Priest Chariton Ioannovich Poido was born in September, 1883 in the family of a peasant of the village of Dneprovo-Kamenki, Likhovsky uyezd, Yekaterinoslav province. He finished two classes in the village school and at the beginning of the First World War was a novice in the Svyatogorsk Dormition Desert, and then in the Trinity – St. Sergius Lavra. In 1914 he was at the front, and in 1915 he was captured by the Germans, and was in captivity for four years. On returning to his homeland in
1919, he was ordained to the diaconate and began to serve, although it is not known where.
In 1920 he was imprisoned for three months for not concealing the miracle of the renovation of an icon. In 1927 or 1928, while living, in his words, “as a prisoner of the Orthodox Faith in the Soviet Union”, he was arrested “for counter-revolutionary activity”, and on April 20, 1928 was exiled for three years to Kotlas or Mari district. There, on on September 20, 1929, he was arrested for being “a
participant in a counter-revolutionary group of clergy and believers, followers of Bishop (Saint) Victor (Ostrovidov)”. On January 30, 1930 he was sentenced to three years in the camps and sent to Syzran camp, but was then transferred to Arkhangelsk. On June 24, 1931 he was arrested in camp for refusing to work on Sundays and feastdays, and was subjected to administrative punishment. However, on October 20 the case was shelved.
In September, 1932 he was released from camp and went to live in the village of Sidorovo, working as a cobbler. On December 29, 1932 he was arrested for being “the leader of a counter-revolutionary group of followers of the True Orthodox Church”, and on July 22, 1933 was sentenced to six months in prison. He was released in view of the time he had already spent in prison. In 1935 he returned to Mari province, where he began to serve in secret.
His flock included True Orthodox peasants from the Vilovatovsky, Kuznetsovsky, Kozhvozhsky and
Krasno-Volzhsky villages, that is, of a fairly large Trans-Volga Catacomb community, which was canonically subject probably, although this is not certain, to Bishop (Saint) Sergius of Narva.
In the village of Vazhnanger, where 21 True Orthodox Christians gathered under the leadership of Fr. Chariton, a peasant called Stenkin betrayed them to the police. Fr. Chariton was arrested on August 26, 1937 in the village of Koryakino, in the house of Nun Maria (Bulygina), “who, together with
him, conducted counter-revolutionary, destructive work among the collective farm workers”.
On being arrested, “Poido declared that he did not recognize Soviet power since it was the power of the Antichrist, and he was struggling against Soviet power and would continue to struggle against it in the future”. He explained that he was struggling against it “by way of the defense” of the Orthodox Church and “the teaching of Christ”.
Fr. Chariton refused to answer most of the questions posed to him, but only admitted that “he taught Christians that peasants should not go into the collective farms, and should not believe in the teaching of Soviet power and should not submit to it”, and he considered “Soviet laws to be atheist, and not in
accordance with the spirit of Orthodoxy”.
On September 11 he was sentenced to death, and on September 17
he was shot in the prison in Yoshkar-Ola.