Venerable Potapy Emelianov

Potapy Emelianov Потапий Емельянов (c. 1889, Ufa Governorate, Russian Empire – 14 August 1936, Nadvoitsy, Segezhsky District, Karelian ASSR, USSR) was a Russian clergyman and Eastern Catholic martyr under Stalinism. Pyotr Emelianov was born and raised in a family of Priestless Old Believers, who were received by Bishop Antony Khrapovitsky. As a special protege of Khrapovitsky, Emelianov followed him, first to Volhynia and then to Kharkiv. Emelianov eventually became a monastic priest, or Hieromonk, of the Pochaiv Lavra, and took the monastic name of Potapy. Following the Russian Revolution, Emelianov was received by Exarch Leonid Feodorov into the Russian Greek Catholic Church and communion with the Holy See along with his entire Old Ritualist parish, which was located at Nizhnaya Bogdanovka, near Kadiivka in the Luhansk Oblast of modern Ukraine, in 1918. He was subjected three times to flogging at the insistence of local Orthodox priests, arrested repeatedly by the armies of multiple political factions during the Russian Civil War, and, after having refused to renounce his "Jesuit politics", narrowly escaped summary execution by General Anton Denikin's anti-communist White Army. After subsequently being released when Starobielsk was captured by the Red Guards, Fr. Potapy returned immediately to his parishioners and wrote in a letter to a fellow priest, "Do not worry that they persecute and torment us; we stand firmly upon the Rock of Peter." During the subsequent Soviet anti-religious campaign, Emelianov was arrested by the Soviet secret police for his religious beliefs and ministry. He was declared guilty of espionage, based on having gathered and shared information about local religious persecution with his superiors, who had then shared it with the western news media, and "bribing peasants to convert to Catholicism", based on his previous role in helping to distribute food and medical supplies sent by Fr Edmund A.