Archimandrite Zosima (Gorshunov) is one of the oldest clerics of the Diocese of Tobolsk and Tyumen. His Church ministry and missionary work began back in the 1980s. He’s the abbot of Holy Trinity Monastery in Tyumen and confessor for the diocese and the Tyumen Spiritual College.
Archimandrite Zosima (Gorshunov)
Coming to Faith
I was born in the city of Omsk. In this huge city of millions, there were only two churches. I was baptized in the Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross when I was about five. Then came a period where I was disconnected from the faith. My parents didn’t teach me much about it, although my mother and grandmother were believers. My mother was named Ludmila Alexeyevna and my grandmother was Platonida Nikolaevna. They went to church and kept the fasts. I remember when I was about ten, they took me to church for Holy Communion for the first time. In those Soviet times, it was risky for them and took courage. But I didn’t understand anything then.
The second time I communed was ten years later, when I consciously came to the faith after serving in the army. We had the New Testament at home. I started reading the Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul. I was particularly influenced by his words about the good news of Christ and the last times. I thought hard about what I had read, accepted it as truth, and believed.
It’s very important to plant the seed of faith in the soul of a child or an adult, which will surely grow under favorable conditions and find a lively response in their heart. It often happens that the words of the Gospel don’t immediately bear fruit, but gradually ripen in the soul, going unnoticed until a certain time. That’s what happened with me.
Path to the Priesthood
I saw that the Church didn’t have enough clerics, and I decided to become a priest. A deacon I know suggested that I go to seminary, and I agreed. I realized that it was impossible to serve the Church well without an education. If you want to serve the Church, that means you have to be educated. And yet, I hadn’t spent a single day on the kliros and I couldn’t do Church reading or singing.
Bishop Maxim (Krokha) of Omsk and Tyumen blessed me, so I entered seminary in 1977. There were only three seminaries in Russia then: in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Odessa. I went to the Moscow Theological Seminary.
Surprisingly, the year I started was the first since the 1940s that the Soviet government and Committee for Religious Affairs allowed the seminary to have three parallel classes. Before that, they would take only thirty people per year in one class. What does it mean for the Church when there’s an acute shortage of clergy? When I enrolled, it was the first time they allowed them to take ninety people at the same time. They enrolled 120 altogether, because some were immediately enrolled in the second class and some in the third. It’s also amazing that everyone who came to enroll was accepted. No one was sent home. Such was the shortage of clergy then. From that time on, they began admitting students this way every year, and gradually the seminary grew first to 500, and then to 1,000 people.
After finishing seminary, I returned to Tyumen, and Vladyka Maxim ordained me as a hierodeacon and then a hieromonk. At first, I served as rector of the Church of All Saints in Tyumen, then I was transferred to Tobolsk.
Spiritual Succession
Even before all my missionary trips, I had the chance to see Fr. Partheny (Nevmerzhitsky), who was probably the last priest in Yugra in the 1960s. After his imprisonment, he was in exile and served in the church in the village of Shapsha near Khanty-Mansiysk and visited believers there. He wanted to open a church there, but they wouldn’t let him. After his departure, Church life here faded away until the 1990s.
Sometime in 1985, he visited Vladyka Maxim in Omsk. He was already quite old then; his hands were shaking. And I was serving in the city of Tara then, and I also wound up in Omsk. We served Liturgy together. It’s a pity we didn’t have much time to chat. He then left for Ukraine and reposed there somewhere. He lived to be ninety.
It turns out we have a historical spiritual succession between us. Back then I never thought or imagined that I would end up in Khanty-Mansiysk, preaching and serving there. But the Lord brought me together with the one who labored there before me.
Siberian Mission
The millennium of the Baptism of Rus’, which was celebrated in 1988, opened up opportunities for us to carry out an Orthodox mission outside Tobolsk. At that time, Tobolsk was the last Siberian city where Orthodox churches were still open. Further north was a spiritual desert without a single church. Nefteyugansk, Surgut, Khanty-Mansiysk, Noyabrsk, Kogalym, Nizhnevartovsk, Salekhard, and other cities were left without spiritual care. In the Far North, Orthodox Zyryans baptized infants themselves, naming them after saints. They would be chrismated later when they had a chance to get to a church or when a priest would visit. Some ended their journey without Chrismation.
Archbishop Theodosy (Protsyuk), who replaced Vladyka Maxim in 1986, blessed to open parishes in the northern lands. We opened the first parish in Kondinsky, which, as I recall, we reached on an An-2 propeller plane.
To open new parishes in the North, we first had to find local believers, so that’s what we did. In Tobolsk, in the St. Sophia-Dormition Cathedral, they would ask pilgrims where they came from. If they named a city or village where there was no church yet, they would offer to help them organize a parish. We agreed on how and when we’d visit them. Thus, thanks to active and caring believers, new parishes were born and new churches were built.
Our mini-missionary squad usually consisted of a priest and a singer. That was quite enough. Everything else was done by the community. On my trips, I was usually accompanied by the psalmist Aquilina Evgenievna Esnyatskaya, my right hand in everything.
She used to fly to different cities where there was no priest to organize parishes, sometimes even without an address or knowing who to turn to, relying only on the will of God. That’s what happened, for example, in Nizhnevartovsk. We had an address for when we flew to Salekhard, because Anastasia Chemodanova, a parishioner of the parish in Uvat, gave us her daughter’s address there. We arrived there and immediately organized a community.
Later, the priests were also accompanied by pupils of the Tobolsk Theological Seminary as chanters and altar servers. In the summer, the seminary became a kind of base for missionary practice. The seminarians studied throughout the year, and in the summer, they went to preach with their teachers. A schedule was drawn up for all the teachers and students for who should go where, when, and with whom. One of these missionary seminarians was the future first official rector of the Znamenny Church, Fr. Sergei Kravtsov.
Fr. Sergei Kravtsov with Sisters of Mercy
In 1989, we made our first missionary trip, to Salekhard, Gornopravdinsk, Kondinsk, and the nearby villages of Pershino, Demyanskoe, Turtas, and others. We didn’t manage to get to Kogalym. While in Nefteyugansk, we bought a small house and organized the first community there. In 1990, Fr. (now Archpriest) Nikolai Matviychuk was appointed rector there. A community had already existed in Surgut since 1987. Vladyka Theodosy sent Archpriest Viktor Reisch there as rector.
Usually, upon arrival in a certain place, we’d make an announcement on the radio that we’d be celebrating Baptism, Confession, Communion at this place and time, and that you could invite a priest to your home for Unction.
After seventy years of spiritual starvation, people poured into the Church. Everyone wanted to be baptized then. There was a massive demand for the Orthodox faith. I remember, as soon as we’d arrive in some remote village, explain to the village council who we were and why we’d come, and make an announcement, all the people would come running right away. It was amazing.
It’s not like that anymore, unfortunately. Times are different now. The acuteness of spiritual hunger is gone. Churches have appeared in places, priests come frequently. It’s become ordinary for people: a church and another church, someone came and someone else came.
My base was in Uvat, because I was the acting rector there. There was an airport there, from where we flew to Kondinsk, Gornopravdinsk, and Khanty-Mansiysk. We flew from Tyumen to Salekhard on a Yak-40. In the summer, we went by water, on a hydrofoil, and would stop in Berezovo.
We went to every parish about once a month or every two months. It all depended on the seasonal conditions. We could go more often in summer, but less in winter. We were constantly on the move. This continued until about 1993, when I was transferred to the seminary, where I started teaching liturgics and moral theology. Until 1995, I also remained the rector of the Uvat church and continued going around to different churches, but less so.
Overall, from 1989, with God’s help, we managed to open eleven parishes.
Those were the first years of the development of the Tobolsk-Tyumen Diocese. There were few seminary graduates and there weren’t enough priests, but there were many places to serve. At that time, which many call the Church revival in Russia, on the one hand, parishes were opening en masse, while on the other hand there were very few priests. Priests often had to serve several parishes.
That’s how it was for me. Officially, I was rector of the church in Uvat and temporarily attached to the other parishes that I pastored. Besides actual spiritual nourishment, I also had to deal with the issue of obtaining legal status, resolve economic issues, and oversee the construction of churches.
Fellow Preachers
Besides me, there was Igumen Vasily (Donets) working in the missionary field. He came with a whole group. They gave him a boat and he traveled the whole summer. That was probably 1994 or 1995. I don’t remember exactly. He went around to all the settlements from Tobolsk to Salekhard, and also to Khanty-Mansiysk. It was a herculean task. He even made it to Labytnangi. He baptized 300 people there in one go.
Fr. Alexei Sidorenko also visited the Siberian parishes, by motorboat or hydrofoil, which goes all day from Tobolsk to Khanty-Mansiysk. Then, after spending the night, you could get to Berezovo. And from there, after spending another night, you could get to Salekhard. So you could get there in three stages.
We also traveled by train—to Nefteyugansk, Surgut, Nizhnevartovsk and further on to Noyabrsk, Novy Urengoy, and from there all the way to Yamal.
Protestants
At the same time, some American Protestants also began preaching in Siberia. In 1992, a ship carrying nearly 120 Protestant preachers came down the Siberian rivers. I read that about $40 million had been allocated for this mission work. A Baptist center, their main prayer house, was organized in Tobolsk. The Protestants went to all the villages, including Uvat, Demyanka, Gornopravdinsk, Khanty-Mansiysk, Salekhard, and even Aksarka in Yamal. They preached everywhere, distributed the New Testament, and organized their own communities. Then they went back by boat. This was basically the beginning of Protestantism in Siberia.
Then other preaches from the U.S., Canada, and other Western countries made their own private visits.
I remember one time a preacher came to Uvat and gave out light-blue hardcover Gospel book to everyone he met. Many took it and then immediately tore it up and threw it away. They were wild people. I had to go around and collect them then—I gathered seven or eight altogether.
To be continued…
