The name Pravdoliubov, now well known in the Church for the holy martyrs, confessors, and respected priests who bear it, means “lover of truth.” On this day, August 10/23, the Russian Orthodox Church celebrates the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors who suffered in the infamous Solovki Prison Camp. Archpriest Sergiy Pravdoliubov was one of those who bore the cross of confession of the faith on that cold archipelago in the White Sea—an ancient monastery turned into the first camp of the Soviet Gulag.
The Holy Confessor Archpriest Sergiy Pravdoliubov was born in 1890 in the village of Makkaveyevo in Ryazan Province to the family of Anatoly Pravdoliubov, a teacher at the Kasimov Theological School (later Archpriest of the Dormition Church in Kasimov and a Holy Martyr). The Pravdoliubov family had been a clerical family since the mid-seventeenth century. Sergiy Pravdoliubov graduated from the Ryazan Theological Seminary and the Kyiv Theological Academy, married, and in 1915 was ordained as a priest at the Church of the Savior in the village of Kukarka in Vyatka Province (later the town of Sovetsk). In 1919, he was appointed rector of the Trinity Cathedral in Kukarka. Here, he immediately faced a severe trial. A punitive detachment of Latvian riflemen came to the town, conducting a night raid, arresting and executing the town’s most influential people on the spot. They approached the Trinity Cathedral, woke the watchman, and demanded to know where the “head priest” lived. The watchman pointed not to the house of Fr. Sergiy, the dean and rector of the cathedral, but to the house of the former rector, an elderly priest who was retired but whom the watchman, out of long habit, still considered the “head priest.” The old priest was awakened, taken out of his house, and shot on the spot. Fr. Sergiy always remembered this incident and constantly prayed for the old priest who was executed in his place.
Later that same year, Fr. Sergiy narrowly escaped death once again. All the priests in the town of Kasimov, including Fr. Sergiy, were arrested, taken to a forest, and ordered to dig a large trench near the railroad tracks. The clergy were convinced they were digging their own graves. They wept and prayed. Then a freight train arrived, and the officer in charge shouted, “You priests should be used to the stench of corpses! We've brought you here to unload and bury four train cars of rotten fish. After that, at my command, you can go free.” While Father Sergiy was digging the trench, thinking he was digging his own grave, his infant son Vladimir died.
In 1923, Fr. Sergiy, along with his family (his wife and five children), moved back to his hometown of Kasimov, where he was appointed rector of the Holy Trinity Church. In 1929, he was arrested along with many other clergymen from the city and region and sentenced to two years of imprisonment. His parishioners did not abandon him and constantly petitioned for his release, and by Pascha of 1930, Fr. Sergiy was freed. His next arrest came in 1935, along with his brother, Priest Nikolai Pravdoliubov, and Father Sergiy's son, Anatoly. They were arrested as part of the “Matrona of Anemnyaseva Case.” He was sentenced to five years of imprisonment and was sent along with his son to the Solovki Special Purpose Camp. Two years later he was transferred to the Medvezhyegorsk Camp in Karelia.
Father Sergiy was released in 1943 and returned to Kasimov, but the Holy Trinity Church was closed, and there were no other positions available for priests. Fr. Sergiy and his family survived on occasional religious services and temporary duties in various churches when the regular priests were ill. His wife, Lydia Dmitrievna, worked to help support the family. In December 1943, Archpriest Sergiy Pravdoliubov was mobilized to the labor front in the stone quarries in the village of Maleevo in the Ryazan region. For three years, he worked there as a watchman. These quarries, used for extracting white stone, had previously been a place of labor for prisoners.
Fr. Sergiy's health was broken, and he had been separated from his loved ones for a long time. In 1944, he wrote a spiritual testament entitled, “To My Children and Grandchildren: On How to Observe Fasts and Prepare for Confession and Communion of the Holy Mysteries of Christ.”
In 1946, Fr. Sergiy was appointed rector of the Church of the Savior in the town of Spassk in the Ryazan region. The following year, his son Anatoly was ordained a deacon in this church, soon becoming a priest and its new rector, while his father moved to live in the village of Lebedyan, where he served in the local church until the end of his days. Archpriest Sergiy Pravdoliubov departed to the Lord in 1950 at the age of sixty. He was buried in Kasimov, at the Holy Trinity Church.
