On this Sunday, the holy Orthodox Russian Church celebrates the memory of the new martyrs and confessors of Russia.

It wasn’t long ago that you and I had to fear speaking out about these events, which happened in our country in the terrifying 1930s and ‘40s, when the blood of our fellow countrymen was spilled in our own territory, in the territory of Moscow, in the territory of the North, the South, the West and the East. Our countrymen were killed by their own brothers!

Christianity was persecuted over the course of nearly 70 years. In his days, Tertullian, a Christian apologist, said that the blood of the martyrs represent the seeds of Christianity. The past years of persecution tell us that there is a great number of martyrs and confessors from Russia, and today we are honoring them.

Martyrs are all saints, priesthood, monks and nuns, parishioners – they are all part of that joyful, bright God-blessed land that we are leading into the 21st century, thanks to their prayers. And if the blood of martyrs in the first few centuries became the seeds of Christianity, then the blood of the new martyrs of Russia is the breath and life of Christians in the 21st century. And each of us today remembers the events accompanying that terrifying and difficult, but also glorious and spiritual, epoch.

It may seem meaningless to grub in past memories and revive "phantoms of history". It's passed and thanks God that it passed!

But for those who investigate a period of repressions the whole issue is absolutely different. They realize that our past influences deeply our present.

Suppose we've discovered a mass murder and the respective burial place: after several days of bewailing, the remains are buried in some new place with a cross on top. What else should we do?

But some enthusiastic martyrologists appear, who diligently collect information on people that died as martyrs: their names, background and exact number.

In the U.S.S.R. it happened many times. Hundreds of thousands of people were executed by the Soviet Secret Police, better known as the NKVD, in the first 15 years after the Bolshevik revolution, and later between 1937 and 1941, not only in Russian territory but also in neighboring countries.

Historical and civil rights societies, historians and martyrologists frequently had to focus on recording the Soviet Union's totalitarian past, to promote the revelation of the truth about the historical past and immortalize the memory of the victims of political repressions. They reopened the NKVD archives, investigated secret papers and took the lid off the truth. It turns out that not only descendants of these martyrs need this job to be done so that they would know the fate of their ancestors. It is needed also to assist the formation of a public consciousness based on the values of democracy and law, to get rid of totalitarian patterns, and to firmly establish human rights in practical politics and in public life.

Data from archives and the fact that these execution-grounds really existed, all this cause lots of arguments and fighting among historians and politicians, as it happened at Kuropaty in Belarus and at Katyn Forest in Poland. But even after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in the early 1990s, the government continued to hide facts that are undesirable to be wide-known from its point of view. They tried their best to attach the blame for the persecutions and executions on other forces and they even destroyed material evidences found there.

Many people in the former U.S.S.R. realized that it is tremendously important to put the historical record straight, nations of the former U.S.S.R. need to know the reasons why brothers murdered brothers and not enemies. Why did executions continue without legitimate criminal investigations and Court decisions for fifteen years after the end of the Civil War? Why was the mass murder of nearly 700.000 persons possible just through the authoritarian decisions of communist leaders during the two years of the Great Terror? It is important not to confuse unpleasant facts of home policy with conflicts between different countries, in order to find out the historic truth.

We need to come to a correct and clear understanding of what really happened in those days: those who murdered martyrs - scientists, philosophers, poets and believers - were destined to death from the very beginning. 

We should realize where this kind of politics comes from, why such governmental system existed and why they created this age of terror and fear. If we get to know it one day, we will have a chance not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Thanks to many efforts of historians and associations we now have the "Book of the Memories of Victims of Political Repressions”. For the Russian Orthodox Church this is not only an opportunity to straighten the historical record and to discover the phenomenon of "new martyrs" and so to suggest them as examples for everyday life. Martyrs are not only the seeds of Christianity, they are also the best example of faith and coherence of life for younger generations: their example is what fits most the “pure hearts, sincere willingness to get to know the truth, the readiness for heroic deeds” that Patriarch Kirill asked for at Moscow State University last 25 January, 2010, the memorial day of the saint martyr Tatiana.