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| St. Arcadius with his matushka Anastasia and daughters Maria (the future catacomb Nun) and Olga |
Archpriest Arcadius Ivanovich Volokitin was born on February 14, 1887 in the village of Bogorodskoye, Ufa province. He was made a priest in 1914. Fr. Arcadius was a man of strong character, a natural leader. His parishioners trusted him implicitly. He chose his words carefully, and did not like empty phrases.
In 1913 or 14, the future Martyr married Matushka Anastasia Konstantinovna. They had six children. The elder daughter, Maria Arkadievna, became a Catacomb nun. The younger, Zoya Arkadievna, was told the details of her father’s death only in 1994! His son, Ivan Arkadievich, who was only two when his father was shot, has left us his memoirs of his father. Three of his children died when young, the third, Fedya, from cholera.
In the 1920s he served in the village of Suneyevo, and then, from 1927, in the city of Birsk, where he had a prayer house in which the services were conducted without haste and in strict accordance with the typicon, with no abbreviations. Next to the prayer house a kind of work house for the poor and
the sick was built. He actively opposed the renovationist schismatics, and in 1927 joined the Andrewite “non-commemorators”.
Fr. Arcadius’ younger brother Fr. Dimitry was also a catacomb priest.
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| St. Arcadius with his younger brother, the future catacomb priest Fr. Dimitry (in 1903) |
In the 1920s Fr. Arcadius was condemned four times for “counter-revolutionary activity”. In 1927 he was arrested in Birsk for conducting religious propaganda among juveniles. To the amazement of the court, the juveniles defended their pastor, and so, on January 28, 1928 he was sentenced to the comparatively light sentence of 11 months’ hard labor in Bashkiria.
However, on February 2 he was again arrested and cast into prison in Kazan. On March 30, 1928 he was condemned to three years’ exile in Kazan in accordance with article 58-10 (anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation). From the summer of 1930 he lived in Kazan. In Kazan Fr. Arcadius and other exiled clergy from Ufa entered into communion with Bishop Nektary. Like him, Fr. Arcadius
constructed a secret church in the house in which he lived and conducted regular services there. Many Chuvash who did not recognize the declaration of Metropolitan Sergius came to him, and he gave them the address of Archbishop Andrew in Central Asia, who in turn blessed Bishop Benjamin to
ordain a priest for the Chuvash – Fr. Gury (Pavlov).
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| St. Andrew of Ufa (left), St. Nektary of Yaransk (center), and Archimandrite Gury Pavlov (right) |
On August 30 or 31, 1930 Fr. Arcadius was arrested and cast into prison in Kazan. He was accused, together with Bishop Nectary and Nuns E.A. Antipina, O.M. Antipina and A.F. Solovieva, of being “a participant in a counter-revolutionary organization, a branch of ‘The True Orthodox Church’
in Kazan”, of “convening in his flat meetings of an anti-Soviet nature”. The accused “gathering around themselves counter-revolutionary church people and forming a filial of the ‘All-Union Centre of the Church-monarchist organization “The True Orthodox Church”, and acting in accordance with its principles on the territory of the Tatar republic, the Mari region, the Votkinsk region and the former Vyatka province, with the aim of overthrowing Soviet power”.
On the same day an interrogation took place at which Fr. Arcadius conducted himself very calmly and independently. He said that he had had prayer services in his house without the permission of the OGPU, emphasizing that he had never intended to ask permission since he did not consider it necessary. In conclusion he declared that “he refuses to name the surnames of the believers who visited his house, since he is not intending to betray anyone”. In his interrogation on September 2 he declared: "In my home I arrange prayer services, the worshipers are citizens of Kazan. I refuse to
say who they are and how many they are, I do not want to give them away... In general, I have no intention of telling the authorities about the worshipers who visit me. I do not have permission to perform Divine services and do not consider it necessary to let the NKVD know and seek permission from them. Only about three to four worshipers come to me." Fr. Arcadius said that since the death of Patriarch Tikhon he had submitted to Metropolitan Peter, although he considered Metropolitan Cyril to be the lawful heir of the patriarchal throne.
The accused, meaning those who were arrested with Fr. Arcadius, in general said very little. However, false witnesses and traitors affirmed that in 1928 there had appeared two representatives of the anti-sergianist tendency in Kazan: the exiled bishop Nektary (Trezvinsky) and the priest of the “Andrewite” fraction Arcadius Volokitin, who had created their own church communities, which had then united into an anti-Soviet and anti-sergianist bloc. They accused the two confessors of reading appeals after services and distributing them in neighboring republics, and much else.
The accused (Fr. Arcadius and others) languished in prison for a year and a half. Then on January 5, 1932 he and Nun Angelina were sentenced to three years in the camps in accordance with articles 58-10 and 58-11. This was “The Case of the Members of the Kazan Branch of the ‘True Orthodox Church’, Kazan, 1932”.
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| St. Arcadius |
After his release Fr. Arcadius lived in Bashkiria. He never talked about his sufferings in prison and the camps. When his daughter Olga asked him whether the investigators beat him, he said, quietly and with conviction: “It is not necessary to ask about that.” However, one of his fellow-prisoners
witnessed that when they were together in the Bear Mountain camp, he saw how Fr. Arcadius cried out during a particularly severe frost: “O Lord, warm me or take my soul!”
On July 23, 1937 Fr. Arcadius was arrested in Birsk for anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation. On October 15, 1937 he was condemned to be shot with confiscation of his property by a troika of the NKVD of the Bashkirian republic. On November 15, 1937 the sentence was carried out in Ufa. He was buried in the Sergievsky cemetery in Ufa.
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Fr. Arcadius’ matushka, Anastasia Konstantinovna, was born in 1896 in the village of Vozdvizhenka, Belebeyevsky uyezd, into a clerical family. In the 1910s she studied in the Ufa diocesan women’s school, and married (the future Father) Arcadius in 1913 or 1914.
She was arrested on August 30, 1930 in Birsk and cast into prison in Kazan, where her husband was. On December 3, 1930 she was sentenced in accordance with articles 58-2 and 19-13 to three years
administrative exile in “The Case of Bishop Benjamin (Troitsky) and others, Ufa, 1930”. She was accused, among other things, of “collecting material things to support the political exiles Arcadius Volokitin and Bishop Andrew (Ukhtomsky)”. She was sent to Kazan, where her husband was living in exile. In 1931 she was arrested again, and sentenced in accordance with article 58-10 to work on the Moscow canal. In 1935 she went to live in Birsk with her husband, who had returned from prison. On April 21, 1938 she was arrested and cast into prison in Birsk. On May 22, 1939 she was convicted of being “the wife of the organizer of ‘the black band’ of counter-revolutionary popes”.
However, the case was shelved and she was released. She died in 1983.