Alexander Andreyev

Saint Alexander Andreyev, hieromartyr (1901 to 1937), was an archpriest of the Russian Orthodox Church, a priest in Moscow and Ryazan, condemned to death in the camp and shot in the Novosibirsk region in 1937. He was numbered among the saints in August 2000 by the Jubilee Council of Bishops, as a hieromartyr. He is commemorated on 22 October (Old Style).

Youth

He was born into the family of a worker at a brewery; his father was named Alexander, his mother Elena. His brother Boris, chief subdeacon of Archbishop Juvenaly of Ryazan, was shot. He was religious from childhood. He finished the town school in Moscow, specialty bookkeeper, and in 1918 to 1919 worked as a clerk in an evacuation hospital. From 1919 he was a novice at the Ascension monastery in Moscow, then subdeacon of Archbishop Tikhon (Obolensky) of the Urals and Nikolayevsk. He studied theology under his guidance, and Tikhon ordained him in 1921 deacon and then celibate priest, at Uralsk.

Priest in Moscow

From 1922 he served in Moscow, as second priest at the church of the Resurrection in Kadashi, and from 1924 as rector of the church of Saint Sophia on the Sofiyskaya embankment. He founded at the church a sisterhood, about thirty deeply believing women, not entered into monasticism, who gathered in the evenings for talks and agape meals and sang spiritual verses. On Sundays and feast days, in the refectory of the church, from the means of the parishioners and the sisterhood, meals were given for the poor, beggars and orphans, at which forty to eighty needy people came. Before the meal Father Alexander served a molieben, and at the end he usually preached a sermon calling to a truly Christian way of life. He also carried out repairs in the church, taking part himself; the painter V. A. Komarovsky restored the frescoes and painted new scenes, and the priest gathered a good library of Orthodox literature.

Exile in Kazakhstan

On 25 March 1929 he was arrested, accused that, "being a minister of religion, he conducted anti-⁠Soviet agitation among the faithful, organizing and maintaining an illegal sisterhood". He was also charged that he "prayed for the killed and those in prison, openly, from the ambo, before all" and that the sisterhood gathered money for "the clergy and members of church councils in exile and in prisons". On 10 May 1929 he was sentenced to three years of exile in Kazakhstan and spent 1929 to 1932 at Karkaralinsk. Vera Richter, younger daughter of the socialist revolutionary Vladimir Richter, exiled there, relates that when her father was arrested in exile, someone brought a bottle of milk to their house every day early in the morning, which the arrested man's wife carried to the prison. It later came out that the milk was brought by Anna Dyukova, a relative of the exiled priest Alexander Andreyev, who thus helped his companion in exile, a convinced socialist. From that time Father Alexander came every Saturday to the Richters, and they came to the priest on the great feasts. Vera Richter described him as somewhat taller than average, slender, in a black cassock that underlined his figure, with an icon-⁠like profile and fair wavy hair to the shoulders, for her the ideal of the Orthodox priest's appearance.

At Ryazan and martyrdom

In 1932 he was released, but not allowed to live in Moscow and other large cities. He came to Ryazan, where the archbishop was Juvenaly (Maslovsky), was appointed second priest at the cemetery church of the Sorrows, then raised to archpriest and its rector, and was one of the archbishop's closest collaborators. He was also spiritually close to the vicar of the diocese, Bishop Ignatius (Sadkovsky) of Skopin.

On 14 January 1936 he was arrested and held in the Taganka prison in Moscow; at the interrogations he bore himself with confidence and calm, denounced no one and rejected all charges. On 4 April 1936 he was sentenced "for participation in a counter-⁠revolutionary group" to five years in a camp and served in the Suslovo section in West Siberia. In September 1937 he was arrested in the camp, accused of taking part in a "counter-⁠revolutionary group" supposedly led by Archbishop Seraphim (Samoylovich), and, sentenced to death by a troika of the NKVD for the Novosibirsk region, was shot.