In 2017, Pravoslavie.ru published this article by Olga OrlovaOrlova, Olga
“>Olga Orlova on 
Schema-Archimandrite Iliy (Nozdrin)Iliy (Nozdrin), Schema-Archimandrite”>Schema-Archimandrite Iliy (Nozdrin), who had just turned eighty-five. He was born fifteen years after the beginning of the Bolshevik revolution, precisely on the day it began. His name day, which according to Orthodox tradition falls on the eighth day after birth, coincided with the celebration of the Icon of the Mother of God “Enthroned”The “Enthroned” (or “Reigning”) Icon of the Mother of God appeared on March 2, 1917, the day of Tsar Nicholas’s abdication, in the village of Kolomskoye near Moscow.”>“Reigning” icon of the Mother of God.
His entire life was marked by the protection of the Most Holy Theotokos, and everything he did was in fulfillment of the will of the Sovereign Lady for the strengthening of his homeland.
Father name day in monasticism fell on the feast of the 40 Holy Martyrs of Sebaste
“>Forty Martyrs of Sebaste.
Schema-Archimandrite Iliy (Nozdrin), on Mount Athos
War
Even before the revolution, in his native village of Stanovoy Kolodez in the Oryol region, his grandfather Ivan served as the warden of the Pokrovsky Church, which had been built through the personal funds of local peasants and had been active for over a century. However, by the time his grandson was born into the family of Athanasius and his wife Claudia, services in this church were conducted only in secret if at all, or sometimes even in private homes. Because of this, the newborn was baptized in the neighboring village of Yakovlevo, in the Church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God. He was named Alexy, in honor of Venerable Alexis the Man of GodThe parents sought the missing Alexis everywhere, but without success. The servants sent by Euphemianus also arrived in Edessa, but they did not recognize the beggar sitting at the portico as their master.
“>St. Alexius, the Man of God.
V.A. Kravets and the Restored Church in Yakovlevo In modern times, in 2001, a tractor driver and combine operator from Oryol, Valery Alexeyevich Kravets, came to see then Schema-Igumen Iliy, who had by then returned from Mount Athos to the reviving Optina Monastery, to seek advice on a family matter. During the conversation he happened to mention that there was no church in the area. To this, Father Iliy simply replied,
“Start building one!”
Kravets’ eyes widened in shock. The schema-monk reassured him, “God will take care of everything.”
Father Iliy often liked to say in such cases: “God will build it, I will pray.” Meaning, you don’t need to worry about anything…
And so, by God’s miracle, the church was built, almost without disrupting Kravets’ ongoing agricultural work.
With Father Iliy’s blessing, the Pokrovsky Church in his native village of Stanovoy Kolodez was also restored.
Childhood under Soviet rule
During Father Iliy’s childhood, before he even started school, the church had been converted into a school. In earlier times, peasant children learned to read in churches using the Psalter. But under Soviet rule a new entrance was carved directly through the altar, and the steps were made from gravestones, as the surrounding cemetery was leveled.
Of course, the children knew nothing about this, and the adults mostly remained silent. The year that the future Schema-Archimandrite entered first grade coincided with some of the harshest Soviet repressions.
Children were taught strictly in line with Soviet propaganda, with much slander directed at the Tsar’s family. Neverthless, Christmas and Pascha were still celebrated in the village despite all the prohibitions. Yet, as these feasts became disconnected from church services, their deeper spiritual meaning gradually faded for the villagers.
Alyosha was fortunate—he had an aunt in Moscow who was a deeply faithful woman. She often visited their family. Among all the nephews—his older brother Ivan, his younger brother Sergey, and his little sister Anya—it was Alexey who, from a young age, was the most sensitive to all things religious and sacred.
Together, he and his aunt visited all the open churches in their native region and traveled to the functioning churches in Oryol. As he grew older, his aunt began bringing him rare spiritual literature, which was hard to find at the time. She also taught him Church Slavonic and guided him in the foundations of faith.
Alexey Nozdrin at the Technical School
So, after finishing his studies at the Mechanical Engineering College in Serpukhov from 1955 to 1958, and being assigned to work at a newly constructed cotton mill in the city of Kamyshin, in what is now the Volgograd region, young Alexey’s first question was:
“Where is the church here?”
During the Great Patriotic War (World War II), despite the difficult circumstances, a single church had been reopened in Kamyshin—the Church of St. Nicholas, in 1944. Remarkably, it was one of only two functioning churches in the entire region at that time (the other being in the regional capital). It was truly God’s providence that this young specialist was sent precisely to this place.
Here, he found his first spiritual mentor—Archpriest Ioann Bukotkin, a war veteran who received the Order of Glory, Third Class, who had fought on the third Belorussian Front and in East Prussia.
“I prayed unceasingly throughout the war,” Father Ioann would say. “I wore a cross on my chest.”
These were the men who, by God’s power, had won a terrible war. And so, they met in a region that still bore the name at the time given to its capital city in honor of the generalissimo—Stalingrad. Interestingly, before 1589 to 1925, this city had glorified the Queen of Heaven and was called Tsaritsyn.
The rector of their Church of St. Nicholas was Archpriest Ioann Potapov, who had endured ten years in Stalin’s labor camps. They all had much to remember and discuss together.
In response to Father Ioann’s stories about miraculous survival during the war, Alexey was one of the first to share with his spiritual father the extraordinary event he himself had witnessed by God’s intervention during the war years.
On the Feast of the Meeting of the Lord in 1943, ten-year-old Alyosha was returning from the village of Kryukovka, where he had gone to visit his godmother. As he neared his home village of Redkino (which, in 1969, became part of Stanovoy Kolodez), a German vehicle suddenly overtook him, braked sharply, and a drunken German soldier fell out.
The Germans struggled with the Russian winter, but even worse was the vodka. As his comrades laughed, the intoxicated soldier vomited, the car door slammed shut, and the vehicle sped away. Left lying in the snow was a map case.
Alexey picked it up.
As he approached his village, an inner voice persistently commanded him:
“Walk along the railway tracks!”
Had he taken the usual path, he would have been searched at the SS checkpoint near his home. His tracks in the snow would have given him away. The German shepherds, which were later released in droves, could have followed his trail.
But now, from the safety of his home, he watched through the window as the Nazis searched frantically for their missing documents.
They even drove a special vehicle over the road to compact the snow, and then scraped it meticulously, meter by meter—but in vain.
The young boy, having slipped home through the gardens, where the mysterious railway tracks lay—tracks that would later be linked to several other mystical stories—opened the map case. Out fell two maps, one a detailed topographical map, and the other an identical version marked with military installations, along with a document containing unfamiliar words.
There were no adults at home except for his grandmother—his father was at the front, and his mother worked from dawn till dusk.
Suddenly, a captured Red Army soldier ran into the house. The elder later recalled his name: Andrei. The Germans had assigned him to tend to their horses, which had been housed in the Nozdrin family’s barn. Usually the prisoners were closely watched, but somehow, he had managed to slip away unnoticed…
Realizing what the boy had found, Andrei quickly commanded him to throw the map case into the stove, while he hid the papers in his coat and disappeared.
As it was later rumored in the village, the drunken officer who had lost the documents was immediately executed. But the Germans never reported the loss to Hitler, fearing the same fate would befall them as well.
This incident did not make the Nazis more vigilant. Having grown arrogant in what they believed to be their permanently occupied territory, they let their guard down. Taking advantage of this, Andrei stole a German uniform, escaped, and began making his way toward the front line. There, he was nearly shot by the Soviets, who mistook him for the enemy. But somehow he managed to convince his own troops that he had urgent intelligence.
With Fr. Kirill (Pavlov) Thus, the maps found by young Alyosha, along with Andrei’s explanations of the enemy’s strategic plans, ended up in the hands of Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, the commander at the Battle of Kursk.
Rokossovsky then gave an emergency order—one so urgent that it had not even been approved by Stalin—to open fire on the enemy fortifications marked on the maps. To be fair, he had already received three separate reports from spies and captured German engineers, but the maps provided the decisive confirmation.
On August 5, 1943 the city of Oryol was liberated, and for the first time during the war, in Moscow a victory salute was fired in celebration.
Schema-Archimandrite Iliy often spoke about how Hitler had planned to make Oryol the capital of “Ostland,” the center of his conquered Russia in his dreams, and to establish his headquarters there. But by God’s providence, his plans were never allowed to succeed.
The liberation of Oryol became a key turning point in the Battle of Kursk, which shifted the course of the entire war.
Archimandrite Kirill (Pavlov)—Milestone of His BiographyOne day, in the ruins of a house, I picked up a book in the trash. I began to read it and felt something so dear and sweet to my heart. It was the Gospel.
“>Archimandrite Kirill (Pavlov; †February 20, 2017) once recalled, “At the beginning of the war, our tanks and planes burned like plywood. The moment a Messerschmitt appeared and fired a shot, our planes would fall from the sky.” From the shameful early defeats, the Red Army transitioned to a strategy of victory.
“When the Church and the faithful prayed with tears, begging the Lord for victory over the enemy, their prayers reached Him. And soon, He turned His wrath to mercy,” Father Kirill once said.
The true essence of this victory is confirmed by many stories from the life of Schema-Archimandrite Iliy, who even as a youth had never lost his thirst for prayer and his remembrance of God, despite living in a country that had officially declared atheism as its state ideology.
Lieutenant General V. S. Ivanovsky and Elder Iliy
On Saturday, December 24, 2016, Lieutenant General Vladimir Sergeyevich Ivanovsky was assigned as the senior officer aboard the TU-154, flying to Syria on a critical combat mission.
A friend suggested that on the way to the airport they make a quick stop in Peredelkino, where Schema-Archimandrite Iliy, who had been transferred from Optina Monastery to be closer to His Holiness the Patriarch, had been receiving people for several years. Thus, the general’s first-ever meeting with the elder took place.
Right away there was tea, and a warm, heartfelt conversation. The general kept glancing at his watch, growing visibly anxious—after all, he had a mission to carry out! But the elder did not let him leave…
“He prayed me out of danger!” Vladimir Sergeyevich now confesses.
“When he finally blessed me, he also gave me a small icon. As I was leaving, the entire road was at a standstill. I switched to a military police vehicle” (V. S. Ivanovsky was the Head of the Military Police of the Russian Ministry of Defense) “to get through the traffic faster.
“I arrived at the airport, only to find that the previous plane, which was scheduled to depart at 3:00 PM, was still on the runway.
While I was with Father Iliy, everything changed. I was suddenly ordered to fly on that first plane instead. Yet just a few days earlier, on Wednesday, I had my last conversation with the late General Valery Khalilov. We were playing football together, and he said, ‘Let’s fly together. I’ll introduce you to Doctor Liza (Elizaveta Glinka), we’ll have a good talk…’
But the aircraft was overloaded with medications for Syrian children, so I removed eighteen members of the Alexandrov Ensemble from that flight. It’s easier for men to mobilize quickly.
I called them urgently to the airport, and we took off on the same type of Tupolev jet, stopping for refueling in Sochi just as planned…
But their wives took the evening flight—the one that crashed into the sea…”
The more one reflects on the nature of war and disasters, the more evident it becomes that their true origins lie in the spiritual realm: And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another… (Rev. 6:4) Just as demons are permitted to harm mankind—as seen in Job’s trials and countless accounts from the lives of the saints—so too is the right to intercede in prayer and to save inseparably linked to those who have fully devoted themselves to God.
It was with this understanding of the true battlefield that the war veteran, Archpriest Ioann Bukotkin, blessed Alyosha Nozdrin to enter the Saratov Theological Seminary. And when that seminary was closed during Khrushchev’s persecution in 1961, he urged him to continue his studies—first at what is now the Saint Petersburg Theological Seminary, and later at the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy.
A.I. Bakin with Schema-Archimandrite Iliy
During his years of study, his old schoolmate, Alexey Ivanovich Bakin, now still living, visited him. Hoping to engage his once-quiet friend in a debate about communism and Marx, he was suddenly met with such a fiery rebuke that he still shudders at the memory:
“Even back then, in his relatively young years, he defended the faith with incredible firmness, even during the height of Khrushchev’s persecutions! In school, he was mostly silent. But his zeal and fervor for God and the Church were already there from his youth.”
It was during his time at the theological academy that Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov) tonsured Alexey Nozdrin into monasticism, giving him the name Iliy (Ilian, meaning “sunlit”) in honor of one of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste. The same hierarch soon ordained him a hierodeacon and then a hieromonk. Thus began his spiritual ministry, initially in the parishes of what is now the Saint Petersburg Metropolia.
A few years later, in 1966, Hieromonk Iliy joined the The Most Beautiful Place on Earth…Happy is the man who has a place on the earth that he loves more than anything, a place where his heart lies. A place, a land, that as the ancient tales say, gives him strength. And for me, this place on the earth is the Pskov Caves Monastery.
“>Pskov-Caves Monastery, the only monastery in the country that had never been shut down. After the war, it had become home to the elders of Valaam, who had ended up in Finland after the Revolution. It was here that, just a year after Iliy’s arrival, Archimandrite John (Krestiankin)“>Father John (Krestiankin; †February 6, 2006) also came.
In the company of these spiritual giants, the spirit of the future elder was spiritually tempered.
To be continued…
