur, and the clergy is rushing headlong into an abyss, having no strength or desire to stop the process. Just one more year, just a little while, and there won’t even be simple folk left around us. They will all rise up and reject such insane and repulsive leaders. And what will happen to the state? It will perish along with us. It no longer makes any difference who is in the Synod, who is the procurator, what seminaries and academies there are—our agony and death are near.

Saint Seraphim had a rare gift for seeing beneath the surface of events and understanding the root causes. Similarly to Saint Andrei of Ufa and Saint John of Kronstadt themselves, Saint Seraphim was neither impressed nor cowed by displays of wealth and power. And – laudably for one born into the nobility, as he was! – he understood that the strength of the Church lay in the ‘simple folk’, not among the erudite and foreign-educated.

In 1912, Saint Seraphim was transferred to the see of Tver. In February of 1917 Saint Seraphim voiced his disapproval of the overthrow of Tsar Nikolai II and the subsequent social transformations that had accompanied the revolution, and he was therefore marked by the Bolsheviks as an enemy. After the October Revolution he was exiled from Tver. Patriarch Saint Tikhon attempted, unsuccessfully, to transfer the saintly bishop away from Tver and into Poland, but he was arrested by the NKVD in 1921 and sent into exile again in Archangelsk in 1923. He returned to Moscow the following year, but was soon involved in struggles against the Renovationist clergy who had taken control of the Church. He retired for a brief while to Shuya’s Resurrection Cathedral at the invitation of the abbess there; then he served as a bishop in the Leningrad diocæse where his presence served to bolster the faithful of the Church against the Sergianist compromise. He was forced into retirement in 1933 and sent into the countryside by the Soviet authorities. In 1937, as an ailing, elderly man, he was thrown into prison. A month later, the bedridden Seraphim had to be carried out on a stretcher to be shot by the NKVD at Butovo, and in this way he attained to the glory of martyrdom and the company of the saints. He was glorified by the Church of Russia on the twenty-third of February, 1997, sixty years after his death.

Saint Seraphim (Chichagov) is another one of the Russian New Martyrs whose legacy is quite a bit more complex, and much richer and deeper in its holiness, than many who venerate him (particularly abroad) appear to realise. Although he did not approve of the Revolution, it is clear that his prophetic gift made him much more a critic of the prevailing order prior to the Revolution than of the predictable situation that succeeded it. He did not once turn against the ‘simple folk’, and he is certainly not a straightforward ally of those who would attempt to rebuild a ‘white’ status quo ante in Russia today. Holy hierarch Seraphim, steadfast defender of Orthodoxy and bold speaker of the truth in good times and in evil ones, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saint Seraphim (Chichagov) of Leningrad, Tone 4:

By sharing in the ways of the Apostles,
You became a successor to their throne.
Through the practice of virtue, you found the way
To divine contemplation, O inspired one of God;
By teaching the word of truth without error, you defended the Faith,
Even to the shedding of your blood.
Hieromartyr Seraphim, entreat Christ God to save our souls.

Saviour Transfiguration Cathedral, St Petersburg, Russia