Time to read: 12 minutes(s)

A small white brick church with a blue dome on the outskirts of Slavyansk-on-Kuban, a regional center 80 kilometers from Krasnodar. In February 2023, Archbishop Viktor (Pivovarov) of the Russian Orthodox Church delivered a sermon here, speaking of the injustice of the war of conquest. That same day, police raided his home. Journalist Valeria Shustval, specially for New Tab and "NotMoscow Speaking" spoke with the 86-year-old priest.

A thin old man in a black cassock

Slavyansk-na-Kubani is a small town on the route to the Sea of ​​Azov. It has a population of about 65, with tens of thousands more living in the surrounding larger villages. Locals grow wheat and vegetables, but the job market isn't limited to agriculture—many work at the oil and gas refinery. The remaining large enterprises in the town are gradually closing. Locals call Slavyansk-na-Kubani a quiet and peaceful place with everything necessary for family life. However, students often leave for larger cities.

The Church of the Holy Protection and St. Tikhon is a building with a blue dome, hidden behind a fence. From the street, it's not immediately noticeable due to its modest appearance, which is more than can be said about other Orthodox churches in the city. On Sunday mornings after the sermon, it's empty, except for a single woman tying a headscarf at the entrance.

"Looking for Father Victor? Check the building behind the church; he might be there," she advises in a half-whisper.

Behind the church stands a small brick house, with an old Lada in front of it. I knock on the door. A middle-aged woman in a long skirt and headscarf appears on the threshold. At first, she suggests we go inside and wait for the archbishop, but when she learns I'm a journalist, she invites us in.

There are several rooms inside the house, and a retired woman wearing a headscarf sits in the hallway. Women are rattling dishes through the wall. I'm invited to sit on a blue bench by the window in an empty room. Nearby is a washbasin, and in the corner opposite are an iconostasis and a refrigerator.

A couple of minutes later, a thin, short old man in a black cassock appears before me. In a quiet voice, he asks me to sit on the left: he has hearing loss in one ear.

"Many people come just to look."

Viktor Pivovarov was born in 1937 to a family of farmers in the Altai region. His father died during the first year of the war. When he was 14, a "catacombnik" named Yakov moved into their home. "Catacombniks" was the name given to Orthodox believers who, in 1927, refused to submit to the Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus'. They viewed the Soviet regime as the Antichrist. The movement took its name from the memory of the early Christians who gathered for services in the catacombs—the underground cemeteries of Roman cities.

It was Yakov who introduced Viktor to Christianity. "I had a mentor who brought me to faith, but he forged his own path to salvation," Pivovarov says of him. Under Yakov's influence, Viktor, still a teenager, dropped out of technical school to avoid joining the Komsomol. Later, he enrolled in the Moscow Theological Seminary, then the Moscow Theological Academy (MDA). However, he was expelled from the latter for participating in the "little opposition"—the name then given to a group of believers who, at the 1971 Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, requested that "the current members of the Holy Synod, who have sold themselves to the authorities, not be elected as patriarch."

Later, Father Victor served in various churches, including in France and Canada, and assisted Bishop Vitaly (Ustinov) of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR). But now the priest is reluctant to talk about any relations with the West. His assistant, who was nearby, overheard our journalist's questions about his service abroad and became wary, saying that the security forces had already inquired about this very thing about five years ago.

In the late 1990s, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia asked Father Viktor to be ordained and serve in the Krasnodar Territory. Since then, he has lived in Slavyansk-on-Kuban, but he oversees parishes in Murom, Vyatka, Vitebsk, St. Petersburg, and Kalyazin.

When the *** (special operation) began in Ukraine, Archbishop Victor immediately condemned it in his sermons. Some of them were even withheld from the church website to avoid legal trouble. Hieromonk Jonah assists the priest at the church, but he prefers to remain in the shadows. The tall, young, bespectacled priest says many people come to see him "just to have a look," because they know Father Victor's anti-war stance.

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"I'm going to the next world soon"

On the morning of February 19, 2023, the archbishop was conducting a service in his church. That day, a woman arrived at the church whom none of the parishioners had seen before. As Father Victor recalls, she ran out into the street in the middle of the sermon, not waiting for the end, and began shouting that the church would face problems for its political sermons.

"The thing is, I'm about to depart this world, and I must warn my core flock in Slavyansk not to lean to the left or the right. And I had to answer the question of whether we are right to fight against Ukraine. I had to tell them frankly that wars are different: there is a holy war, a defensive one, when the enemy attacks, and there is, on the contrary, a war of conquest. The only way to distinguish them is this: if there are foreign tanks and foreign soldiers under our windows, then we are fighting defensively. If our tanks are in their country, and the soldiers are also cruelly abusing us, then we are occupiers," the priest explains his position to our journalist.

That evening, police arrived at the church, reported the parishioners' complaint against the priest, and filed a report against the archbishop under Part 1 of Article 20.3.3 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation ("public actions aimed at discrediting the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation"). Father Victor believes that the woman who allegedly filed the denunciation was "deliberately sent to deliver the sermon."

The archbishop's assistant clarified that no one had seen her again and no one knew who she was. Perhaps she was working for the police, or perhaps she had wandered into the church by chance—parishioners say there have been a lot of visitors in the city lately, especially Ukrainians.

“Maybe she’s just a Z-patriot, and she even embellished [the words spoken by the archbishop in his sermon],” one of the parishioners suggested.

While we converse, the archbishop speaks quietly, staring straight ahead. Occasionally he pauses to catch his breath. Sitting, the elder slouches, and I have to lean toward him. At such moments, I notice that small holes have appeared in his black cassock with age, and gray hairs from his beard are falling onto the fabric.

"The investigators, the police—they clearly sympathize with me in their hearts; they all see that we are indeed waging a war of conquest, a colonial one. Ukraine has done nothing wrong to Russia. They'll now be constantly sending me agents. Because after the second warning, they promise to put me behind bars," the priest continues.

On March 24, 2023, Judge Nikolai Mironenko of the Slavyansk City Court found the archbishop guilty of discrediting the Russian army and fined him 40 rubles to the state. This amount has already been collected and the fine paid. The money was donated not only by parishioners but also by concerned city residents, church officials admitted.

According to Father Victor, the church relies on donations—it has no other sources of income. When the fine issue arose, many decided to donate money to express their anti-war stance and support the priest.

"Strangers from the city, people who never came here, started coming. They said they read about the fine, here's the money, pay it. They understand everything themselves," shared Archbishop Iona, assistant.

Residents of neighboring streets, however, say they know no details about the church or its rector—they simply saw an ordinary small church on the street. As for what goes on inside, they have no idea.

A store employee across from the church says she heard about the case against the archbishop on TV, but didn't look into it: "What happened there? Hmm... What is defamation?"

"Their sacraments are invalid."

In the conversation, the priest calls himself “a true priest, under the special protection of God,” a follower of Metropolitan Vitaly (Ustinov) of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC).

As the church's clergy explained, in 1918, the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church elected Patriarch Tikhon. But after the communists came to power in 1927, Sergius took over the leadership of the church. According to Father Viktor's aides, the church was placed under the control of the OGPU in 1927, and agents, including Sergius, were stationed everywhere.

The arrival of Sergius divided the church: one part followed Tikhon, the other the new leader. Many Orthodox Christians abroad and in Russia rejected Sergius, but in their homeland, Tikhon's supporters were labeled schismatics and executed, says Hieromonk Jonah. Since the Russian Orthodox Church only received its name in 1943 (previously it was called "Russian"), Patriarch Tikhon's modern followers decided to call their church by the old name—the Russian Orthodox Church.

"I am under God's special protection. And sent by God, Christ, through revelation, sent specifically to fight Bolshevism, I have no right to retreat. I am sent by Christ, and that's how I am," explains Archbishop Slavyansky.

Back in 2011, in the magazine published by Father Victor, wrote"The Church should not engage in politics. However, complete apoliticality is not a virtue of spiritual life. Often, it signifies a lack of concern for the needs of others, indifference to goodness, fear of authority, and reconciliation with evil."

On Palm Sunday 2023, several dozen people gathered inside the Church of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin and St. Tikhon. Some were longtime visitors, while others were visiting for the first time. Parishioners said they didn't bother delving into the legal differences between the churches, but chose their favorite.

"This temple is like the old days, when they didn't charge money. It's quite modest on the outside, you see, and inside there's no 'tax': whatever you give is what you pay. But in the new churches now, everything costs money, and I don't like that. This one is more to my liking," explains a girl leaving the temple.

Other Orthodox churches in the city consider the Church of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin and Tikhon to be schismatic. There are about a dozen Orthodox churches in the city, along with several Protestant and Evangelical churches.

The new Orthodox Church of the Entry of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple in Slavyansk-on-Kuban opened two years ago. The modest brick building is occupied only by a lonely pensioner who had heard of Father Viktor but had no dealings with him.

"This is a private church, and private, you know... And we are a state church. We know nothing about them, we have no relationship with them," the woman says amiably, and then "hits" the photographer and me on the shoulders with a willow branch.

More radical sentiments are evident in Slavyansk-on-Kuban's main Orthodox church, the Holy Dormition Cathedral, which recently celebrated its 110th anniversary. Roma women sit on the path leading to the church, offering pussy willow and asking for money for the children they allegedly brought from Ukraine.

A man in a pressed black cassock and a brown leather briefcase stands near the cathedral. Hearing about Father Victor, he calls him a schismatic.

"There are organizations that have the right to conduct divine services and sacraments and everything associated with them, and then there are those that have neither legal nor canonical status. They have no rights. From a spiritual perspective, schismatics have no basis in grace, and their sacraments are invalid," the priest concluded, walking away from the church toward a Toyota Land Cruiser parked nearby.

"Now we are expecting a nuclear war."

Archbishop Victor often jumps from topic to topic in conversation, but his main point is that he has been fighting the Bolsheviks since 1964. The priest believes that Lenin, Stalin, and now Putin were possessed by Satan and that they are the heralds of the Apocalypse. He also calls the president a top-notch magician and shamanist—for visiting Putin and Shoigu in the taiga. according to rumors, shamans came to perform a secret ritual.

A priest from Slavyansk-on-Kuban is convinced that the Chekists had been tracking him for many years and deliberately creating problems for him.

"It turned out that I was the only one on the straight and unyielding line. I couldn't turn left or right. When our entire episcopate was led away to join the Moscow Patriarchate, I had to fight against it. Only I and Metropolitan Vitaly (Ustinov) remained. I helped him serve in Canada. He was already frail, over ninety years old," Father Victor recalled in a conversation with our journalist.

For nearly 20 years, the archbishop has continued to wage a nearly single-handed campaign against the Moscow Metropolitanate. After such trials, the administrative case for discrediting the army hasn't deterred the priest, and he considers the verdict a publicity stunt. Father Victor admits that even in court, he said he needed publicity to get the world interested in his ideas.

"My ideas are that the overthrown great red serpent-dragon fell from heaven and founded, as early as 1917, the kingdom of the Red Bolsheviks. This is the kingdom of Satan. We are waging war against him; our church is real. That's why I prayed and prayed: 'Lord, please allow my works to reach the people.' But the Lord kept stopping me. And now we're expecting a nuclear war, the kind Putin frightens us with. And it will definitely happen," says Father Victor, who has spent his entire life interpreting the Apocalypse, studying the Holy Scriptures and biblical parables about the end of the world.

"They invaded Ukraine, they invaded Crimea."

The church in Slavyansk-on-Kuban has already had problems due to the archbishop's statements about Crimea's annexation to Russia. sermons In April 2014, Father Victor recalled the biblical story of the apostles James and John, who asked Christ to allow them to sit at his right and left hands when he ascended the throne. Jesus responded by explaining that in the world, princes rule the people, but it should be the other way around.

"Whoever desires to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever desires to be first among you must be slave of all," the archbishop quotes from the Gospel of Mark. "For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many."

In his sermon, the priest called Crimea's annexation by Russia an "illegal seizure" involving Kremlin "agents of influence" and "militants under the guise of self-defense." He argued that the referendum had no right to be held without the consent of the Ukrainian authorities.

After this service, security forces came to the Kuban church for the first time.

"They've been writing to the prosecutor's office about us since 2014. The bishop said back then that Ukraine, Crimea, had been invaded. Then they wrote a whole article in the local newspaper against the bishop, telling him how wrong he was, what scoundrels the Ukrainians were. They also wrote to the prosecutor's office, but there was no investigation, no such article. And now they've made up an article... and that's it," complains one of the church's priests.

"I told the investigators that if Ukraine had attacked us, I would have thrown all my efforts into fighting against Ukraine. But since there was no attack, that's exactly what I believe," his father, Viktor, agrees.

The archbishop continues to live in Slavyansk-on-Kuban and serve in his church. His health, however, is failing: he can only hear in one ear and see in one eye. His legs are gradually becoming numb, making it difficult for him to walk. But he says he will not be afraid or remain silent. This applies not only to the war but also to his life's work—the interpretation of the Apocalypse.

The priest is certain that the current authorities will soon start a nuclear war—he saw this in his dreams. Therefore, he considers it his highest goal to warn people of the coming catastrophe: "No one has yet explained the Apocalypse to me, but I have been given two teachings by miracle workers, and I have seen many miracles myself. I have published all of this, some 200 articles, on the website, and several books on the mysteries of existence and the future. These mysteries—all those the world does not know—are revealed to me."

Valeria Shustval