Damaskin

Dimitry Dmitrievich Tsedrik was born on 29 October 1877 in the village of Tsebrikovo, in the Tiraspol district of Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire, the son of an Orthodox priest. Raised in a clerical family in the south of the empire, he pursued a full course of ecclesiastical education, graduating from the Odessa Theological Seminary in 1899 and from the Kiev Theological Academy in 1903 with the degree of candidate of theology. For the following years he served as a teacher and administrator in theological schools of the western provinces, including posts connected with the Kholm Seminary and the theological school at Kamenets-Podolsk. These were regions of mixed population and intense ecclesiastical activity on the empire's western frontier.

The revolutions of 1917 and the Civil War shattered the established order of the Russian Church. Tsedrik remained with the canonical hierarchy under Patriarch Tikhon. In 1923 he was tonsured a monk with the name Damaskin and consecrated Bishop of Starodub, a vicar of the Chernigov diocese. As a bishop he resisted the Renovationist (Living Church) movement, which enjoyed Soviet support, and sought to preserve traditional Orthodox church order in his region. After the 1927 Declaration of Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky), which pledged the Church's loyalty to the Soviet government, Bishop Damaskin was among the hierarchs who refused to accept the new policy and continued to regard the imprisoned Metropolitan Peter of Krutitsy as the legitimate locum tenens.

Soviet authorities arrested Bishop Damaskin on multiple occasions during the 1920s and 1930s. He spent years in prisons and labor camps. In the period of the Great Terror he was held in the Karaganda camp complex in Kazakhstan. On 10 September 1937 an NKVD troika condemned him to death, and he was shot. The precise site of his burial is unknown, in keeping with the secretive mass executions of that year.

The Russian Orthodox Church glorified him as a hieromartyr at the Jubilee Bishops' Council of August 2000, numbering him among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. He is remembered as a bishop who chose fidelity to the canonical tradition of the Church over accommodation with the atheist state, and who paid for that choice with his life. His memory is observed in the Russian Orthodox calendar in connection with the date of his martyrdom.