Pictures of Russian painting of the 19th century. Russian painting of the mid-19th century (Peredvizhniki)

After the murder of Fr. Pavel (Adelgeim) was flooded with some crazy stream of conspiracy theories: they say that a crazy killer is not crazy, and in general the priest was killed by bloody hebnya (TM), and in general there was a global conspiracy to kill the priest.
Alas, in reality everything is much simpler and sadder. It has been officially established that the killer is mentally ill.
27-year-old Muscovite Sergei Pchelintsev has been charged with the murder of Pskov priest Pavel Adelgeim. On August 5, a young man came to talk with Father Pavel about his affairs, but suddenly attacked him with a kitchen knife in his hands. According to investigators, during the arrest Pchelintsev shouted that Satan ordered him to kill the priest, after which the guy stabbed himself in the chest with a knife.

The murder suspect also stabbed himself during his arrest, which speaks in favor of the version about some kind of mental health problem in the young man. He is now in the hospital on a ventilator. Investigators will try to interrogate him as soon as the doctors give them such an opportunity.
The investigation has already ordered a psychiatric examination for the alleged killer. Witnesses claim that before terrible events In the priest's house, a visiting Muscovite behaved inappropriately....

Details and circumstances of the tragedy. What preceded this?

It turned out that there were still signs of impending trouble:

The bride of the killer of Father Pavel Adelgeim sent him to the priest to get rid of demons

The fiancee of Sergei Pchelintsev, suspected of murdering father Pavel Adelgeim, once advised young man turn to a priest to get rid of demons.
Sergei's parents made an appointment with a psychiatrist, which he was afraid of, as he felt that he would be taken to the hospital. Then his fiancée Anya advised him to go to Father Pavel. Sergei ran away from his parents and came to the priest for help.

“Father Pavel soon realized that the young man needed not a conversation, but qualified help from a specialist,” said church parishioners. “Sergei’s bride turned out to be a good friend of Mother Vera Mikhailovna. She was immediately informed about the arrival of a friend, and she, apparently, told about Sergei’s arrival in church to his father."
(from here)

Mother of a priest suspected of murder: Son made a film about killer maniacs
Svetlana Kovaleva, the mother of Sergei Pchelintsev, suspected of murdering a priest in the Pskov region, said that her son was filming a documentary project dedicated to maniac killers.
According to her, this could have caused her son’s insanity. “Seryozha always made good, kind films,” said Kovaleva. “But this time he repented that he had made an evil film - he even said that this film takes energy away from people.”
The mother of the alleged killer also said that her son last years suffered from severe headaches due to an injury to the upper cervical vertebra.
(from here)

The “smiling” VGIK graduate Sergei Pchelintsev was changed by his own work - a film about killer maniacs
A Muscovite, suspected of murdering priest Pavel Adelgeim, graduated from the All-Union Cinematography Department a year ago state institute Cinematography
Nobody imagined that such metamorphoses could happen to a VGIK operator
“Seryozha always made good, kind films. But this time he repented that he had made an evil film - he even said that this film takes energy away from people!” - Svetlana Kovaleva, the mother of the alleged killer, shared with law enforcement officers. According to her, having gone to the priest, the young man wanted to cleanse himself. According to Svetlana Vladilenovna, her son was planning to soon marry his girlfriend and, in conversations with the holy father, wanted to prepare himself for the ceremony.

“My son said that he fled to Pskov, he kept telling me about the Bible. He wrote me terrible SMS... That he wants, for example, to take my soul, and something else about the sacraments...,” Svetlana Vladilenovna recalls the last terrible days. According to her, Sergei’s life in recent years was poisoned by frequent headaches caused by an injury to the upper cervical vertebra. Not without a shudder, the woman recalls: “In last time When I saw him, he grabbed me by the breasts. He started shouting: “Mom! How can you not understand that it’s like I have a pin in my head! Why does it hurt me!”

Sergei’s mother Svetlana Kovaleva says that her 27-year-old son worked at one time as a cameraman for short films. Among the great many films he shot was dedicated to life killer maniacs documentary project. The mother did not rule out that the impetus for brutal crime, for which Sergei is accused, could have been precisely this film. This is quite a probable version, especially since the motives for the murder have not yet been established. It is only known that, according to witnesses, at the time of the crime the young man was in a completely inadequate state and shouted that he was acting on the orders of Satan.
(from here)

“I took a taxi here from Moscow, paid 16 thousand”
An acquaintance of the suspect in the murder of priest Pavel Adelgeim said that Sergei Pchelintsev was a closed person, but didn’t look like a murderer. Pchelintsev is now in the hospital and cannot yet testify. He lived at home with a priest and his wife for three days; the motives for his behavior are still unknown. Family friends note that the wife of the deceased Vera Adelgeim Even on the eve of the murder, she sensed something was wrong. Father Pavel's funeral will take place on Thursday.

Videographer Sergei Pchelintsev, suspected of murdering priest Pavel Adelgeim, is now in the hospital and connected to a ventilator. Doctors assess his condition as serious, but say that there is no threat to life.

Gazeta.Ru spoke with the director of the United Media Group company Dmitry Pishchulin, who once studied with the alleged priest's killer. Pishchulin has not seen Pchelintsev for the last two years and, although he says that he was a private person, he was shocked by the news of the murder of Father Pavel. “We communicated with Sergei while studying at VGIK and worked together several times. He is considered a very good operator, he always approaches every shot very carefully and thinks it through,” said Pishchulin. “You can’t say that he is sociable and cheerful, he was himself all the time.” But from his behavior one could never assume that a person could be a murderer. Well, someone, but definitely not him. True, a lot could have changed over the years; there were rumors that he went to Goa and returned strange.”
According to Dmitry Pishchulin, Sergey Pchelintsev is a native Muscovite and single. “He never spoke about religion or expressed his attitude towards it,” Pishchulin added.

Senior assistant to the head of the Investigative Committee of the Investigative Committee for the Pskov Region, Anton Dobrokhotov, told Gazeta.Ru that investigators are on duty at the hospital and are waiting for the doctors to allow them to interrogate Pchelintsev. A representative of the department said that at the moment tragic death The priest's wife, Vera Adelgeim, was in the house.

“The priest worked with this young man. The guest suddenly grabbed a knife and hit him. Hit the heart. The wife called the police, and the alleged criminal ran out into the street and behaved inappropriately, which attracted the attention of neighbors. A nearby squad detained him, and he did not try to cause any damage to the law enforcement officers, but simply began to cut himself,” Dobrokhotov explained.

According to the Pskov Information Agency, the wife of Father Pavel, on the eve of the tragedy, called family friend Pyotr Gusev and told him about Pchelintsev. “She said: We are in trouble. A man arrived from Moscow, the son of some acquaintances. I took a taxi here and paid 16 thousand. My name is Seryozha. He doesn’t behave quite adequately,”— the publication quotes Gusev. According to Vera Adelgeim, Sergei Pchelintsev’s father came to take him home, but he behaved inappropriately - he knelt down and asked him not to send him to a mental hospital.

Later that day, Father Pavel was in the same room with Pchelintsev. The priest was cutting zucchini, and his guest was reading the Gospel. “And suddenly the heart-rending cry of Father Pavel. I came running and didn’t understand what was going on. I saw knives on the table. I threw the knives on the floor and shouted at Seryozha: “What have you done, get out of here!” I didn’t even understand what happened,”- Pyotr Gusev retells the words of Vera Adelgeim.

Priest Pavel Adelgeim will be buried at the Myrrh-Bearing Cemetery at the Church of the Myrrh-Bearing Women, where he served. The funeral service will take place on Thursday morning.
Relatives and acquaintances of Father Pavel are grieving the loss. The Pskov Information Agency reports the words of the altar boy of the Roman church: “He never abandoned his flock, he was with them until the end. He spoke such speeches that my soul became calm. And at confession he admonished kind words. The whole parish rested on him.” Local assembly deputy Lev Shlosberg said that priest Pavel Adelgeim was always ready to help: “He opened his doors to everyone who asked him for help. It so happened that he opened the door to his killer.”
(from here)

According to eyewitnesses, death blow The killer stabbed the priest in the heart during a conversation about the famous surgeon Bishop Luke...

Why do mentally ill people attack priests, what mistake did Father Pavel Adelgeim make, how can you avoid becoming a victim of a madman? The story is told by the priest and psychiatrist Grigory GRIGORIEV, who personally knew the murdered priest well .

- Why do mentally ill people kill priests, what is going on in their heads?

Back in the days Soviet Union When there was a powerful psychiatric system, 8-10 psychiatrists per year died at the hands of mentally ill people. Mentally ill people kill not only priests, but everyone who crosses their path and tries to help them. This does not apply to all mentally ill people, but primarily to those who have “delusions of influence.”

In psychiatry there is such a thing as “delusion of influence,” and this is one of the most severe types of delirium. If any person, no matter a doctor, priest or relative, tries to help a mentally ill person, then he may fall into his “delusional picture of the influence of dark forces.”

A mentally ill person will feel that the helper is having some kind of harmful effect on him, and for this reason the patient feels unwell. For example, some special radiation generators are acting from a neighboring apartment. Or there is an electric field coming from the outlet. Or poison rays are sent through television. And if a mentally ill person gets the picture that someone is influencing him in this way, he will devote his entire life to destroying this source of evil.

If a mentally ill person comes to Church, and this happens often, and the priest, without immediately getting involved, without realizing that in front of him is a patient with, say, schizophrenia, tries to help him, then he can seriously suffer. If you help the patient only with the help of prayer, with the help of reprimands, give pastoral advice, especially related to repentance, which can deepen the patient’s depression even more, give him some spiritual books to read, then as a result the very delusion of influence may arise and the patient will put himself the task of destroying the helping priest as the source of evil.

- In many parishes there are mentally ill people, how can you prevent them from killing you?

You need to behave very carefully with them and you need to learn to feel them. Unfortunately, we currently do not have such a course as clinical psychiatry, we only have pastoral psychiatry. You need to ask if the person has been in a mental hospital or if he is registered with a psychiatrist.

If it turns out that he is a member and has been treated in hospitals more than once, but his enemies drove him there, this is a symptom. It is necessary to ask whether there are any visions, whether there are delusions, hallucinations, that is, try to assess the adequacy using elementary questions. And it is also necessary to evaluate his critical self-esteem; in mentally ill people it is completely absent. We have to ask - could it be different from what you say? If a person says “yes, maybe I could be wrong,” then he is probably not that sick.

Most importantly, a priest in pastoral work must always be on alert and must understand that a mentally ill person may come to him for confession, conversation, or consultation. You have to be very polite, correct and careful with him. And try to evacuate him towards the psychoneurological dispensary. If the doctor treats with medication and relieves acute psychosis, and the priest provides spiritual assistance, then a good result can be achieved. But if the priest tries to take everything upon himself, then he will not help the patient and will harm himself.

- That is, the murder of Fr. Paul has nothing to do with the fact that the priest could criticize some decisions of the church hierarchs?

It is not related either directly or indirectly. The killer's name is Sergei, he is mentally ill and is registered with a psychiatrist. Mom brought him to Fr. Pavel with acute schizophrenia, in the hope that the priest will help her son. I knew Father Pavel very well, he was a wonderful father, very kind and soft man. He was very trusting and sometimes made such mistakes. For example, he allowed thieves to stay with him, and they then robbed him.

And this time he also made a mistake; he would not have coped with schizophrenia and reactive psychosis. He overestimated his strength as a priest. He was sure that he would help Sergei. But he couldn’t help, because mentally ill people are out of contact, they live in their own world.

Sergei quickly developed delusions of influence, and he stabbed the priest who was trying to help him. The fact that Sergei tried to commit suicide after the murder once again proves that the murder was not ordered or political. This is the mistake of Father Paul as a priest and the martyrdom of his service as a shepherd. Life is not taken without God, and His incomprehensible Providence was reflected in this event. Father was wonderful. For a priest, such an end is like a martyr’s crown, for which all his sins, known and unknown, will undoubtedly be forgiven.

Soon five years have passed since the famous Pskov priest PavelAdelgeyma. This year he could have turned 80. And it cannot be said that his work lives on.

In the winter of 2003, he got behind the wheel of his old Volga and went to work. He drove slowly because there was ice, and that’s why he lived another ten years. Then the traffic police officially confirmed to him that the steering of the car had been unscrewed by a human hand, but they refused to open a case. This happened shortly after the publication of Adelheim’s scandalous book “Dogma of the Church in Canons and Practice,” in which he tried to comprehend the persecution that had befallen him in recent years.

This story is delicate and deeply personal: in 1970, Father Pavel sat down for three years to write samizdat - the Bible, Akhmatova, etc. He had no doubt that the young priest of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, Fr. Eusebius (Savvin). During the riot in the zone, Adelgeim lost right leg. And in 1993, Eusebius was appointed archbishop of the Pskov diocese, where Adelheim served since 1976.

Some of the believers will wave their hands: they say, they can’t Orthodox priest hand over your fellow believer to the persecutors, and even in connection with the spread Holy Scripture. To do this you have to be a complete atheist. Maybe Adelgeim himself stumbled across the zone to build on honest people slander? Moreover, he is the son of repressed people: his father Anatoly Adelgeim, a poet and artist, was shot, his mother Tatyana Pylaeva was imprisoned in a camp. Both, however, were rehabilitated in 1962.

However, Father Pavel’s whole life seemed to be opposed to aggression, revenge and violence. He was restoring the Church of the Myrrh-Bearing Women with one foot after the Rosbakaley warehouse moved from it. In 1992, he opened an Orthodox school of regents at the temple, at next year- a shelter for disabled orphans in the village of Piskovichi. And these projects bear little resemblance to a church shop, where candles, amulet and the Thomas magazine fly in - it requires constant investment of effort and money. Adelheim even managed to surround the patients of the psychiatric hospital in Bogdanovo with the word of the Lord, where wealthy pilgrims were certainly not allowed to enter. The old man lived in a poor wooden house, drove his Volga, and did not scam bandits out of money.

To say that he enjoyed the love and respect of people is to say nothing. Once I came to him at the Church of the Myrrh-Bearing Women without an invitation, but he believed that any person is worthy of a conversation - he invited me home. In the 21st century, I saw passers-by Pskovites bowing from the waist to Adelgeim’s Volga. And he remembered Moscow, suffocated in traffic jams during the Council of Bishops, and what good Muscovites said about this. We were drinking tea in Father Pavel's house, and three or four strange-looking children were flashing around the kitchen. The priest explained: these are his students who recently closed school regents. They are not completely mentally healthy, not every shelter will take them. He settled those he could, and took the rest into his home.

It would seem that Father Pavel should be the pride of the Russian Orthodox Church. But the school of regents was closed precisely on the initiative of the diocese. Also, Bishop Eusebius took away from him both the Piskovichi shelter and the church in a psychiatric hospital, and also expelled the Myrrh-Bearing Women from the rectorship of the temple.

In the temple he had a boss - priest Sergei Ivanov, who was old enough to be his grandson, about whom the media wrote that he was the brother of a crime boss. A few days after his appointment, the expensive cobblestone paving in front of the temple disappeared without a trace. And Ivanov, with the support of the diocese, changed the parish charter and began to purge the parish council: people from the diocese took the place of ordinary believers. In those years, the vertical of the Russian Orthodox Church was built throughout the country: the bishops were tired of the semi-feudal independence of the abbots, and they began to increase power following the example of the secular authorities.

Adelheim said that most of the priests did not understand why he did not want to publicly apologize to Eusebius. After all, all you had to do was sign the appeal that had already been drawn up for this occasion: “I, damned reptile and scum, have insulted your shrine, Your Eminence Vladyka! For the complete meanness I have no place in human society. My place is in a cesspool...” The power of the bishop is unlimited, he can expel any priest every minute: recently priests did not even have employment contract, and the pension, if there is one, is minimal. Therefore, events with the participation of the bishop are imbued with humility, like regional committee meetings.

Every year on Forgiveness Sunday, Adelheim wrote in a letter to Eusebius that he forgives him in a Christian way, but did not receive a reciprocal gesture in return. In an interview, Father Pavel sadly stated:

The worst thing is that love left the church, and instead of love all this bureaucratic stuffing came. The patriarch is an official in spirit, and he instills this bureaucracy in the church. Builds a vertical of power. He thinks that by doing this he will create a powerful organization that will work for him. But it seems to me that he is deeply mistaken, and the result of all this will be the funeral of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Father Pavel Adelgeim assessed the processes taking place in the church more and more harshly, and a month before his death he said:

Unfortunately, church life in Russia is dying out. And no matter how much the Patriarchate talks about golden domes, unfortunately, golden domes only express the strength of church power and the growth of the church budget at the expense of state revenues, nothing more. And spiritual life is destroyed and destroyed... In this church there is no place left for Christ: His name is mentioned less and less by the heads of the church. ...Now Orthodoxy and Christianity are not at all the same thing. Because the word “Orthodoxy” is understood more as a national ideology, and not at all as the Christian faith.

We have long been accustomed to the fact that politicians who urge us to buy domestic goods prefer Lexuses, and their children are educated in Switzerland. What is behind the talk about large families - the infertility of the authors, and advocates of adoption are not eager to take an orphan into their own penthouse. Likewise, behind the preaching of love and compassion there can be a willingness to evict sick children onto the street in order to annoy criticism.

Entire buses of pilgrims from the Urals and Volga region came to Father Pavel, and there was even a group from Chukotka. Although he was not even formally a priest - just an old man at the temple. In August 2013, he allowed into the house of a 27-year-old mentally ill Muscovite, who, during a conversation about the Evangelist Luke, stabbed the priest with a knife. Bishop Eusebius did not come to Adelgeim’s funeral and did not make the statements expected from a Christian: they say, we had a fight with the deceased, of course, but I respected him, I forgive him, etc. The diocese generally tried to forget about the apostate, but his successors did not allow it.

Three years passed, and a large batch of drugs and a pistol with a silencer were confiscated from the new rector of the Church of the Myrrh-Bearers, Archpriest Sergius (Ivanov). At the trial, the priest received a suspended sentence of 3.3 years; the verdict noted that the priest was a drug addict. During the investigation, Sergei Ivanov claimed that he found a bag with 20 grams of methamphetamine at the entrance. Either the angel sounded a trumpet in his ear, “take it and put it in the refrigerator,” or for some other reason, but the priest did not renounce the bag. The generosity of 2016 towards Ivanov did not end there: he found another sign from above at the entrance - a Margolin pistol, with a silencer and 65 rounds of ammunition rested in the bag. Instead of the police, the holy father took the gun to the apartment where he lived with his wife and minor child, and kept it in the closet.

The trial of Ivanov took place behind closed doors, and the defendant claimed that he was suffering for his faith - they say, persecution of the church had resumed. Bishop Eusebius did not abandon his subordinate, calling on the flock not to believe that drugs and a gun were confiscated from the “venerable Father Sergius,” as written in the “dirty articles,” for “Satan acts through people.” However, “in dirty articles” there is evidence from church parishioners that the “venerable father” sweated profusely during services and generally looked unwell, despite his young age. Even with a criminal record, Ivanov continued to serve in the Church of the Holy Myrrh-Bearing Women and teach in Sunday school, which was attended by fifty children. True, the bishop's council, which met before Christmas, forbade Ivanov to stand on the pulpit for the next three years, but “in case of decent behavior” the excommunication can be shortened by a year - that is, according to all the rules of parole.

The long-suffering Church of the Myrrh-Bearing Women was taken over by 31-year-old Father Alexander (Nikolaev), who was the second priest under Sergius, and began his career as a subdeacon with Bishop Eusebius. And the first thing I decided to do was reform the Sunday school at the church, created by Adelgeim in 2010.

On Saturdays, adults, children, and children from shelters in Pskov and Neyolovo practiced singing there. In addition, they learned to cook food, practiced drawing in a creative workshop, painted chairs, and made stained glass windows. As reported in the Pskov media, the school was formally maintained by the church: director Yulia Ermolaeva received a salary of 2 thousand rubles (that is, a tank of gasoline per month) from her generosity and looked for money for everything else. According to the widow of Fr. Pavel Vera Adelgeim, food for the children was prepared by the parents and grandmothers of the pupils. But the new abbot rented out the catering unit to a colleague for prosphora - after all, that’s money. And he banned children from orphanages, and at the same time a group of older teenagers, from attending school.

... From the outside it may seem that this whole story is complete darkness. That some demons and ghouls are dancing on bones tender at heart a righteous old man who has already suffered enough in life to destroy everything he created with his horns and hooves. But we must not forget that for a believer, everything valuable is created in the world of the spirit. And there Father Pavel Adelgeim set guidelines that were beyond the reach of any persecutors.

Pavel Adelgeim(August 1, 1938, Rostov-on-Don - August 5, 2013, Pskov) - an outstanding priest of the Russian Orthodox Church, martyr for the faith, author of numerous articles on church topics, author of the books “With My Own Eyes” and “Dogma of the Church in Canons and Practice,” which caused a wide resonance in the church. Father Pavel Adelgeim was a spiritual disciple of the elder, Seraphim (Sutorikhin) and other confessors of the faith. Father Paul dedicated his entire life to God and the Church.

He was a member of the Transfiguration Brotherhood, taught and served on the board of trustees of the St. Philaret Institute.

Father Pavel Adelgeim was a member of the Pskov branch of the Memorial society and did a lot for restoration historical truth in society. Being the son of “enemies of the people,” he himself spent three years in camps on charges of “slander against the Soviet system.” In 1971, while in prison, he lost his leg as a result of an assassination attempt.

Father Paul was a brilliant preacher. Since April 2009, he has maintained his own blog, which is still a testimony to the life of the church.

Family. Childhood. Karaganda. 1938-1956

Father Pavel Adelgeim was a friend of the Transfiguration Brotherhood for many years and regularly received fraternal pilgrims. He became a member of the Institute’s Board of Trustees in 2006, and since 2008 he has been teaching the courses “Canon and Ecclesiology”, “Problems of Canons and Ecclesiology”, “Introduction to Canon”, “Confessional Law” at the St. Philaret Institute. Priest Pavel Adelgeim participated in conferences and meetings held by the PSMB.

In 2010, the brothers helped Archpriest Pavel Adelgeim publish and publish the book “With My Own Eyes.”

In 2013, Father Pavel Adelgeim became a member of the Preobrazhensky Brotherhood.

In memory of Father Pavel Adelgeim, the Transfiguration Brotherhood prepared the exhibition “Witness: Priest Pavel Adelgeim”, which was held in many cities of Russia.