Archpriest Vsevolod Drobot was born on this day in 1930. When I think about all what is wrong with the Russian Church Abroad, I think about Fr. Vsevolod’s lifestory. He was born in Kharkov in 1930. Therefore, he was two when Holodomor struck. His mother was a doctor and I believe that helped him to survive. During World War Two Kharkov was taken by Germans in 1941 and then twice “changed hands” during the war. Kharkov, the capital of Ukraine from 1920 to 1934, was significantly developed before the war and impressed Germans by modern buildings and spacious squares. At the same time Germans, although National-Socialists, became cultural messengers form the European world for the local population, which has been “locked up” within the Soviet system. Fr. Vsevolod’s mother was recruited by Germans and in 1943 with their retreat his family left the USSR finding itself in Italy with Cossacks. There Vsevolod and his brother George met the ROCOR Archimandrite Simeon (Narbekov), a graduate of Moscow Theological Academy, who from 1916 to 1963 was the rector of the parish in Rome. From Italy George Drobot went to St. Serge Theological Institute in Paris and became a founder of the prominent family within the Russian Exarchate of the Ecumenical Patriarchate (since 2018 under the Moscow Patriarchate). Vsevold with his family went to Argentina. He married there and in 1958 came to Jordanville, to study at Holy Trinity Seminary. In 1961 Fr. Vsevolod was ordained a priest and assigned to the church of Nativity of Most Holy Theotokos in the capital of New York State, Albany. For decades he became an "unmercenary" priest to his parishoners. Fr. Vsevolod was well respected by fellow priests and some of them went to him for confession. Now, I will explain what I meant in the very first sentence of this report. In 2015 Matushka Nadezhda passed away and Fr. Vsevolod came to live in Folts Care Center in Herkimer New York. There I visited him, and Fr. Vsevolod was telling me about his life before, during, and right after World War Two. His room did not have any possessions, just photos of the beloved ones and a prayerbook. Fr. Vsevolod was spending his days sitting in a hall surrounded by other residents of very different cultural background and sometimes not quite sane. Fr. Vsevolod knocked himself out, serving his parish, working two jobs to bring up his seven children. Under his rectorship the church in the Metropolitan area erected a new building. However when Fr. Vsevolod reached “the end of the rope,” neither parish nor diocese could help and he ended up in what I called an American GULAG. If before and right after World War Two it was explainable why our clergy did not have pensions and why we do not have much else going on beside liturgical life, I cannot find good explanations now why there is nothing happening to improve the conditions of our clergy and to address various issues that families of church people often deal with one on one. | 
