A soldier as saint

He is Russia8217;s new unofficial saint, a casualty of the war in Chechnya who has been canonised not by the Russian Orthodox church but by a groundswell of popular adoration.

The portraits are religious icons, venerated in homes and churches where Rodionov has become the focus of a minor cult that seems to fill a nationalist hunger for popular heroes.

In one icon, he is painted to look like a medieval Russian knight. In another, he is included, in full uniform, in a group portrait of the last czar and his family, under the gaze of Christ.

Church officials say all of this breaks religious law. Sainthood is not a popularity contest and icons are not campaign posters. The process of canonisation, the officials say, is long and arduous and can only be carried out by the Church.

But it does happen from time to time that a symbolic figure emerges to capture the passions of a moment and becomes a sort of folk saint8212;sometimes the first step towards official sainthood.

In pamphlets, in songs and poems, in sermons and on websites, Rodionov8217;s story has become a parable of religious devotion and Russian nationalism. The young soldier, it is said, was killed by Muslim rebels seven years ago because he refused to renounce his religion or remove the small silver cross he kept around his neck.

It is the story his mother says she was told by the rebels who killed him and who later led her, for a ransom of 4,000, to the place where they had buried him. When she exhumed his body late one night, she said, the cross was there among his bones, glinting in the light of flashlights, stained with small drops of blood.

8216;8216;Nineteen-year-old Yevgeny Rodionov went through unthinkable suffering but he did not renounce the Orthodox faith but confirmed it with his martyr8217;s death,8217;8217; reads an encomium on one nationalist website.

8216;8216;He proved that now, after so many decades of raging atheism, after so many years of unrestrained nihilism, Russia is capable, as in earlier times, of giving birth to a martyr for Christ, which means it is unconquerable.8217;8217;

As his story has spread, pilgrims have begun appearing in this small village just west of Moscow, where his mother, Lyubov, 51, tends his grave on an icy hillside beside an old whitewashed church.

Some military veterans have laid their medals by his graveside in a gesture of homage. People in distress have left handwritten notes asking for his intercession.

In a church near St Petersburg, his full-length image stands at the altar besides icons of the Virgin Mary, the Archangel Michael, Jesus Christ and Czar Nicholas II, the last of the czars, who was canonised three years ago.

Alexander Makeyev, a paratroop officer who heads a foundation to assist soldiers, said he had seen soldiers kneeling in prayer before an image of Rodionov. 8216;8216;The kids in Chechnya, they feel they8217;ve been abandoned by the state and abandoned by their commanders,8217;8217; he told the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets.

8216;8216;They don8217;t know who to appeal to for help, but they understand that Zhenya is one of them,8217;8217; he said, using Rodionov8217;s nickname. 8216;8216;You can say he is the first soldier-saint.8217;8217;

Among the photographs of her son that Mrs Rodionov spreads on her kitchen table are laminated cards that she said some soldiers carry with them for luck. They bear his image along with a prayer:

8216;8216;Thy martyr, Yevgeny, O Lord, in his sufferings has received an incorruptible crown from Thee, our God, for having Thy strength he has brought down his torturers, has defeated the powerless insolence of demons. Through his prayers save our souls.8217;8217;

Although he has not been formally canonised, Rodionov8217;s mother and other believers say his icons sometimes emit rivulets of holy perfume, as some extremely sacred Orthodox icons are said to do.Indeed, Mrs Rodionov said, her own icon of her son drips perfume. 8216;8216;When that happens and I am planning a trip I postpone it,8217;8217; she said. 8216;8216;The icon gives me signs.8217;8217;

Rodionov said she was able to find her son8217;s body and learn how he died during a lull in the war when rebel soldiers were demanding huge sums of money to return live prisoners or the bodies of men they had killed.

According to the accounts of his captors, she said, he and three other soldiers were seized in 1996 while manning a checkpoint and were held in a cellar for 100 days before they were executed.

Rodionov was killed, she said, when he refused the rebels8217; demand that he remove his cross and forswear his religion.

A poem called The Cross, composed in his honour, paints a scene of laughing heathens who beheaded the young soldier when he defied them. 8216;8216;Pure mountains in the distance, slopes covered in blooms of blue,8217;8217; the poem reads. 8216;8216;Refusing to renounce Christ, the soldier of Russia fell. And his head rolled, blood flowed from the sabre, and the red grass whispered a quiet prayer in its wake.8217;8217;

Rodionov had been proud to wear his military uniform and to do his duty for his country, his mother said. But as a boy in this small village, all he had really wanted was to be a cook.

8212; The New York Times