Florensky was on the closest terms with Father Fyodor Andreyev and supported his position as head of the Josephites. By coincidence, shortly after Andreyev’s release, Florensky was arrested in May 1928. The accusations levied at him concerned alleged association with monarchists and former aristocrats, who like him lived in the city of Sergiev Posad north of Moscow. On 14 July, Father Pavel was sentenced to exile in Nizhny Novgorod. He was released after two months, largely due to the intervention of the philanthropist and human rights activist, Yekaterina Pavlovna Peshkova.
Peshkova enjoyed a unique position, winning the trust of both prisoners and the security organs. Aged twenty she had married the writer Maxim Gorky. They separated five years later; nevertheless they maintained friendly relations throughout their lives. A fearless woman, Peshkova dedicated her life to alleviating the lot of political prisoners, under whatever regime they were held. In 1918 she joined the Red Cross, and in 1922 became chairwoman of the organization ‘Help to Political Prisoners’ known by the acronym ‘PomPolit’, the only organization of its kind in the Soviet Union. PomPolit survived until 1937 – probably due to Peshkova’s personal friendship with Lenin. Through its services, sentences could be reduced or commuted, and prisoners were allowed to receive food parcels and letters.
Shortly after Florensky was freed, Father Fyodor Andreyev was arrested for a second time. He was held in solitary confinement for two months, where the awful conditions exacerbated his terminal illness – tuberculosis of the throat. He was released in December 1928 on compassionate grounds through the intervention of family, friends (Yudina included) and the tireless Peshkova. Father Fyodor was an immensely popular figure, and his death on 23 May 1929 at the relatively young age of forty-two elicited immense sorrow. At his funeral, crowds turned out in an unprecedented demonstration of support, carrying his coffin from the Church on Spilled Blood along Nevsky Prospekt to the Nikolsky cemetery. When the police tried to block the path of the mourners, the procession simply turned down smaller side streets. Not since Dostoevsky’s funeral had such crowds turned out to pay their respects.
Yudina’s close circle of friends was largely drawn from the Josephites, who like her also frequented the Voskreseniye circle. Amongst them was Boris Filippov, who had come to Petrograd in 1923 as ‘a young man full of confused ideas’ – a convinced Marxist, a follower of Kant, and a dedicated reader of Dostoevsky. When his uncle took him to a service at the Church on Spilled Blood he became aware of Russia’s tragic past, abandoned his position as an atheist, and joined the Brotherhood of Seraphim Sarovsky. It was in this church that Filippov first caught sight of Yudina prostrating herself, as she bowed low to the ground beside the canopy marking the place of Alexander II’s murder. He noted ‘her darned shoes with holes in the soles, an unusual sight in the years of NEP, which had brought relative well-being’.58 Within a couple of years he got to know Yudina personally through common acquaintances, including Ivan Mikhailovich Andreyevsky, the founder of the Seraphim Sarovsky religious circle. Andreyevsky’s wife, Yelena Sosnovskaya would become a close friend of Yudina’s.
Filippov recalled the heady discussions and arguments revolving around the meaning of faith. ‘No, Boris,’ Andreyevsky muttered in his nervous, rapid patter, energetically gesticulating with his thin hands, ‘Good deeds turn to ashes. They will not save a Christian, for he is rewarded in this world [. . .] The only thing to save us is Faith in God, only and exclusively Faith! You will not be asked at the Last Judgement how you lived and sinned, but how you believed, and how strong was your belief!’ Andreyevsky had just been released from the Solovetsky and Svirsky camps, and from 1927 lived in exile, while secretly visiting ‘Piter’.* ‘No, Ivan Mikhailovich,’ Yudina retorted, ‘it has been said that Faith is measured by deeds.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ interpolated Andreyevsky, ‘but those deeds connected to Faith. Morals and charitable acts have nothing to do with Faith. Only Protestants use a codex of morals, and nothing more.’ Shura Makarova, an old-believer and self-immolator in the past, and now a fervid Josephite, entered the discussion. ‘Ivan, in the official old Orthodoxy the only thing that was demanded was the Act of Faith.’59
For Yudina, living by her faith nevertheless presupposed the obligation to help others. Filippov recalled how:
. . . she somehow managed to travel to the camps and places of exile of the disgraced Josephite bishops, bringing messages and instructions from them to their priests and congregations. In all this Maria Veniaminovna was troubled, almost embarrassed: ‘Whom do they take me for? Almost all my acquaintances and friends have been arrested at least once, many of them are in the camps [. . .] I haven’t even been called up by the GPU!’ ‘That’s nothing to be sad about, Mashenka,’ we laughed. My mother really loved Yudina and added, ‘Be glad of your good fortune.’60
As Filippov observed, it was hard to believe that a person in those times could be so completely and openly devoted to God’s laws and heedless of the material things of life:
When Maria Veniaminovna came out of the Church on Spilled Blood – and as a rule she never missed a service – she was hemmed in by a crowd of beggars. And without even glancing around her, she gave to left and right the whole contents of her pockets. I remember a lanky beggar, a typical vagrant imposter of old times, who come winter or summer went barefoot, dressed in a very dirty gown of lurid brown colour, with a Cossack belt bedecked with metal discs tied round his waist. On his breast he wore a large, carved wooden cross, in his large hands a knarred staff the height of a man. His knotted hair, red edged by grey, fell loose nearly to his waist, his fiery red beard was streaked with grey, and his small cunning animal eyes peered out from under bushy eyebrows. He did not so much ask as demand in his low trombone voice, ‘Oh God’s servant Maria, give to a pilgrim from the Athos and Kiev shrines.’ He was completely unperturbed that the New Athos had been turned into a Soviet Institution. And Maria Veniaminovna, without counting her change, gave him whatever remained in her purse. ‘That’s not much, oh God’s servant,’ the vagrant muttered.61
Even though Yudina earned a relatively good amount of money through concerts and teaching, she rarely had enough for her basic needs. Filippov noted:
Usually she was as hungry as a wolf. She would come over to us and announce [to Mother] straight away, ‘Lidia Andreyevna, mmm . . . something smells so good in your kitchen. Is that Borsch cooking on your primus?’ Six families lived in our communal flat, and six primus stoves bubbled and spluttered away on the large, unheated range in the former nobleman’s kitchen. Yudina not only had good ears and eyes, but her olfactory sense was very refined, and she could sniff out any smell. ‘Come, Mashenka,’ Mother invited, ‘we’ll have lunch together.’62
As anti-religious propaganda intensified and atheism became the official dogma, the term ‘Catacomb-church’ came into common usage to denote those practising Christians who rejected the ‘official’ Sergeyite Orthodox Church. The Party authorities had most to fear from a united Church with strong popular appeal. In practice all religious movements were abhorrent to the Communist regime, which indiscriminately repressed Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and Shamanists. By the end of the 1920s most churches had stopped functioning and the priesthood was decimated. At the same time there were committed believers who decided to secretly take monastic vows, known as strizhka, the shaving of the head. These included Yudina’s historian friends Vsevolod Bakhtin and his wife, and the philosopher Alexei Losev and his wife. Even in recent years rumours abounded that Yudina had taken monastic vows, but there is no evidence to show for it. Certainly she never accepted Sergei Starogorodsky’s compromised Orthodoxy, and after the repression of the Josephite movement she stopped confessing or attending church services for nearly thirty years.