Warrior-Martyr Yevgeny Rodionov
May 23 marks twenty-eight years since the martyrdom of warrior Yevgeny Rodionov, who was beheaded by Chechen militants for refusing to remove his cross and convert to Islam. He is remembered as a true hero, an example for those who yearn for valour and truth. Among believers, his veneration as a martyr who died for Orthodoxy continues to grow.
His sacrifice occurred during a particularly dark chapter in recent Russian history. It was the second year of the war with the insurgent Chechen fighters. The Soviet Union had just fallen apart. Russia reached its nadir of weakness, and the minds of its people were gripped by widespread confusion. A life of comfort and unbridled consumption had become the golden dream of the masses. Occultism, witchcraft, and magic captivated many minds. Many strayed from Christ’s teachings about supreme love, which urge us to lay down our lives for our friends.
Few at that time were prepared to appreciate the magnitude of Yevgeny’s feat. Derogatory words, like shots in the back, were hurled at Russian soldiers: “We didn’t send you there!” The press mocked them. They had nothing behind them but impoverished mothers and the smouldering ruins of a crumbling state.
Enduring severe torture, Yevgeny Rodionov received the crown of a martyr for Christ. As Father Vladimir Pereslegin remarked about Yevgeny’s feat, “He chose the cross and death. Only the victory over death contained within the cross could have inspired him to do so.”
Yevgeny was born on 23 May 1977 in Cheberley Village, located in Russia’s Penza Region. His parents, typical Soviet citizens, seldom thought about God. Nevertheless, he was baptised as a child — not out of strong faith but because his mother feared for his health. Lyubov Vasilyevna recalls, “He was over a year old and still hadn’t started walking, which worried us. We decided to baptise him. A month later, Zhenya began to walk — steadily, confidently, without haste.”
Lyubov Vasilievna Rodionova, mother of Yevgeny Rodionov
From a young age, Yevgeny displayed traits of observance and strength. He grew up with a truly strong male character. During his childhood and youth, he was robust and enjoyed sports. He took an interest in boxing for a while, even securing second place in a competition. However, he later quit, saying, “I cannot hit a person in the face.”
Yevgeny’s parents separated when he was seven, but he remained very close to his father. They would later make crosses together by hand. He became early on a true helper and friend to his mother, Lyubov Vasilyevna. Despite being somewhat reserved, he was always content with their circumstances, no matter how difficult. His friends respected him and valued his opinion.
Yevgeny Rodionov in childhood
At 11 or 12 years old, Yevgeny returned from a summer break at his grandmother’s, wearing a cross around his neck. He told his mother they had gone to church, where he had confessed, taken communion, and received the cross. Lyubov Vasilyevna asked him to remove it to avoid mockery from his peers. She admits that her “rather tough character and 25 years of membership in the Communist Party” initially led her to treat her son harshly. Yet, he showed unexpected firmness and refused.
In his teenage years, Yevgeny began attending the Orthodox church independently and bringing holy water home. He attended services in an outlying Moscow suburb called Podolsk, although it is not known to whom he confessed. According to his mother, before joining the army, he confessed and took communion of his own accord. He followed an ancient Russian custom of wearing a belt embroidered with Psalm 91 (“He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High”), which he wore when he entered the army.
Russian law requires all young men to spend time in the armed forces. In June 1995, Yevgeny was called up. His mother recalled that Yevgeny felt it was his duty to serve his country. He and his friends understood that some things in life must be done regardless of personal desire, and they had no thought of evading their military duty.
He was immensely proud to have joined the border troops. In every letter home, he wrote, "Mum, I'm not just a soldier; I'm a border guard!" Yevgeny earned a good reputation in his unit by diligently fulfilling all his obligations.
Yevgeny Rodionov on the day he took the military oath, which he upheld to the end
Half a year of rigorous training flew by, and soon, Yevgeny and his comrades were assigned to a border outpost. Out of three hundred young soldiers who had trained with him, two hundred and fifty volunteered to serve in a war zone to test their mettle and benefit their country where it was most perilous. Yevgeny was among these brave souls. Eventually, he was posted to the border with the Russian republic of Chechnya, where the Russian Army was engaged in a protracted conflict against Chechen warlords.
“Someone has to serve there. Besides, I’ll return from the army six months earlier, I promise you,” Yevgeny reassured his mother in his affectionate and poetic letters (conscripts in war zones were entitled to early discharge — editor). “But Zhenya, there’s a war going on there; you just don’t understand how serious it is,” his mother protested. “There are already prisoners, there are dead. If something happens to you, I won’t survive it.’ It was well-known how brutally the militants — professing to be Moslems — treated Russian prisoners of war. Yet, she knew how resolute her son was and how true to his word he remained. He never sought the easy way out.
On 13 February 1996, only one month into his posting, Yevgeny and three other border guards — Alexander Zheleznov, Andrey Trusov, and Igor Yakovlev — were manning a checkpoint on the Chechen-Ingush border. This road was considered a “lifeline” by the militants, who used it for transporting weapons, ammunition, prisoners, and drugs. That night, the Chechen rebels travelled down this road in an ambulance packed with ammunition. Yevgeny and his comrades engaged in an unequal battle with the enemy and were taken prisoner.
Initially, the command suspected the men of desertion and searched for them at their home addresses. Only much later did reliable information emerge about what had transpired during the vehicle inspection.
“Russian Hero - Yevgeny Rodionov” by M. V. Fayustov, 2009
The details of the execution are known from his executioner, Ruslan Haikhoroyev, who was killed in 1999. In the presence of an OSCE mission representative, Haikhoroyev declared, “The soldier had a choice. He could have changed his faith but refused to remove his cross.”
Following three months of torture, they sawed off his head after shooting his other three comrades first. The militants, coarse and superstitious people, did not bury his head with the body but shattered it with rifle butts, perhaps fearing that Yevgeny’s restless spirit would haunt them in the dead of night.
Yevgeny’s story is also the story of his mother, Liubov Vasilyevna. To go to Chechnya and retrieve her son’s body, she sold her apartment. They returned his body to her — headless but with the cross still on his neck. Then came another journey to retrieve her son’s head, the burial, her husband’s death, and new trips to Chechnya — with food and warm clothing for the soldiers. She travelled to Chechnya 56 times, where the war had not yet ended, enduring captivity, threats to her life, and personal encounters with her child’s murderers.
Yevgeny Rodionov’s pectoral cross
When Liubov arrived in Chechnya in mid-February 1996, the ransom for a living private was ten million roubles, she recalls. “By August, this price had soared to fifty million. A friend of mine was asked to pay 250 million roubles for her son, as he was an officer.”
On a bleak autumn day in 1996, Liubov stood at the edge of a crater left by an exploded shell in Bamut, Chechnya, praying fervently. She clung to the hope that the body unearthed by the sappers would not be her son’s, wishing against all odds for a miraculous twist of fate.
“It was night-time when I, along with some sappers, began digging into the pit where the bodies of four Russian soldiers had been thrown,” she remembers. “I prayed constantly, hoping my Evgeny was not among them. I couldn’t and didn’t want to believe he had been murdered. When we retrieved the remains, I recognised his boots. Still, I refused to accept his death until someone found his cross. Then I fainted.”
For a long time, she struggled to find the strength to forgive the killers and pray for them after everything that had happened. Only after coming across well-known verses transcribed in captivity by Grand Duchess Olga Romanov, daughter of Russia’s last Emperor Nicholas II, did something begin to change within her:
At the brink of death’s dark door,
Grant Your servants grace to pour
From their lips, a prayer divine,
For those who wronged them, love sublime.
Liubov began asking God to help her grasp the meaning of the words of the Tsar-Martyr in a letter sent from Tobolsk by Olga Romanov: “Father asks everyone he may influence not to seek revenge for him, that the evil in the world will become even stronger, but it is not evil that will prevail, but love.”
“God granted me a great reward and, no matter how hard it was for me, He also gave me the strength,” Liubov Vasilyevna would later recount, reflecting on her ordeal.
Yevgeny Rodionov took the martyr’s crown on his birthday, coinciding with the feast of the Ascension of Christ, commemorated on 23 May 1996. His body was buried by the Church of the Ascension near the village of Satino-Russkoye in the Moscow Region.
Yevgeny’s mother brought her son’s body home on 20 November, the feast day of the Martyrs of Melitene — 33 Christian warriors beheaded for refusing to denounce Christ. One of them was named Eugenius (“Yevgeny” in Russian). For believers, these details are more than mere coincidence, many find them deeply providential.
People from across Russia visit his grave; veterans leave their medals there as a sign of respect. “He truly touched the depths of everyone’s soul — not just Russian but even Chechen hearts. He is known in Greece and Serbia,” said Archpriest Dmitry Smirnov, fifteen years after Yevgeny’s martyrdom.
Grave of Yevgeny Rodionov and other family members
Although Yevgeny Rodionov has not yet been canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church, he is venerated locally in the Astrakhan Diocese in Russia and by the Serbian Orthodox Church.
In the village of Aktash in the Altay region of Russia, a church was built on the grounds of the local Border Guard administration in honour of Saint Martyr Eugenius of Melitene and in memory of Yevgeny Rodionov and his comrades. On 20 November 2002, his icon began to exude myrrh.
The warrior Yevgeny Rodionov, clad in the red cloak of a martyr, has appeared to Russian soldiers on the front lines, leading them out of encirclement, helping prisoners escape, and easing the severe pains of the wounded in hospitals. There are multiple testimonies of these miracles, and their number continues to grow.
St. Eugenius Church, Aktash settlement, Altaysky Krai, Russia
Through his sacrifice, Yevgeny Rodionov exemplifies faith’s triumph over all the gold in the world, all the lies of Satan and his minions. As it is said in the Troparion to Martyr Yevgeny: “Your martyr, O Lord, Yevgeny, in his suffering received an incorruptible crown from You, our God. For having Your strength, he laid low the tormentors and crushed the powerless audacity of demons. By his prayers save our souls.”
Archpriest Alexander Shargunov eloquently spoke of the warrior Yevgeny Rodionov:
“His heroic deed highlights a crucial truth for our times — the profound mystery of the inseparable union of chastity and courage, without which martyrdom is impossible.
They struck him in the chest and back, damaging his lungs and kidneys. Our body is the instrument through which the enemy seeks to reach our soul. He aims to corrupt the body in order to make the soul susceptible to evil.
Those who indulge in sensual pleasures cannot be martyrs for Christ; only those who value purity can, as the life of the Church attests, from Saint Boniface to the holy martyr Grand Duchess Elisabeth.
Archpriest Alexander Shargunov
This heroic deed offers everyone today a chance to see that the spiritual world exists and that it is more important than the material one. It reveals that the soul is more precious than the entire world.
Yevgeny’s sacrifice lifts the veil from all events, exposing their essence: it reminds us that trials are coming when a person cannot live by conscience and truth, cannot simply be an honest citizen, a soldier faithful to his oath, and cannot avoid being a traitor to all if he is not a Christian.
[…] Difficult times are approaching for Christians, but those who seek purity and truth will, by God’s grace, gain the ability to resist. God will shorten, is shortening these times, and we must understand that spiritual resistance [now] is more crucial than any other form of resistance.
We must prepare ourselves spiritually and morally to keep our souls and our countenances — the images of God in man — untainted. We must trust in God and know that He will not abandon His own. These are not mere words, not just beautiful phrases — they are life itself, testified by thousands of new martyrs and confessors of the Russian Church, by the warrior Yevgeny Rodionov, and by all those who suffer for their faith in our days, a testimony we are called to bear.”
Troparion and Kontakion to the Warrior-Martyr Yevgeny Rodionov Troparion, Tone 4
Thou hast suffered a martyrdom of the last times, the adornment of the Christ-loving armies, O holy Martyr Yevgeny, thou wast devoted to of the Cross of Christ, from our God and Saviour, thou hast received a crown, O Champion of Christ pray to the Lord that our souls may be saved.
Kontakion, Tone 4
Thou hast appeared as the fortification of the fortress, Imitating Christ's patience even unto death, thou wast not afraid of the excruciating torment which awaited thee, thou hast not denied the Cross of the Lord, and by doing so thou hast received the cup of Christ from thy tormentors, for this reason we cry out: Holy Martyr Yevgeny, pray for us always, who are suffering.
(These troparia and kontakion to the warrior-martyr Yevgeny Rodionov, who was beheaded for refusing to remove his cross in Chechen captivity in 1996, were compiled by Hieromonk Varlaam (Yakunin) from the Altai Republic. Published only for private reading.)
