Alexander Aksenov

Saint Hieromartyr Alexander Aksenov (1886 to 1937) was a priest in the Vyatka diocese and was shot in the Karlag camp in Kazakhstan on 26 September 1937. He is commemorated on 7 February, with the synaxis of the new martyrs and confessors of the Russian Church, on 26 September, and on 21 October with the saints of Vyatka.

Alexander Petrovich (or Pavlovich) Aksenov was born in 1886 in the village of Rychkovo, Nikolsk district, Vologda province (today the Vokhma district, Kostroma region). He finished the Vologda seminary, married, and from 1917 served as priest at the church of Saint Nicholas in the village of Chernovsko-⁠Nikolaevskoe. In 1929 he was arrested on a charge of "anti-⁠Soviet agitation" and exiled for three years to the far North, in the Narym region. He was sentenced first to three years of exile, then to ten years in the camps, for "keeping sermons of counter-⁠revolutionary content".

In 1937 he was in Karlag, in Kazakhstan, together with the priest Stefan Kostogryz, who had served in the Odessa region. The two priests were given a single "group case" and condemned to death on a charge of systematic counter-⁠revolutionary agitation among the prisoners. They were shot together on 26 September 1937 at the first Volkovo section of the Karlag camp.