Alexander Bogoyavlensky

Saint Hieromartyr Alexander Bogoyavlensky (1879 to 1937) was a priest in the Tver province and was shot on 3 November 1937 because he tried to defend his church from closure. He is commemorated on 3 November, on 7 February with the synaxis of the new martyrs and confessors of the Russian Church, and on 18 July with the saints of Tver.

He was born in 1879 in the village of Kukarevo, Ostashkov district, Tver province, into the family of the psalm-⁠reader Lev Bogoyavlensky. He finished the church school and was ordained priest, in an unknown year. In the persecutions of the late twenties and early thirties he was arrested because he had not paid a tax set at an impossible amount. In this way the authorities succeeded in arresting the priest and closing the church, where, for lack of a priest, the services ceased. He was sentenced to two years in a labour camp, from which he came out very ill. Even now he did not give up serving the Church, and in March 1937 he was appointed to the church of Saint Nicholas in the village of Gryadtsy, Toropets district, Tver region.

After two months it became clear that the authorities would seek to close this church too. Father Alexander began to gather the "twenty", the only body which by law could defend the church and negotiate with representatives of the state. He went from house to house among the believers, because a meeting of the community in the church was already impossible; it would at once have been regarded as an illegal gathering. Some of the parishioners, who did not know him well because he had come to the village recently, he asked whether they believed in God, and if they answered yes, he asked them to join the twenty.

At the end of September a representative of the NKVD, gathering material for the priest's arrest, questioned witnesses who by their positions feared to contradict the NKVD, such as the chairman and the brigade leader of the collective farm. They said that on the day before, 27 September, a meeting had been held in the village soviet on Father Alexander's activity, which decided that the priest, by his preaching, services, going round the parishioners' houses, baptizing newborns and burying the dead, created an unsettled atmosphere that hindered the success of the authorities' agitation campaigns. They also said that the priest carried on counter-⁠revolutionary agitation for the preservation of the church and its repair, urged the peasants to go to church more often with their children and to pray, and advised the parishioners not to wait for trouble but to baptize their children at once. Three members of the twenty signed, under pressure, statements that they had not belonged to it, and the chairman of the church council, frightened by the investigators' threats, gave up the defence of the church and signed a record they had drawn up.

On 9 October the priest was arrested and imprisoned at Toropets. On 11 October the investigator asked him whether he admitted guilt of counter-⁠revolutionary agitation. He answered that he had carried on no such agitation but, as a priest, had served in the church and gone through the villages to baptize newborns and bury the dead. Asked whether he had distributed counter-⁠revolutionary leaflets, he answered no, and that the parishioners had told him that such leaflets had been spread in the village soviet. That same day the case was closed and given to the NKVD troika. On 1 November the troika sentenced him to death. Father Alexander was shot two days later, on 3 November 1937.