Biography
Father Vladimir Ambartsumov
Vladimir Ambartsumov was born into a Lutheran family in 1892 in Saratov, the capital of a Russian region settled by a German colony many decades before. He studied in Moscow at the Sts Peter and Paul Gymnasium, where he became keen on physics. In 1913 he applied to enter the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at the University of Berlin. In July 1914 he returned to Russia because of the war and applied to enter the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Moscow State University.
In Moscow he became a member of the Christian Students’ Group and converted to Baptism. In 1916 he married Valentina Alekseyeva, also a member of the group. When the civil war broke out, as a consequence of the Bolshevist coup d’état, Moscow was stricken by famine, so he moved with his family to Samara, where the economic situation was better than in the Russian capital.
In 1921 he was arrested and brought to Moscow, as many other believers were. He was released on condition that he did not leave the city. He continued to carry out his activities as coordinator and permanent manager of the Central Committee of Christian Students’ Groups in Russia until it was prohibited from operating in 1924. Meanwhile he worked as a physicist in a state institute, and was also secretary of the Engineering Department of the Union of Communal Service Workers in 1923-24.
At the beginning of 1926, influenced by the Priest Valentin Sventsitsky, he converted to Orthodoxy. On 4 December 1927 he became a deacon, and on the 11th he was ordained into the priesthood. Over the years 1931-1932, he was forced to practise his faith in secrecy, and celebrated Mass unofficially in private flats. On 5 April 1932 he was arrested and falsely accused of counterrevolutionary activity, an accusation fabricated by the NKVD (People’s Committee for Home Affairs).
On 7 July 1932 he was given a suspended sentence of 3 years’ internal exile to Western Siberia under articles 58/10 and 58/11 of the Russian Penal Code. He was released thanks to a petition from the Soviet Academy of Sciences where he was working at the time, but on 9 September 1937 he was arrested again. During the interrogations he was steadfast in his faith, denounced the godless authorities, and refused to give the names of his friends and acquaintances so that they would not be arrested. On 3 November 1937 he was sentenced by the NKVD to be shot to death. The sentence was carried out at the NKVD’s Butovo firing range on 5 November 1937.
On 20 August 2000, at the end of the Commemorative Council of the Priests of the Russian Orthodox Church, Priest Vladimir Ambartsumov was canonized in the Cathedral of New Russian Martyrs and Confessors.
Background
The Butovo Execution Range
In what is now a southern suburb of Moscow, a plot of ground was surrounded by barbed wire and a ditch was dug there: the place was called Butovo Shooting ground. The residents of the neighbourhood were told that the area was to be used for military exercises.
And there, from August 1937, they started to ‘fire’: 60 to 80 people were shot on a daily basis, but the peak was reached on February 28, 1938, when 562 people were shot to death. In its 15-years of ‘operations’, the execution ground saw the death of 21,000 people, many of whom were priests sentenced to death without trial between August 1937 and 1953, the year of Stalin’s death. Factory workers, nobles, professors, priests, communists, servicemen, peasants, actors, engineers, artists and disabled persons lie next to each other in the Butovo ditches. It really is a memorial sepulchre for all the victims of the Stalinist regime in Russia. After a while, the ground subsided and corpses started to surface. At this point, the place was surrounded with a three-meter fence, and the sunken ground was covered with rubbish. The residents of the area then worked there as guardians, not knowing that they were guarding a huge common grave. For a few rubles, they guarded the dump and did not let anybody go near it, just as they had been told to do. It simply looked like it was a special KGB place…
The documentary film Butovo tells of how this secret was discovered. Thanks to the concerns of the victims’ relatives and to perestroika, the KGB archives were opened to the public for some time (now they are once again sealed, and this is alarming), and the lists of the people shot at Butovo were made public. The gates of the shooting ground were opened to the victims’ relatives for the first time on June 7, 1993. In 1995, the foundations of a church were laid there. When in August 1997 excavations were carried out in a certain area of the shooting ground, the researchers found the corpses of more people who had been shot: none of them had yet been properly buried.
The main characters in the film are two Orthodox priests – a grandfather and his grandson. The former, Vladimir Ambartsumov, was killed because he had studied in Berlin and was a member of an international movement of Christian students. He was already a priest in the years of persecution, and he had built up a community of persecuted people. On the other hand, the grandson, Father Kirill, is now the minister of the Cathedral of New Martyrs, which was built on the shooting ground by the deceased’s descendants. In the icon of the Cathedral of New Russian Martyrs and Confessors, the Butovo shooting ground is portrayed as a brand of infamy, and an image of Father Vladimir Ambartsumov stands out among the saints. The Orthodox church has so far added 140 religious ministers who died at Butovo to the count of the new martyrs.
The other people involved in this film are mainly relatives of the victims of repression; they avoid stepping on the bare ground and only walk on the paths, because the whole ground covers human remains. Atrocious murders took place there, but Butovo also was the scene of many heroic acts. That is why the following words from St. Matthew’s Gospel were chosen as a subtitle for the film: “He that endureth to the end shall be saved”.
Did you know...
The Great Terror
... that the great communist terror has almost become a trivial matter, being at first concealed and then deceitfully presented as a minor event in comparison to Nazis’ concentration camps: so much so that it has often been perceived as a trifling part of past history. Anyhow, it is possible to think so only if you disregard the common graves where skeletons, bones, shoes reduced to dust and heaped rubbish can be seen. And, most importantly, if your relatives are not among these poor remains.
As soon as the Bolshevists rose to power, they started a ruthless campaign of arrests and repressions. While explaining the principles upon which the trials were based, one of the heads of the agencies of repression said: ‘When you conduct your investigation, do not look for any kind of evidence that the defendants acted or spoke against the Soviets. The first question you need to ask them is what their social class is, what background they have and what kind of education they received… These are the elements that will decide the defendant’s fate’. In the 1920s, executions by shooting took place all over Moscow: in prison basements, in monasteries which had been turned into jails, in churches (in recent years, evidence of these reprisals have been discovered during reconstruct and restoration work), in courtyards, in parks, in almost every town graveyard and even in the Kremlin, with trucks rumbling in the background.
The atheist authorities were convinced that by May 1, 1937 ‘all Russians will have completely forgotten the name of God’. However, the census of that year showed that more than half of the people thought of themselves as believers. A new and even crueller drive against religion was then undertaken: Stalin got rid of his real or alleged adversaries one by one, along with potential opponents of the regime, such as true believers. According to reports from the Ministry of State Security, 688,000 people were executed by shooting between 1937 and 1938.
It was not only Orthodox clergy who were purged, but all religious and lay ministers who lived in the observance of the faith: Catholics, Lutherans, Jewish, Muslims, followers of the ‘Old Believers’; everyone whose reason for living was beyond the control of Soviet power. As it was impossible to control their minds, they were automatically charged with the accusation of anti-Soviet unrest and counter-revolutionary acts. According to Article 58/10 of the USSR Penal Code, the appropriate measure to protect society was execution by shooting. In that dark year of 1937, 8,000 religious buildings were shut down and 70 dioceses were dissolved.