Varlaam (Riashentsev), Archbishop of Permʹ, was killed on this day in 1942. Viktor Riashentsev was born in 1878 in Tambov into a merchant family. He was educated at a classical gymnasium (studying Ancient Greek and Latin). In 1901, upon his graduation from Kazan Theological Academy, Anthony (Khrapovitskii), Bishop of Ufa, ordained the young monk a deacon and priest. In 1913, Archimandrite Varlaam was consecrated Bishop of Homel, Belarus. In 1922, for a short time, he joined the Renovationists. He was arrested a number of times. The Church remained the only organization in Soviet Russia “competing” with the intolerant Bolshevik “religion.” The Church as a whole received legal status only in 1991. Parishes could be registered (in theory), and the head office (Metropolitan Sergii Stragorodskii’s Synod) was registered, but the Russian Orthodox Church as a whole was not. The authorities constantly toyed with the promise of official registration. Representatives of the “official” church attempted to demonstrate that they were not enemies of the Soviet state. Such was the context for Metropolitan Sergii’s infamous “Declaration” of loyalty to the Soviet government. Metropolitan Sergii tried to normalize the status of the Church in the USSR. However, he was just a Deputy to the Patriarchal Locum Tenens, Metropolitan St. Peter of Krutitsa, who had been imprisoned since 1925. Metropolitan Sergii also did not have a mandate from the episcopate of the Russian Church to gather a Synod. Bishop Varlaam’s superior at this time was the Holy New Confessor Metropolitan St. Agafangel (Preobrazhenskii) of Yaroslavl, who did not agree with Metropolitan Sergii’s new ecclesiastical policy. The Metropolitan and his vicar protested by ceasing to commemorate the name of Metropolitan Sergii at liturgical services. However, they still commemorated the name of the canonical and universally recognized head of the Russian Church, Metropolitan Peter. In September 1929, Archbishop Varlaam was arrested under the pretext of anti-Soviet propaganda. From exile in Vologda, in the Russian North, he continued to minister to his spiritual children through written correspondence. Many of them were male and female monastics from closed monasteries, or clergy who were tempted to desert their ministry for secular employment. St. Varlaam instructed his spiritual children to withdraw from the godless Soviet reality as much as they could. This correspondence became a foundation for his next arrest. Saint Varlaam was accused of maintaining an anti-Soviet network throughout the country. 330 books confiscated at the arrest were destroyed along with his episcopal vestments and his letters. St. Varlaam passed away in 1942 in one of the prisoner camps in Vologda Region, while serving a 10-year prison term reduced from a death sentence. Archimandrite Damaskin (Orlovskii), an expert analyst of secret Soviet interrogation files, studied the minutes of Archbishop Varlaam’s interrogation and concluded that he had willingly signed a document with a list of names of his alleged “co-conspirators” against the Soviet authorities. In this way, he defamed himself and provided his persecutors with a list of names of new potential victims. This prevented him from being added to the list of New Martyrs by the Moscow Patriarchate, though he was canonized by the ROCOR in 1981. Source:
A.V. Mazyrin, M.V.Shkarovskii, “Varlaam,” Pravoslavnaia Entsiklopedia. Archimandrite Damaskin (Orlovskii), “Slozhnosti izucheniia sudebno-sledstvennykh del…” [Difficulties of Studying Court Trials and Investigation Files], Regional’nyi obshchestvennyi fond. Pam’iat’ novomuchenikov I ispovednikov Rossiskikh [Regional Public Fund dedicated to the memory of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia]. | 
