HOLY NEW MARTYR GEORGE OSORGIN
George Mikhaiolovich Osorgin was born in 1893 and was an officer on the Staff of the Supreme Commander of the army in World War One. He had been awarded the George cross. In 1921 he was sentenced to be shot for taking part in an attempt to save the Royal Family. However, he was amnestied. On March 6, 1925 he was arrested again and cast into Butyrki prison. On October 12 he was condemned by the OGPU and sentenced to be shot, but the sentence was commuted to ten years’ imprisonment. In May, 1928 he was sent to Solovki.
In the words of O.I. Volkov: “Osorgin belonged to a completely special kind of warrior, to that old-fashioned type that saw their presence in the army in a knightly, medieval light, as a kind of heightened form of service… Being a convinced, absolutely undoubting monarchist, George was devoted to the memory of the destroyed Royal Family… He was from a famous old family. Osorgin traced his genealogy to St. Juliana. Being devoted to his family traditions, George was deeply believing by inheritance. Yes, and in the Moscow style! That is, he knew and observed the Orthodox rites in all their age-old inviolability – he chanted on the kliroses and did not miss an opportunity to put on a sticharion to take part in a hierarchical service… Osorgin declared with the greatest firmness at interrogations: ‘I am a monarchist and a believer’… George was chief clerk at the field hospital… He worked with rare zeal in the camp: his service gave him the opportunity to do a lot of good. It is impossible to say how many priests and helpless intelligenty he fished out of the thirteenth, quarantine company! He put them into the hospital… George would save people… The whole day he would dash about between the hospital, the companies and the administration, trying to get alleviation, transfers, passes, privileges… ”
Before his release O. Volkov wrote his impressions about George Osorgin as follows: “I suddenly saw that which I had not noticed when I would meet George from day to day: both his sharply etched wrinkles, and his deeply sunken eyes, and the ineradicable crease between his brows. The look in his eyes was completely exhausted, even downtrodden. My George’s soul was heavy. But what self-possession he had! In no way did he give away his suffering, he was always sympathetic and light! And generous in doing good. As if he had been spoiled by fate, he was ready to splash out his extra good fortune onto others. George looked on his earthly path soberly and without hope. But from Solovki he could not reach out and protect his helpless parents, and his dear little wife Marina. They had no defence, and there was no support for them in the fickle, hostile world – only God!”
A.I Solzhenitsyn writes: “Besides the clergy, nobody was allowed to go to the last monastic church. Osorgin, using the fact that he worked in the sanitary section, secretly went to the Paschal Mattins [in 1928]. And he brought a mantia and the Holy Gifts to [the Catacomb] Bishop Peter of Voronezh, who had been taken to Anzer with spotted typhus.”
Now Anzer was twelve kilometres from the monastery, and in January, 1929 there was no access. Many tried to dissuade Osorgin, saying that Vladyka was unconscious and he would be subjecting himself to danger for no purpose. But Osorgin took a boat and made his way through the ice and water to Anzer. Vladyka came to for a very short moment, during which he received the Holy Gifts and immediately died...
George Osorgin was not punished for his feat of self-sacrificial love. Later, however, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn relates, he was denounced, cast into a punishment cell and condemned to death. On that very day his young wife came to the quayside at Solovki. Osorgin pleaded with his jailers: don’t spoil my wife’s meeting with me! He promised that he would not let her stay for more than three days, and immediately she left they could kill him. They agreed. For three days he was with his wife, and, exercising supreme self-control, did not let her guess what awaited him. Not by a word, not even by the tone of his voice. And not by the expression of his eyes.
“Only once (his wife is alive and recalls it now), when they were walking along Holy Lake, she turned and saw her husband clutching his head in torment. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ ‘It’s nothing,’ he immediately explained. She could still stay, but he asked her to leave. The time came to part: he persuaded her to take his warm things, he would get more in the sanitary section the next winter — after all, they were precious, he was giving them away to his family. When the steamer left the quayside, Osorgin let his head fall. Ten minutes later he had already put on other clothes for the shooting.”
George Osorgin was shot on October 29, 1929.