For Archimandrite Kirill (Pavlov, 1919–2017), elder and spiritual father of three Russian Patriarchs, a war veteran who fought at Stalingrad and throughout World War II, this time was difficult even to recall. “A terrible, huge war,” Father Kirill would say. By God’s mercy, he survived, turning to Orthodox faith during the war after finding a Gospel amid the ruins of a house in Stalingrad.
Meeting of Relatives in Makovo Below: Fr. Kirill’s sister Anna, Fr. Kirill, his elder brother Adrian, granddaughter Anastasia; above: Anna’s daughter Antonina and her husband Valery, between them the daughter of Fr. Kirill’s cousin Alexander.
The Pavlov family home in the village of Makovskie Vyselki, Ryazan Region—once thatched with straw—no longer stands; it burned down in 1957. In the 1980s, Father Kirill’s sister Anna Dmitrievna Pavlova, upon retiring, bought a small house near the church in neighboring Makovo, where she warmly welcomed all those who came to pray at the Church of the Nativity of the Mother of God.
As the spiritual father of the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra, Archimandrite Kirill visited this place each spring with his spiritual children, from Pascha to Ascension, when the gardens were in full bloom.
Memorial Service at the Cemetery in Makovo These memorial services at the Makovo cemetery gradually became a special form of communal prayer—joyful and reverent communication with God and one another, both the living and the departed. After prayer Fr. Kirill would bless the villagers and give them gifts, and they would all sit down for a meal and sing spiritual hymns—about the Mother of God, the Samaritan Woman, the stormy sea of life, and a mother’s prayer:
“If your mother is still alive, You are blessed, for on this earth There is someone who, with care and sorrow, Will pray for you.”
These words held special meaning for veterans who had experienced the power of a mother’s prayer during the war.
It was said that Praskovya Vasilievna, though not strong in health, made hundreds of prostrations daily for her son, the soldier Ivan Pavlov.
Elizaveta Fyodorovna Chuikova Elizaveta Fyodorovna Chuikova, the warden of the St. Nicholas Church and mother of Vasily Chuikov, commander of the 62nd Army, prayed in the village of Serebryanye Prudy, seventy kilometers from Makovo. After the war, all eight of her sons returned home alive and unharmed. Their mother’s handwritten prayer remained enshrined in the military ID of the celebrated general and hero of Stalingrad for the rest of his life.
This terrible war, in all its mercilessness, brought clarity to the worldview of the future spiritual father of the Lavra, Archimandrite Kirill (Pavlov).
A Time of Heroism and Betrayal
Father Kirill, like many veterans, was reluctant to talk about the war. The episode with the Gospel found in the ruins of Stalingrad was one of the few wartime memories he recounted in detail. Once he said, “Those who weren’t there know nothing. Sometimes it was worse than hell. To endure such things is extremely difficult…”
Archimandrite Kirill (Pavlov) with Archimandrite Alexy (Polykarpov). The elder recounts the war
For war is not only about great heroism—it is also about betrayal, collaboration with the Special Department, and attempts to escape the front lines to rear assignments. One constantly felt as if in encircled defense, without the comfort of a secure rear: “The enemy was right in front of you, but all the time new people would appear beside you, and you didn’t know them or trust them. That’s what was worse than hell.”
The future Archimandrite Kirill, then simply Ivan Pavlov, met the beginning of the war on the Manchurian border, in the village of Barabash, Khasan District, serving as a conscript in the 96th Engineer Battalion of the 92nd Rifle Division of the 1st Red Banner Army.
Autobiography of Ivan Pavlov
He was drafted into the army on September 14, 1939, by the Katav-Ivanovsky Military Commissariat of the Chelyabinsk Region. By autumn 1941, they were expecting demobilization. Dreams of civilian life vanished on June 22, the feast day of All Russian Saints, when news arrived of the war’s outbreak.
Fearing a Japanese attack—Japan had occupied Manchuria in 1931—the Soviet command reinforced its Far Eastern borders. “They brought us right to the Japanese border and ordered us to dig trenches, build dugouts, stockpile fuel and food,” Fr. Kirill recalled.
In September 1941, Soviet intelligence received information that the Japanese Emperor had decided to delay entering the war until at least early 1942. Dozens of divisions from the Far Eastern Front were urgently transferred to Moscow and Leningrad, where the situation had become critical.
Fr. Kirill recalled that on October 18, 1941, the order for redeployment came, and by November 1, their unit was already at Khvoynaya Station near Tikhvin.
“The terrain there was swamps and forests,” he said. “And I must say, the winter was very harsh, with early snow and severe frost. Since we arrived in summer uniforms, many suffered from frostbite.”
The Volkhov Front, where Ivan Pavlov was deployed, was being formed to break the siege of Leningrad.
Volkhov Front, 1941
According to Father Kirill’s memories, the impassable wet forests were filled with German bunkers and deadly minefield traps. The advance toward Leningrad from the Volkhov side stalled, and a large group of Soviet troops became encircled.
On April 24, 1942, during the battles near Volkhov, Ivan Pavlov was wounded in the leg by shrapnel and spent two and a half months in a military hospital in the village of Kai, Kirov Region, on the banks of the Kama River. This hospitalization likely saved his life. The elder recalled years later that after he was wounded, his battalion was sent to clear minefields—and most of his comrades never returned.
“Beyond the Volga, there is no land for us!”
After devastating defeats near Leningrad, in Crimea, and at Kharkov, the Soviet forces retreated toward the Don River. The summer of 1942 was dry and hot, with no rain for weeks. The smoke of burning wheat fields mingled with the stench of death.
The Wehrmacht was concentrating its forces in southern Russia, intending to destroy the Soviet troops in the Don region, capture Stalingrad, and begin the seizure of the oil-rich regions of the Caucasus. The Germans planned to sever the railway and road connections between the center of the country and the south, as well as to cut off the main water transport artery—the Volga. Along this river, the country received oil from the Caucasus and grain from the Kuban and Stavropol regions.
Thus began a battle that would be known as the largest of the Second World War in terms of scale, number of troops involved, and casualties. One could say that the outcome of the Battle of Stalingrad would determine the fate not only of Russia but of the entire world. Stalin issued Order No. 227, “Not a step back!”, which imposed punitive measures, including execution, for retreat without orders. The phrase “Beyond the Volga, there is no land for us!” became the stark and absolute reality for the defenders of Stalingrad.
After being discharged from the hospital, Ivan Pavlov made his way south—first to Nizhny Novgorod (then called Gorky), and then to Kamyshin, where new units were being formed to defend Stalingrad.
According to archival documents, at the beginning of the Battle of Stalingrad, Ivan Pavlov served in the 9th Motorized Rifle Brigade.
Military description of Ivan Pavlov Half a century later, in 1993, Archimandrite Kirill (Pavlov) would return to those lands as part of the delegation accompanying His Holiness Patriarch Alexy II for the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad. In the Volgograd television studio, Father Kirill recalled the early days of the battle on the Volga: “We were stationed in the defensive lines outside Stalingrad, about 20–25 kilometers from the city. On one Sunday in August 1942, around a thousand German bombers launched an air raid on the city. The sight was truly terrifying. The city was engulfed in flames, clouds of black smoke rose into the sky. We were pulled from the defense lines. It was during that time I was wounded…”
In 1942, the unimaginable happened: Having easily crossed thousands of kilometers of Russian territory, Hitler’s forces failed to conquer the final few dozen meters to the Volga. As war correspondent and writer Vasily Grossman noted, “A superstitious fear overtook the enemy. The wondered, were those soldiers attacking them truly human, were they even mortal?”
The countless mass graves on Mamayev Kurgan and throughout Volgograd are a solemn reminder that the Soviet soldiers were indeed mortal.
In 1942, the evacuation of civilians from the city was not completed in time, and thousands of Stalingrad residents perished during the bombing raids. Streams of burning oil and gasoline from destroyed fuel depots rushed toward the Volga. The surface of the river burned, steamships in the harbor blazed, and the scorched skeletons of ruined buildings billowed smoke into the sky.
Meanwhile, the forward units of Field Marshal Paulus’s 6th German Army, having crossed the Don River, advanced toward the Volga and the northern outskirts of Stalingrad. On August 23, they broke through to the river in the area of the villages of Erzovka and Rynok. From the south, General Hoth’s 4th Army was advancing, intending to link up with Paulus’s northern group and seize the bombed-out city.
The 9th Motorized Rifle Brigade, in which Ivan Pavlov served, received orders to counterattack the enemy and block the road at the northern approaches to Stalingrad near the village of Orlovka (in the Gorodishche district).
In one of his postwar interviews, Fr. Kirill recalled the details of a battle on the Volga’s bank near the approaches to Stalingrad: “We raised our heads just a bit, and German tanks and machine gunners were already seventy meters away—shooting. The feeling is indescribable. You just entrust yourself to the will of God. You lie there—the ground is sandy—and I could see bullets hitting the sand, the dust rising. Any bullet could strike you—and that would be it. Those who ran alongside me fell like sheaves. We ran along this ravine right on the riverbank.”
In September 1942, the defenders of Stalingrad were ordered to retreat into the city itself. From that point forward, global news reports would mention names that became synonymous with the battle—Mamayev Kurgan, the Red October Factory, the grain elevator, the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, the railway station (which changed hands thirteen times), January 9th Square, and Pavlov’s House.
In mid-September, after heavy losses, the 9th Motorized Rifle Brigade was withdrawn from the front line near the Red October Factory and Mamayev Kurgan for rest and reorganization.
By September 1942, the name of Ivan Pavlov had disappeared from the rosters of active combat units for nearly two months…
Personal File of Ivan Pavlov
Soldier Ivan Pavlov with his sisters Maria and Anna Tracking a soldier’s path during the war is no easy task—at times, the only documents proving his presence in a particular unit are payroll records.
Such documents, bearing the signature of Private Ivan Pavlov, were found in the archives of the 254th Tank Brigade, covering the period from November 1942 to December 1943. By that time, a massive grouping of German troops—over 330,000 men—had become encircled in the Stalingrad pocket. General Manstein’s tank divisions were advancing to assist the struggling army of Field Marshal Paulus.
The 254th Tank Brigade moved up from the south toward Stalingrad, making a sixty-kilometer forced march, and joined the 57th Army of the Stalingrad Front in the area near the “8th of March” collective farm. At the end of 1942, the brigade took up a position of “mobile defense” with the goal of preventing the Germans from breaking through to Stalingrad.
Fr. Kirill later recalled how they encircled Stalingrad and froze in snow-covered trenches:
“The snow was two meters deep. We dug in only about one meter, and that’s how we froze, wrapped in greatcoats—sometimes captured German ones. Food was delivered only at night, already cold and frozen. How did we survive?.. By a miracle of God!”
He spoke about how he would pray under the starry sky in those cold trenches—walking a short distance away and reciting the ‘Our Father’. This stirred no laughter or mockery—on the front lines, there are no atheists. Smoking or lighting fires was strictly forbidden. They were issued small rations of alcohol to keep warm, but Ivan would give his to his comrades. At night, German transport planes dropped supplies to their soldiers—some of which occasionally landed in Soviet trenches, causing great rejoicing among the troops.
In such superhuman conditions, they fought on—ignoring the toll on their lungs, which would remind them of their suffering only after the war. Some even longed to fall ill back then, just to rest in a hospital. But no illness came.
“You ran,” Fr. Kirill recalled, “your weapon heavy in your hands, jumping over wide ravines, ditches, and trenches. And you’d think—if only I could break or sprain something…”
Immediately after the end of the Battle of Stalingrad, on February 6, 1943, Ivan Pavlov was recommended for candidacy in the Communist Party for his combat merits.
“They selected five of us,” Father Kirill recounted, “saying we had helped win at Stalingrad, we were young and disciplined—the political officer vouched for us, and even wrote the request…”
The personal file of Communist Party candidate Ivan Dmitrievich Pavlov was later discovered in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense, after the death of Archimandrite Kirill (Pavlov) in the summer of 2019.
The Stalingrad Gospel
The liberated city of Stalingrad greeted Soviet soldiers with the skeletal remains of buildings and streets strewn with the bodies of the fallen. Fr. Kirill could never forget the eerie silence and the stench of death that made Stalingrad feel like a lifeless, terrifying place.
Liberated Stalingrad
Amid the ruins of a bombed-out house, Ivan Pavlov discovered a Gospel. He gathered its scattered pages and began to read, finding solace and spiritual revival.
This encounter with the Gospel in devastated Stalingrad became a pivotal moment in his life, awakening him to a new life in Christ. “It was April, and the sun was already warming everything,” Fr. Kirill recalled years later. “One day, among the ruins of a house, I picked up a book from the debris. I began to read it and felt something so dear and sweet to my soul. It was the Gospel! I found such a treasure, such comfort! I gathered all the pages together—the book was torn—and that Gospel stayed with me always. Before that, I was so confused: Why is the war happening? Why are we fighting? There was so much incomprehensible because the country was steeped in atheism and lies, and you couldn’t find the truth. But when I began to read the Gospel, my eyes were opened to everything around me, to all the events.”
Everyone who sought guidance from Father Kirill as the spiritual father of the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra heard his consistent advice: “Read the Gospel! You can’t imagine what a treasure will be revealed to you!” “The Gospel is given to us, brought from heaven—and it’s not just any word; it’s the Divine Word, and it teaches us only goodness, how to live here on earth, to avoid all sins, temptations, to rid ourselves of the passions, vices, sins, and lawlessness that torment us.”
Ivan Pavlov no longer doubted that this terrible war was allowed as a consequence of the people’s departure from God, the fall of morality, and the attempt to eradicate faith and the Church in Russia.
Lyubov Pyankova His assistant, Lyubov Pyankova, recounted his words: In the destroyed and lifeless Stalingrad, he made a vow—that if he returned alive, he would study to become a priest and serve God.
This desire was further solidified in Tambov, where his unit spent some time after the Battle of Stalingrad. Fr. Kirill recalled attending a service at the Church of John the Baptist in Tambov. The church was filled with people, who wept openly as they listened to the sermon of Fr. John, who later became Bishop Innocent of Kalinin. “It was a continuous wail... Of course, such a wail, the prayer of a simple believing soul, reached God!” Fr. Kirill recounted.
In September 1943, the famous meeting between Stalin and Metropolitans Sergius (Stragorodsky), Alexiy (Simansky), and Nicholas (Yarushevich) took place; a Patriarch was elected, churches and theological schools began to open, and pastors returned from prisons.
After this, “the situation at the front fundamentally changed,” the elder recalled. “Even [Marshal] George Zhukov notes this in his memoirs. He says that German generals, who had been making strategic plans at the beginning of the war, started making mistakes and blunders from 1943 onwards, so much so that it was astonishing. And it’s very simple: when the Lord wants to punish a person, He takes away his reason.”
Ivan the Confessor
However, Ivan Pavlov’s refusal to join the party in 1943 on religious grounds nearly cost him his life.
His candidacy period was ending, but his conscience wouldn’t allow him to take the final step—he kept postponing it.
In Pavlograd, Dnepropetrovsk region, the political officer finally confronted him: It was time to make the move from candidate to party member. In response, the 24-year-old Ivan, with deep faith and youthful fervor, confessed Christ and refused to become a communist.
“They began to torment me. There was a staff meeting, then a company meeting, a battalion meeting. Everywhere, they worked on me. I had a hard time...” The verdict was that the uncooperative soldier would go to the front lines as a machine gunner on a tank. Such positions rarely survived a second battle.
But the Lord protected His confessor. The leadership of a neighboring unit, where he was transferred as a clerk, intervened on Ivan Pavlov’s behalf.
Archival documents indicate that by the end of the war, Ivan Pavlov was a clerk at the headquarters of the 1513th self-propelled artillery regiment. In the orders and combat reports recorded in his handwriting are the kilometers of front-line roads: settlements in Ukraine, Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia.
Shortly before the end of the war, in March 1945, near Lake Balaton, the last major counteroffensive of the Wehrmacht’s tank army began. Even seasoned war veterans recalled these battles as heavy and bloody. After their conclusion, on the eve of Victory, Ivan Pavlov was awarded the Medal “For Courage.”
After the war, his regiment remained in Czechoslovakia for several months. It was here that Ivan first heard about Mount Athos.
The stories sounded like a fairy tale. There, on the Holy Mountain, amidst the unbearable blue of the Aegean Sea, stood monasteries like fortresses; there was a monastic brotherhood, undistracted from prayer by anything or anyone.
In post-war Europe, it was easy to disappear, to reach Athos. But if he were accused of desertion, his family would have to answer.
Ivan Pavlov completed his service in the autumn of 1945 with the rank of senior sergeant. In Moscow, leaving his soldier’s duffel bag at his sister’s communal apartment, he went to the Yelokhovsky Cathedral [of the Theophany] with the main question: Were there any theological schools in the Soviet Union where one could study to become a priest?
Archimandrite Kirill (Pavlov)
Having completed theological schools, seminary, and academy, Ivan, in monasticism Kirill (Pavlov), dedicated more than half a century to serving the monastery of St. Sergius—the Holy Trinity-Sergius Lavra.
As a special sign of God’s providence, his name day fell on June 22, the day the Great Patriotic War began. And the hero of Stalingrad was buried on February 23, 2017, on Defender of the Fatherland Day...
Based on the book, The Stalingrad Gospel of Archimandrite Kirill (Pavlov), STSL, 2021.
