God's spy: thirteen days under the lamp
In a Tashkent NKVD cell, the professor of surgery underwent an "operation" that is not found in medical textbooks. The story of the thirteen-day interrogation of Saint Luke.
He saw himself in the brass faucet of the prison hospital — and did not recognize himself. A gray-haired ghost with a matted clump instead of hair and the eyes of a man who looks through a wall. It happens after staring at a bright light for too long: the brain readjusts, and ordinary objects seem dark and flat. Thirteen days under a lamp of several hundred watts — and the world splits into two kinds of darkness: the one outside, and the one that forms behind your eyelids when you close your eyes.
This happened in Tashkent in 1937. Archbishop Luke – Valentin Feliksovich Voyno-Yasenetsky, a professor, a surgeon, the author of the legendary Essays on Purulent Surgery – was taken into custody for the third time. The charge: organizing a counter-revolutionary church-monastic structure.
Lamp in the Eyes
The first thing he remembered: bright light. Not the kind of light spoken of in prayers — but a literal one, yellow, thirty centimeters from his face. The lamp was mounted on a spring bracket. Investigator Oshanin moved it closer each time the bishop’s eyes began to close. He did it methodically, almost professionally.
The surgeon evaluated the method on himself. The cornea begins to dry out after just forty minutes of continuous exposure to light. Then comes the sensation of sand beneath the eyelids. Then the burning turns into pain that no longer lets go. This he knew from his own surgical descriptions. Now, however, his body became the material for his own monograph.
- Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
The Jesus Prayer – not just words, but the rhythm of breathing, focused on one Name of God. He began it from the first hour not from fear, but according to the diagnosis he had made. A doctor always makes a diagnosis before beginning treatment. His diagnosis sounded like this: "investigative conveyor." The investigators – Oshanin, Spivak, Lavrenov – would change every few hours. Therefore, a prayer anchor was needed. Something for the mind to hold onto when the external world begins to melt.
— We'll make you take off your cassock, professor. Or you'll rot here in your own filth.
He looked at Oshanin the way a surgeon looks at a patient, without hatred.
Hatred is too expensive a luxury under these circumstances.
It requires strength that isn't there. And it binds you to the object of hatred more tightly than any chains. Oshanin was an instument, a man who had been assigned to break another man. But a surgeon looks not at the instrument but at the operative field.
Legs
On the fourth day, the prisoner's legs became foreign: heavy, hot, and seemingly separate from the rest of his body. His boots had to be cut with a knife: his feet had swollen so much that the skin on his shins burst and began to ooze. Lymphostasis, venous stasis – he diagnosed himself automatically. He had seen such a picture in soldiers after multi-day marches.
In Tashkent it was forty-five degrees in the shade. In a cell without ventilation – even more. He constantly smelled unwashed body, pus from wounds, cheap tobacco – the investigators smoked incessantly. He stood barefoot on the cold stone floor and repeated: "Lord Jesus Christ..."
Vision on the wall
On one of the days – he had lost count by then – the wall opposite became transparent. Not all of it, but only one section, in the lower right corner. Through it, night over Tashkent was visible – pitch-black, southern, and starless. And then through the Tashkent night something else emerged: wide water, ripples on it, and the dome of St. Vladimir's Cathedral above a high bank. The Dnieper, Kiev, which he had left more than twenty years ago.
The brain chose what to substitute for reality – and chose Kiev.
This lasted several seconds. Then the investigator threw an ashtray, which hit the table in front of the saint, and the image of Tashkent returned. On the wall remained yellow spots that slowly transformed for him into icons.
Confrontation
Father Mikhail Andreev was brought for interrogation. The archpriest read testimony from a paper, not raising his eyes. His words were "right" from the investigation's point of view: organization, counter-revolution, rebellion. Andreev read evenly, his voice did not tremble.
Saint Luke looked at him and thought about how vulnerable human will is without support and under such pressure.
He himself held on not because he was stronger, but because after so many days he had come to understand: prayer is not a request or consolation. Prayer is a state that is not interrupted as long as you yourself do not interrupt it. For Andreev, this state had disappeared much earlier than he entered this room.
— God will forgive you, Misha, the saint said meekly.
He raised his hand and made the sign of the cross over him. The investigator shouted something, but the archbishop did not listen to him.
God's spy
— I am not a spy for foreign intelligence services. I am a spy for my God. And I will never betray Him, said the confessor.
This entered case №34552 — into one of three hundred pages of protocols, where the saint's short, firm refusals were interspersed with increasingly desperate wordings from the investigation. History preserved a biological paradox: a man who had not slept for more than a week wrote corrections in the margins of protocols in his own hand and with clear handwriting.
On the tenth or eleventh day, a sense of Divine presence appeared before the saint's vision, which did not leave until the very end of the "conveyor." When he was finally brought to the common cell — the criminals fell silent. They decided that the guards had brought in a dead man. He lay down on the bunk and lost consciousness.
Epilogue
Saint Luke ended up in the prison hospital, where he saw that same unfamiliar ghost in his reflection. The doctor, who did not know who was before him, wondered aloud: how a sixty-year-old man could survive with such indicators.
During the interrogations, Saint Luke lost about twenty kilograms. His retina was permanently damaged, and his legs remained weak for a long time.
Investigator Oshanin was shot two years later.
Saint Luke prayed for his repose. Not out of generosity, but out of an understanding that Oshanin, too, had been someone’s instrument. The system ground everyone down, just at different times.
In 1946, the exhausted, half-blind archbishop received the Stalin Prize, the first degree, for Essays on Purulent Surgery. For a book written including during the years when he was marched through stages and held under lamps. The prize committee did not notice the irony or did notice it — and preferred to remain silent. We do not know if he thought about this paradox. Most likely — no. More likely he thought about the next surgery, about a new life that could be saved because God too had once given him the opportunity to live again.
