A priest, the son of a close friend of Vladimir Vysotsky, looks over Mikhail Yefremov in prison

Angelica Dean

One of these days, Mikhail Yefremov from SIZO-3 in the city of Belgorod will be transferred to IK-4 in Alekseevka, Belgorod region, to serve his sentence. The 20-day quarantine has come to an end. During these 20 days, Mikhail Olegovich, judging by his letter to the widow of Sergey Zakharov, Margarita Vladimirovna, who died in an accident on June 8 in Moscow, became a very religious person:

“I don’t know how I can communicate with my family now. How to look your wife in the eye and how to raise your children. That cheerful, ironic and careless Mikhail Yefremov, who I was, will never be again. Even if you forgive me, for the mortal sin that I have committed, I will still have to answer before God”, - Yefremov turned from the pre-trial detention center to Zakharova.

Before the letter reached the addressee (it was published on the Internet), on November 20, Metropolitan Ioann of Belgorod and Stariy Oskol confessed and gave communion to Mikhail Yefremov in pretrial detention center -3. The press service of the chief priest of the Belgorod region explained this visit (the word “visit” is in the title of the article published on the website of the Eparchy) as the caregiving of Bishop John to “the sick in the church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker located in the institution due to the complication of the epidemiological situation in the region”.

The photo published on the website of the Eparchy with Mikhail Yefremov holding the icon and the priest unwittingly caused a smile even among those who demanded severe punishment for the artist. The artist looked very unusual in such a role. But the friends of Mikhail Yefremov evaluated the visit of the influential cleric to the pre-trial detention center with the hope. A close friend of Mikhail Yefremov's mother, theater and film actress Vera Voronkova told Novye Izvestia about the “friendship of Alla Borisovna Pokrovskaya with Metropolitan Ioann”:

“Alla Borisovna knew the archibishop of Belgorod and Stariy Oskol well, and when Misha was in prison in the Belgorod region, Father Ioann visited him”, - Vera Voronkova said.

In the Belgorod and Stary Oskol eparchy, they shed light on the origins of the friendship between the priest and the actress, teacher of the Moscow Art Theater School Alla Pokrovskaya (died on June 25, 2019):

- The fact is that Metropolitan Ioann's father, screenwriter and writer Leonid Monchinsky, knew Alla Borisovna well. He was a close friend of Vladimir Vysotsky and the gold miner Vadim Tumanov. As far as we know, Alla Pokrovskaya knew Vladimir Vysotsky well", - told Novye Izvestia in the Eparchy.

Leonid Monchinsky, in collaboration with Vladimir Vysotsky, wrote the book "The Black Candle" (in 1976). Leonid Monchinsky owns a series of photographs of Vladimir Vysotsky in the Irkutsk region, and in particular, at the Zima station. Alla Pokrovskaya said in her interviews that she "knew Vladimir Vysotsky from the Bogomolov circle". Leonid Monchinsky passed away in 2016, but judging by what happened on November 20 in pretrial detention center-3 in Belgorod, his son did not forget about his father's friends.

Metropolitan Ioann of Belgorod and Stariy Oskol is the chairman of the missionary department of the Moscow Patriarchate, which means that it is in his authority to help convicts get on the right path.