Alexander Abissov

Holy Hieromartyr Alexander Abissov was a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church, born in 1873 in the village of Mormuzhino in the Poshekhonye district, Yaroslavl governorate, and died on 21 February 1942 at Svobodny, in the Bamlag camp (today in the Amur region). He was glorified by the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church in the year 2000, among the hieromartyrs. He is commemorated on 21 February (the day of his personal commemoration), on the Sunday of 7 February or the nearest to it (in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church) and on 5 June (in the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl).

He was born into the family of the hereditary priest Afanasy Abissov and his wife, Claudia Nikolaevna, born Ilyinskaya. His birthplace (the village of Mormuzhino) is now covered by the waters of the Rybinsk reservoir. After graduating from the theological school of Uglich and the Yaroslavl seminary (1896), he was teacher of religion at the parish church schools of the villages of Odrino and Ivanovskoe. In 1907 he married Nadezhda Alexeevna Voskresenskaya, a teacher at the Krivetskaya parish school in the Myshkin district, the daughter of a deceased priest. They had five children.

On 19 February 1908 he was ordained deacon by Archbishop Tikhon (Bellavin) of Yaroslavl for the church of the Beheading of Saint John the Forerunner in the village of Ivanovskoe, Myshkin district, and on 24 February priest for the same church, where he served until his arrest in 1937. Priest Alexander worked not only in the church but in agriculture; being an expert in beekeeping, he taught this craft to the peasants of his parish as well.

The persecution of the Church under the Soviet power did not pass over Priest Alexander Abissov. In 1922 he was deprived of rights and of electoral rights; in 1927 the same fate befell his wife. In 1931, as a servant of the Church and an individual farmer, Father Alexander was subjected to an individual tax and a monetary levy which deprived the family of the necessary subsistence minimum, and in 1934 he was arrested and sentenced to two years of exile at forced labour in the mines of the Donbas. In 1936 he returned home an invalid of the second group, with a heart defect and emphysema of the lungs.

On 3 November 1937 Alexander Abissov was arrested again for anti-⁠collective-⁠farm agitation, subjected to a short formal interrogation, taken to the Yaroslavl prison, and two days later, on 5 November, the NKVD troika sentenced him to 10 years of corrective labour. On 15 January 1938 he was taken in a convoy to Taishet station in the Irkutsk region, where the Bamlag administration of the NKVD was located. As an invalid, the priest was sent to the Bushuisky camp point of Amurlag, where the prisoners were building the second track of the Trans-⁠Siberian. Alexander Abissov's condition constantly worsened. On 22 September 1939 the gravely ill priest was placed in the infirmary of the town of Svobodny (the 14th section of Amurlag), where he worked as duty orderly of the ward, helping other patients as gravely ill as himself. From 14 February 1941 Father Alexander could no longer rise from bed. On 19 February 1942 he was placed in the camp hospital for the dying, and on 21 February he died. The holy hieromartyr was buried in a nameless grave without a cross. On 24 April 1989 the priest Alexander Abissov was rehabilitated by the prosecutor's office of the Yaroslavl region.