Damascene of Starodub, born Dimitri Tsedrik, was a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church who died in the Soviet persecution of the Church. He is numbered among the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia and is commemorated on September 2. Consecrated to the episcopate by Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow in 1923, he spent most of his episcopal years under arrest, in exile, or in labour camps, and was executed by firing squad in 1937.
He was born on October 29, 1877, in the town of Mayaki in the Odessa district of Kherson province, into the family of a postal official. His education combined ecclesiastical and secular training, and accounts of it vary between sources: he studied at the Kherson Theological School and seminary and undertook missionary courses connected with the Kazan Theological Academy, while other accounts add an agricultural institute at Vladivostok and the Kazan Institute of Oriental Languages. He was tonsured a monk in 1902 with the name Damaskin and ordained to the diaconate and priesthood, after which he served in missionary work, including, by some accounts, at the Russian Spiritual Mission in Beijing, and as a military chaplain during the First World War.
He was consecrated a bishop in 1923 by Patriarch Tikhon, taking the see associated with Starodub and the Hlukhiv (Glukhov) vicariate, and for a time administered the Chernihiv (Chernigov) diocese. He became a prominent opponent of the 1927 Declaration of loyalty to the Soviet state issued by Metropolitan Sergius of Nizhny Novgorod, writing extensively against it and ceasing to commemorate Sergius in the services. From the mid-1920s onward he was arrested repeatedly and sentenced to terms of exile and imprisonment, including time on the Solovki islands and in Kazakhstan.
He was shot in 1937 while imprisoned in the Karaganda camp region of Kazakhstan. He was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in 1981 and glorified by the Jubilee Bishops' Council of the Moscow Patriarchate in 2000, among the assembly of New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.
