Saint Andrei of Ufa
The eighth of January – actually the twenty-sixth of December on the Old Calendar – is the feast-day of
Saint Andrei of Ufa, the Russian catacomb saint I’ve mentioned before and also one of the earliest ‘pink priests’ in Russia during the Revolutionary period – in fact, one of the only hierarchical supporters of the moderate socialists in the government. At the same time, however, his understanding of the social question was fundamentally conservative, and much closer to that of the Slavophils than to the social-revolutionaries. He ultimately became dissatisfied with the ideology as it became more violent. Saint Andrei is well worth remembering alongside
Fr Valentin Sventsitskii, with whom he shares much in common, and with
Saint Tikhon of Moscow whose cause as Patriarch he championed. This is because he was, like them, considered ‘too red for the whites, and too white for the reds’. In the end, he was given a sham trial and executed by the NKVD, because he dared to criticise the ecclesiological hæresy of Sergianism and the so-called ‘Living Church’.
The following hagiographical treatment of Saint Andrei of Ufa draws heavily – both in structure and in content – upon the biographical works of him authored by
Vladimir Moss (
The Holy New Martyrs of Eastern Russia, 2010) and
James White (
Missionary, Reformer, and Old Believer in Revolutionary Russia, 2018). It also brings in the briefer treatments of his character and activities – Churchly, political and charitable – in the East by
Charles Steinwedel (
Threads of Empire, 2016) and
Edward E Roslof (
Red Priests, 2002). It is my hope that this treatment is an effective synthesis from the available English-language sources and helps to draw, in writing, as accurate an ‘icon’ of the Saint as possible.
Saint Andrei [Rus. Андрей] was born Aleksandr Alekseevich Ukhtomskii on the twenty-sixth of December in the year 1872. His family was from a village outside
Rybinsk in Yaroslavl’ oblast’. The noble Ukhtomskii family could trace its roots back to the Rurikovich line of royal princes of Rus’, from which sprang many saints including
Saint Olga,
Saint Vladimir,
Saints Boris and Gleb,
Saint Andrei Bogolyubskii and
Saint Aleksandr Nevskii, though he apparently also claimed some Tatar heritage. Aleksandr’s father, Aleksei, was a minor nobleman and bureaucrat who had a posting in the Russian Navy; and his mother Antonina was an ideal housewife. However, it was his governess, a former serf named Maria Pavlovna, who was most instrumental in his early development, inspiring in him both a love for God and the saints, but also a
love for the Russian peasantry and their traditions. Aleksandr’s younger brother
Aleksei Alekseevich Ukhtomskii would go on to become a famous psychologist; and the two brothers did not always get along with each other, but they did love each other quite deeply.
Aleksandr Ukhtomskii early on expressed an interest in the priesthood. He seems to have been inspired in this – as well as in his social activism – by the example of
Saint John of Kronstadt, whose sermons he went in person to attend, and whose sweet words of encouragement directly to him regarding the awesome duties of the priesthood strengthened his desire for a life of service to the common people. However, when he announced his intentions to his family, their reaction was almost entirely negative. His uncle, also named Aleksandr, berated him harshly. His mother Antonina pleaded with him to give up his associations with priests. Out of deference to her, at first, he complied. But after his uncle Aleksandr died the following week, Antonina’s son Aleksandr took it as a sign that he must push forward with his priestly calling.
The choice to become a priest was – it cannot be emphasised enough – an act of
class treason on Aleksandr’s part. His parents and uncle castigated him for his desire to join the priesthood largely out of noble pride. They didn’t want him to be associated with the ‘black clergy’, who were – very much unlike their Catholic counterparts in Western Europe – ill-compensated, ill-educated, lacking in social prestige, largely of working-class origins, and possessed of large families that they were often at pains to feed. They were very close to the peasantry they served – and in the eyes of a largely-Westernised Russian nobility this was a cause for a certain degree of revulsion. But Aleksandr, who kept in mind his governess Maria, not only did not share this revulsion, but he
actively repudiated it.
At Moscow Theological Seminary he was taught first by the preeminent Bishop (later Metropolitan)
Antonii (Khrapovitskii) of Kiev (who introduced the young seminarian Aleksandr to the writings of
Aleksei Khomyakov and
Ivan Kireevskii – the Slavophil philosophers), and subsequently by then-Archimandrite
Saint Arsenii of Novgorod and Toshkent. His imagination was fired by the concept of
sobornost’ and its clear resonance with the lived experience of the Russian peasantry. Aleksandr developed a ‘conservative radicalism’ that would characterise his entire career in the Church: he deeply valued the
freedom of the Russian common people, but this freedom did not consist merely in legal rights and negative immunities – instead it consisted in the
active giving and sharing in each other in the communal life of the rural
mir or the urban
artel’. The Slavophils imbued Aleksandr with a deep and abiding heartfelt faith in principles of œconomic and church organisation which may be termed as
populist,
consensus-based or
radically-democratic. He was a lifelong opponent of both erastian tyrannies whether sæcular or confessional; as well as of clericalism, obscurantism and blind fideism in church matters.
The seminarian Aleksandr Ukhtomskii was not, however, a fan of liberal democracy and
bourgeois parliamentarianism – although the arguments he marshalled against both were
conservative and monarchist rather than socialist or anarcho-syndicalist in character. In Aleksandr’s thinking, Russian freedom is best preserved under a Tsar who embodies and marshals the religious energies of the people, and subsequently allows them to be directed toward their democratic-communal œconomic – though not necessarily political! – life. In Saint Andrei of Ufa’s career, we can therefore see the internal tensions of the early nineteenth-century Slavophil faith played out in a twentieth-century political context. He admired
the Christian radicalism of early Kievan Rus’, and even
the ‘concentrated’ holiness of the Tsardom of Moscow. But – unlike Dostoevskii, for example – he utterly
detested Peter the Great and his transformation of the Church into a mere bureau of government. It was against the Synodal system inaugurated by Peter that he bent all of his energies during his clerical career until the appointment of Patriarch Saint Tikhon; and thereafter against the attempts by Stalin’s government to restore a similar arrangement under the ‘Living Church’ and Metropolitan Sergii.
Aleksandr Ukhtomskii became tonsured as a monk shortly after graduating from seminary, and took on the monastic name of Andrei. He had baulked at the idea of marriage, which would be expected of a ‘black priest’ prior to ordination, because he subconsciously held all women to the unreachably-high standard set by his favourite female saint,
Nino of Georgia. Once he was tonsured as a monk he became vigorously active in promulgating the Gospel – in word and in deed. He had the utmost ceremonial reverence for the Holy Mysteries, and for the Scriptures. But he was equally beloved for his service to the poor and needy. Whenever he was given a gift by a rich admirer – fresh fruit, for example – he gave it at once to a hungry person or someone in need. He kept a strict ascetic routine, fasted and prayed constantly, and slept upon a hard bed without the benefit of blanket or pillow.
The new monk Andrei was sent out first as a missionary-inspector to Ossetia. The
Ossetians, an Iranian-speaking people of the Caucasus descended from
the Scythians,
the Sauromatai and
the Alans, were at that time divided between Orthodoxy, Islâm and the
local rodnoverie. Andrei saw his work there being, not to spread Russian civilisation or to proselytise the Ossetians, but instead to develop Church materials and sæcular readers in the local Ossetian language, to promote education, and to
love the people without ulterior motives. A major proponent of this model of Orthodox missiology, which had been first promoted by Saint Innocent of Irkutsk, was the lay professor and Turcologist
Nikolai Il’minskii. Saint Andrei followed this model religiously – so to speak – even though it led him into conflicts with right-wing Russian nationalists. As he himself put it:
I am convinced that even if the Orthodox Chuvash, Mari, Udmurts and baptised Tatars do not know a word of Russian but are only loyal sons of the Church, then they will always love the Russian Orthodox tsar, serve their Orthodox fatherland, worship its holy saints, defend the Holy Church from insult, and so on. In a word, being enlightened by the light of Christianity through their [own] languages, the inorodtsy can be Russian patriots!
Saint Andrei was a fierce critic of trends in the society he deemed to be materialistic and selfish. In something of a throwback to
Saint John Chrysostom’s tirade against circuses and hippodromes, he critiqued the Russian obsession with the theatre as a pagan idol which took the place of and distracted people from the Christian Liturgy. Also, like
Saint Misail of Ryazan, he wedded a social witness against exploitation and violence to a moralistic witness against drunkenness. But he reserved some of his harshest invective for the spirit of capitalism which he saw descending upon Russia. He called capitalism an ‘egotistic order’ and a ‘deeply anti-cultural phenomenon’, parasitic on Christian history but antagonistic to Christian love.
He therefore welcomed
some of the reforms that the 1905 constitutional crisis in Russia brought about, but by no means all. By this time he had been appointed as an abbot of the Monastery of the Holy Transfiguration in Kazan. By 1907 he would be consecrated to the new bishopric of Mamadysh. He had run-ins with revolutionary upheaval in Kazan, when he broke up a riot at a gunpowder factory that had turned violent and killed one man. He had grown to love and respect the Bashkir and Tatar people amongst whom he lived, and he welcomed the new law that allowed for freedom of conscience among the Russian people – seeing it as an opportunity for the Orthodox Church to reform itself and rededicate itself to a mission of love, without the hint of coercion behind it. He had a personal respect for the
character of
Konstantin Pobedonostsev, but he believed Pobedonostsev’s very office to be a Westernised abomination. And he
hated the idea of
intégrisme – a Church with the weapons of the state in its hand – as much as he hated the idea of Petrine erastianism. At the same time, though, he was
intensely critical of the idea of a full church-state separation, seeing the
public presence of the Orthodox Church being the sole bulwark against both the godless force of capitalism and against the pious reaction of Islâm as preached by Tatar and Bashkir
imâms.
It is
necessary to note that although Saint Andrei could be intensely critical of Islâm as a
doctrine, he had a marked admiration and affection for Muslim
people, similar to his mentor Saint John of Kronstadt. He admired the nobility and strength of spirit in Tatar and Bashkir men. And even his critiques of Islâm presented the faith of the ‘Hagarenes’ as a foil to a lukewarm and indifferent Orthodox Church that had lost its fire and its connexion to the hearts of the common people. As often as not, his diatribes against Islâm contained barely-veiled critiques aimed at the complacency and bureaucratic lethargy of the synodal structure of the Orthodox Church. However, his attitudes toward evangelisation of the
inorodtsy led to confrontations and fights with the far-right Black Hundreds. The Black Hundreds supported
ethnic Russification of the East – ‘Russia for the Russians’ – rather than the
civic evangelism supported by the bishop. As a result, they hated Saint Andrei, and – though it was ill-suited for a bishop to do so, he himself citing ‘sinful thoughts’ – he returned the sentiment heartily. The clashes got to be so bad that Saint Andrei was compelled by the Church to leave Kazan for Mamadysh.
Saint Andrei kept busy. He was active in missionary work among the
inorodtsy according to the Irkutsk / Il’minskii model, both in the Caucasus and in the Russian East. He was also a political activist, homilising in fiery terms against exploitation of the poor by the rich. And of course he was a steadfast advocate of Church reforms: in particular, the democratic organisation of the laity, the election of priests and bishops, and the restoration of the Russian Patriarchate.
He clashed hard with Rasputin and his toadies in the Imperial Court. From the start he had a certain distrust for this wild-eyed
soi-disant ‘holy man’ with his erratic mannerisms and his mesmeric hold over the Tsarina in particular, but Saint Andrei’s personal dislike of Rasputin was cemented when the latter made a comment disparaging Saint John of Kronstadt’s personal life. From that point on, Saint Andrei became, together with Metropolitan Antonii (Khrapovitskii) a devoted opponent of the Rasputin clique in Petersburg. These clashes caused Saint Andrei to be relocated again – this time to the city of Ufa in what is now
Bashkortostan.
In Ufa, Saint Andrei continued to push for Church reforms, including clerical election and the organisation of the laity. Bashkortostan was indeed a logical place for these sorts of reforms to occur, being the centre of one of the
more successful coöperative movements in præ-revolutionary Russia and a long, proud history of left-wing political agitation going back to Pugachev’s Rebellion. And indeed, parish priests in Ufa were, for a short time, directly elected by their parishes under Saint Andrei’s rule. The First World War had a significant effect on Ufa as well. Although initially supportive of the causes of Russian entry into the Great War, Bishop Andrei soon came to realise that the human costs of the war far outweighed any good it might possibly bring, and his homiletics began to take on a strongly anti-war tone. Saint Andrei was actively involved in mobilising the Orthodox parishes in Ufa to care for the slow-rising flood of war orphans, refugees and wounded soldiers retreating from the Eastern Front.
Saint Andrei was active at this time in charitable and social work. He helped to found the East Russian Cultural Enlightenment Society («Восточнорусское Культурно-Просветительное Общество», VRKPO), which used its funding to sponsor schools, orphanages, libraries and hospitals throughout the Russian East from 1916 to 1919, when it was disbanded by the Soviet authorities. The VRKPO also promoted a cultural programme based on the Il’minskii system, which advocated for the cultural and linguistic rights of
inorodtsy while at the same time propagating Orthodox Christianity within non-Russian speaking communities. It also promoted a moderate-left political agenda aimed at promoting financial self-sufficiency, communal credit and collective bargaining among both Russians and non-Russians living in the East. Several VRKPO members from Ufa were in fact elected to the Constitutive Assembly in 1917.
Saint Andrei’s relationship with Renovationism was complicated. He was, in fact, one of the founders – and the sole supporter and patron among the body of Orthodox bishops – of the proto-Renovationist ‘
Union of Democratic Laity and Clergy’ («Союз демократического духовенства и мирян», SDDM) in Saint Petersburg in 1917. The SDDM, which was closely associated with the
Socialist Revolutionary Party, sponsored and championed many of the reforms that Saint Andrei held dear: election of parish clergy, Liturgies in the vernacular, legal freedom of conscience, mobilisation of the laity in the life of the Church. It also shared Saint Andrei’s hostility to capitalism, and supported radical œconomic reforms meant to place control over Russia’s productive forces collectively in the hands of peasants and workers. In the press, Saint Andrei was called a ‘
clerical Bolshevik’. It was meant as an insult, but Saint Andrei took it and wore it as a badge of honour, and supported it with reference to
the Gospel of Saint Luke.
However, the SDDM was soon joined and later supplanted by several other Renovationist organisations with what today might be called
accelerationist platforms. Saint Andrei perceived that these organisations, which came to coalesce into the hæretical ‘Living Church’, were aiming to attack and destroy the very
sobornyi basis of the Church and subordinate it to the new Bolshevik party under a neo-Petrine, cæsaropapist political arrangement. This went against everything that Saint Andrei had lived, worked and fought for throughout his entire clerical career – and, more importantly, it went against the spirit of Christ. Saint Andrei also vehemently opposed Kerenskii’s attempts to sæcularise Russian society and break the Church away from many of the social organisations it fostered and supported – in particular the schools. He lambasted Kerenskii’s ‘atheism’ and ‘irreligion’ when he attempted to seize parish schools and convert them into state schools which would be officially neutral on questions of religion.
Similarly to
Kang Youwei or
Liang Shuming in China, Saint Andrei found himself out-of-step with the spirit of the times in two different ways. Prior to 1917 Saint Andrei had been a left-wing agitator, a
narodnik, a champion of the rights of peasants and workers to determine their own œconomic livelihoods collectively for themselves. In the wake of 1917, Saint Andrei found himself a lonely voice for the religious conscience of the masses, for the humble piety of the same peasants and workers against a pernicious revolutionary doctrine of foreign provenance. Before, he had been a thorn in the side of the Synodal system, of the Black Hundreds, of Rasputin, of the obscurantist wings of the Tsarist clergy. Afterwards, he found himself a thorn in the side of the new and increasingly Bolshevik-dominated post-Revolutionary government…
all without changing what he believed and what he stood for! He had
always stood for Christ – alongside the widows, the orphans, the
inorodtsy, the wounded and crippled casualties of war.
During the Civil War, in fact, Saint Andrei briefly worked for
Admiral AV Kolchak of the White Navy who briefly set up a counterrevolutionary government in Siberia, helping to tend to White wounded and working to restore some semblance of order to the Church in Ufa after the Soviet takeover. Although Bishop Andrei’s personal relationship with Admiral Kolchak was good (the two sharing the same faith and many of the same convictions), the new Provisional All-Russian Government distrusted Andrei for the same reasons mentioned above: he had been a foe of the old order they were attempting to restore. As Vladimir Moss writes: ‘[Bishop Andrei]
often appealed to Admiral Kolchak himself with his plan for organizing parishes throughout Eastern Russia. But he was rejected, and sometimes even persecuted. And this in spite of the fact that the supreme ruler himself greatly respected him.’
In the wake of the Soviet reconquest of the East in 1920, Saint Andrei was placed under arrest on trumped-up charges of conspiracy, and put into prison under the most heinously-confining, inhumane and health-endangering conditions. Bishop Andrei was kept alive largely by donations of food from sympathetic Orthodox Christians, which had to be kept discrete and secret from the Soviet authorities to protect the identities of his benefactors. For the rest of his life, indeed, he was very rarely out of prison. His support for the saintly Patriarch Tikhon – who indeed shared many of Saint Andrei’s social views, given his support of organised labour and the rights of Alaska Natives in the United States! – led him to share in the Patriarch’s martyrdom.
Saint Andrei had long had a weak spot, a sympathy for the
Old Belief in Russia. His heartfelt distaste and opposition to the Petrine reforms, indeed, made such a sympathy more likely. But his attitude toward the ecclesiastical reforms of Patriarch Nikon, and his belief that these reforms both alienated the common people from the Church and set the stage for the erastian arrangement of the Synodal government that followed, cemented this sympathy. But in the wake of his arrest in 1920 he began to have more and more significant contacts with Old Believer communities in the East.
His conflicts with
Metropolitan Sergii became much more overt and hostile, the more he began to contact with Old Believer communities in Moscow, in Ufa and in his exile in Tashkent. At length, a concelebrated Liturgy he held with a certain Old Believer monk named Kliment and an Old Believer bishop named Rufinii, caused Metropolitan Sergii to suspend him from the Orthodox hierarchy – twice. As Sergii continued to persecute him he did so without the authority of the Church and on his own initiative, without giving the beleaguered Bishop the benefit of an ecclesial trial or the benefit of witnesses on his behalf. Saint Andrei remained immensely popular in Ufa, and his return was greeted with exuberant joy by many of the people who remembered his kindness and work on their behalf. A later clerical trial exonerated Bishop Andrei of any wrongdoing and reinstated him as an Orthodox bishop.
But Saint Andrei did not forget his treatment at the hands of Metropolitan Sergii. By the time that Sergii penned
his infamous Declaration swearing the Church of Russia to the Soviet authorities in the most slavish possible way, and demanding all of the bishops of the Church do the same, Saint Andrei was ready with an answer. He openly flouted the
Declaration. But it is intriguing that in his rejection of Sergii’s
Declaration, he attacked
first and foremost Sergii’s history of obscurantism, his closeness to Rasputin and his slavishness before
Tsarist authority prior to the Soviet takeover. Even as late as 1930, Saint Andrei was critiquing the Soviet-accommodationist clergy from a ‘left’ position!
Subsequent to this, he was officially barred from travelling to Ufa, to Kazan or to Siberia – largely on account of his popularity there. He was kept either in prison (where he suffered so badly from malnourishment that most of his hair fell out), or under virtual house-arrest in Moscow, where he celebrated Liturgy at one of the vanishingly-few non-Sergianist churches remaining there, and then was deported to Almaty in Kazakhstan in 1932. He met and was reconciled with
Metropolitan Iosif of Petrograd. He kept up correspondence with his well-wishers and old friends in Bashkortostan and Kazan, who sent him packages with expensive gifts that – true to his character – Saint Andrei at once distributed among the poor and needy in Kazakhstan.
He was arrested one final time and transported to Moscow, held in close confinement for three years between 1934 and 1937, possibly in a labour camp near Yaroslavl’. At a secret trial held in Rybinsk – not far from where Saint Andrei was born, in fact – the NKVD found him guilty of unidentified charges which are nowhere on record, and sentenced him to death by firing squad. The sentence was carried out on the fourth of September, 1937. Saint Andrei asked – and was given – a few minutes for prayer before his execution, and a schemamonk Epifanii who was imprisoned with Saint Andrei reported that while he prayed he was bathed in light from a radiant cloud and vanished from view for several minutes. This caused great fear and bewilderment among his executioners, who hastened to carry out the punishment afterward.
Saint Andrei was glorified by ROCOR in 1981 in the
Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, though there was a motion in 1993 to decanonise him based on his contacts and concelebration of the Liturgy with the Old Believers. He was posthumously pardoned and rehabilitated by the Soviet government under
glasnost’ in 1989, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Moscow Patriarchate has been a bit slow to recognise Saint Andrei despite his immense popularity locally, in Ufa and Kazan, where he is celebrated as a local saint; however, he is listed on the Church calendar, though his feast-day commemorates the day of his birth rather than the day of his martyrdom.
Holy hierarch and new martyr Andrei, steadfast friend of the poor and needy, champion of the inorodtsy
and bold confessor of the truth before the godless, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!
