Oh! Leave me alone!! I have sinned against humanity!!
When it comes to the Soviet regime’s repression of Christians and the Church. When it comes to priests and believers who received the crown of martyrdom… What do we know about Kharkiv in this context?
Meanwhile, in the 1920s, Kharkiv’s prisons were overflowing with Catholic priests who had been brought there from all over Ukraine. Executioners from the state security agencies spared no effort in brutally torturing and extracting confessions from “Vatican spies” and “Polish intelligence agents.” The trials against Catholics were given special names such as “the group case of the counterrevolutionary organization of Catholic priests in Ukraine” or “the case of the priests.” And they were widely covered in the Kharkiv press of that time.
One of the most harrowing and tragic stories of Kharkiv’s Calvary is this one, which took place in 1925.
In 1924, the rector of the Zhytomyr Cathedral—Father Andriy Fedukovych, born in 1875—was imprisoned in our city’s jail.
Unable to endure the abuse and exhausted by the interrogations, Father Andrei, under the dictation of a GPU officer in a Kharkiv prison, wrote an open letter to the Pope stating that “there is no persecution of the Catholic Church in the USSR, and priests are arrested for their political activities and espionage on behalf of Poland, not for their religious beliefs.”
On November 16, 1924, this letter was published in all Soviet newspapers.
Suffering from a severe nervous breakdown, Father Andrei was released from prison and returned to Zhytomyr. There, on March 4, 1925, after confessing to Father Stanislav Yakhnevich, he doused himself with kerosene and set himself on fire.
To the parishioners who were trying to save him, he shouted, “Oh! Leave me alone!! I have sinned against humanity!!”
He burned like a torch. As he burned, walking as far as his legs would carry him across the mountain, he cried out words of prayer through the flames. He made the sign of the cross with a fiery finger. People carried Fedukovich on their shoulders to the Red Cross Hospital. The hospital’s chief physician—the distinguished surgeon Alexander Fedorovich Gerbachevsky—seeing that the priest was experiencing indescribable agony, tried to ease his suffering, but Fedukovich refused treatment and painkillers. “I want to die in agony, like Jesus,” he whispered with his charred lips.
When the priest died, the entire city of Zhytomyr turned out to bury him…