Preacher Ignaty Lapkin of Poteryaevka, dissident and community founder, has died

It is nine days since the preacher Ignaty Tikhonovich Lapkin of Poteryaevka completed his earthly journey.

Within my memory Ignaty Lapkin was perhaps the most vivid and original preacher in all the Russian land. And, curiously, in his last years he gained particular renown through the vast number of admirers online, who followed his blogs and picked over his every appearance for aphorisms.

He was born in 1939 in the Altai Territory, into a large peasant family of Old Believers of the priestless persuasion, in which ten children were brought up. His elder brother Ioakim became an Orthodox priest and Ignaty's chief ally and kindred spirit.

What impelled him to open service to the faith of Christ, as the preacher himself recalled, was the reading of the world classics, and during his service in the Pacific Fleet and his studies at the Riga Nautical School he finally became established in Orthodoxy. The turning point of Lapkin's biography was bound up with persecution by the official authorities. Ignaty Tikhonovich related that already in childhood he had determined such a fate for himself: to stand against the Communists and the destroyers of the Orthodox faith. And once he had grown up and gained experience of life, he did indeed begin active dissident work. He worked as a site foreman, a stove-maker and a watchman, and in spite of this he carried on his Christian preaching. He put all his earnings into buying scarce tape recorders and tapes, so as to record and distribute the Bible, the works of John Chrysostom and the lives of the saints.

Ignaty Lapkin was first arrested by the KGB for keeping and handing out Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book "The Gulag Archipelago", but on that occasion he was released after the investigation. The main blow of the repressive system fell in the years of perestroika. On 9 January 1986 Lapkin was taken into custody again, for religious samizdat and anti-Soviet propaganda. The Altai Regional Court sentenced him to two and a half years' deprivation of liberty with confiscation of property. Fifteen seized tape recorders and hundreds of cassettes were declared instruments of the crime. In all, the preacher spent about fourteen months in the pre-trial detention centre in Barnaul and in the corrective labour colony in the town of Zhanatas.

It is hard to imagine, but in confinement Lapkin won such authority that even hardened criminals stopped swearing and smoking in his presence. Already in March 1987, within the framework of Gorbachev's liberalisation, Lapkin was pardoned. In January 1992 he was fully rehabilitated as a victim of political repression.

In 1991 Ignaty Tikhonovich, together with his brother Ioakim, moved to the site of the vanished village of Poteryaevka in the Mamontovo District of the Altai Territory. They restored the abandoned settlement and founded there the now famous Exaltation of the Cross Community. Here Lapkin opened the children's Orthodox camp Igla (The Needle), in which for 25 years he brought up the young in a spirit of absolute sobriety, daily peasant labour and ceaseless study of the Holy Scripture.

It is astonishing how, under such a burden, with dozens of pupils, constant work with children and young people, journeys around the country, and a rather large household of his own that had to be kept going, Lapkin unceasingly spread the Word of God, and even found time to write books on Christian life. Dozens of volumes remain after him.

The uncompromising ministry of Ignaty Lapkin came to an end with his earthly death on 2 November 2026. His faith and fidelity inspire deep respect. I am certain that the name of the Siberian elder will be on people's lips for a very long time.