Ignaty Lapkin

Ignaty Tikhonovich Lapkin was born on 10 June 1939 in the settlement of Karpovsky in Altai Krai, then part of the Soviet Union, into a large family of priestless (bespopovtsy) Old Believers. According to his own recollections, summarised in Russian Wikipedia, the family had lost much of its property during collectivisation and lived poorly under a strict, ascetic religious regime. His father, Tikhon Dmitrievich Lapkin, fought in the Second World War, was badly wounded in 1941 and lost his left arm. His mother was Maria Egorovna Lapkina. The family later moved to Poteryaevka in Mamontovsky District, the village where Ignaty grew up and to which he returned decades later.

Lapkin finished the Korchinskaya secondary school in 1956. In 1959 he graduated from the Barnaul Construction Technical College as a technician in industrial and civil construction. In the early 1960s, while working in Latvia, he attended a nautical school. He was largely self-taught in theology and became known as a well-read student of the Bible.

After technical college Lapkin worked as a foreman. In October 1959 he was called up and served in the Soviet Navy as a radio operator, later transferring to the Strategic Rocket Forces. He said he came to faith after watching the 1958 French film Les Miserables, began to fast and speak about God, and was sent for psychiatric examination and discharged with a diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia". He worked as a concrete worker in Iskitim, Novosibirsk Oblast, and then in Latvia, became a sailor in 1962, read the New Testament and was secretly chrismated by an Old Believer priest. In 1963 and 1964 he worked as a concrete worker and as commander of a guard unit at an oil depot in Latvia. He then worked as a carpenter in several regions until 1969, was without official work until 1972, worked as a metalworker until 1979 and then as a watchman.

Russian Orthodox outlet Russkaya Vera notes that he and his wife attended the Russian Orthodox Old-Rite Church in Barnaul, that he was excommunicated there after a period among Baptists, and that he later joined the Russian Orthodox Church and then the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR).

In the 1970s and 1980s Lapkin produced religious samizdat. Rather than retyping texts, he recorded them on audio tape, reading the Bible, lives of the saints and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. In 1980 he was arrested under article 190-1 of the RSFSR Criminal Code (dissemination of knowingly false statements defaming the Soviet system), but the case was dropped and he was released on his own recognisance. On 9 January 1986 the KGB arrested him again under articles 162 and 190-1. The Altai Krai court sentenced him to two and a half years in a general-regime colony, and his tape recorders, typewriter and audio archive were confiscated. He was pardoned and released early in 1987 and was rehabilitated in 1992. In the mid-1990s he sued for compensation, and in 1997 a settlement transferred buildings in Barnaul to his community.

In 1991 Lapkin founded the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (Krestovozdvizhenskaya) Orthodox community in Barnaul, registered by decree of the ROCOR Synod and by the Altai Krai justice authorities, and served as its permanent church warden. His younger brother, Archpriest Ioakim Lapkin, became the community's rector. In the same year Lapkin returned to Poteryaevka, by then almost deserted, and began rebuilding it as a Christian settlement. A village community was registered in 1995. Over the following decades the settlement acquired a church, a school, a medical post and houses. Residents and visitors followed strict rules: no alcohol, smoking, swearing, stealing or lying; men wore beards and untucked belted shirts; women wore long skirts and headscarves.

Lapkin preached a rigorist, Bible-centred Orthodoxy shaped by his Old Believer upbringing. He was a committed anti-communist and an ardent supporter of Solzhenitsyn and his ideas. Russian Wikipedia reports that he prayed for Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Donald Trump, and that his community followed patriarchal Domostroy principles and discouraged contact with outsiders and secular authorities. He was criticised for antisemitic views, including promoting the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In 2016 he described Rospotrebnadzor inspectors as carrying out "the order of the Antichrist".

Children's camp. From 1995 Lapkin ran a summer labour camp in Poteryaevka named after Saint Clement of Ancyra, attended by up to about a hundred children each summer according to Lapkin. Health inspectors found violations in 1999, and the camp lost legal registration in 2000. In 2016, during nationwide inspections that followed the deaths of 14 children at Syamozero in Karelia, Rospotrebnadzor inspected the camp and went to court. Lapkin published a video drilling children to flee into the fields and hide from inspectors, which made national news. A Barnaul court ended the administrative case in July 2016, but Lapkin closed the camp himself in early August, telling Komsomolskaya Pravda: "I created it myself, I liquidated it myself." Former campers quoted by critics described forced labour, deprivation of sleep and physical punishments; these allegations are reported in Russian Wikipedia and media and were not tested in court.

Charges of sectarianism. Russian Orthodox sect specialists, including the apologists of the Kemerovo diocese and missionary Dudin, described his communities as sectarian, citing his rejection of the veneration of relics, criticism of the Moscow Patriarchate and closedness. Russian Wikipedia states that ROCOR forbade his communities to present themselves as part of ROCOR. Metropolitan Sergiy of Barnaul and Altai, by contrast, said in 2016 that no dogmatic or canonical violations had been established and called him a zealous Orthodox Christian and confessor.

Lapkin was the subject of the 1994 documentary "Zlatoust iz Poteryaevki" (Chrysostom from Poteryaevka) and of a 2000 report by writer Dmitry Bykov. His sermons and Bible talks, posted on the YouTube channel "Vo svete Biblii" and on VK and Telegram, made him an internet celebrity and meme figure; TJournal profiled him in 2019 as an "80-year-old YouTube blogger" running Russia's most media-savvy religious community. Rossiya 24 and other channels reported on Poteryaevka. In 2014 Deacon Andrey Kuraev, speaking on Echo of Moscow, named him as a modern example of a hero of faith. In July 2026 he recorded answers to questions from Italian photographer Giorgio Dirindin. In 2025 his autobiography "...dlya slova Bozhiya net uz" was published in a third edition in Barnaul.

Lapkin married Nadezhda Vasilyevna Shadrina in Novosibirsk in 1966. He lived for most of his life in Barnaul and spent long periods in Poteryaevka. His younger brother Ioakim became an archpriest and rector of the Barnaul community. Lapkin was recognisable by his army kirza boots and belted peasant shirt, which he wore even to university lectures.

Lapkin is remembered by followers as a confessor who was imprisoned for his faith in the Soviet era and who brought a dying Siberian village back to life. Critics remember him as the authoritarian leader of a closed community whose children's camp became a national scandal and whose views included antisemitism. Few Russian religious figures of his generation were as widely known online. The village of Poteryaevka, with its church and school, remains the most visible part of his legacy.

Lapkin had been seriously ill in his last period, according to Komsomolskaya Pravda Altai. He died in Barnaul at 00:20 local time on 2 November 2026, aged 87, as announced by his followers on his VK community "Vo svete Biblii" and Telegram channel; the news was reported by Fontanka, Regnum, MK, News.ru, Altapress and KP. The cause of death was not made public. On the same day members of the Barnaul community escorted his body to Poteryaevka, where he had asked to be buried in his old kirza boots.