Alexander Ilyenkov

Saint Hieromartyr Alexander Ilyenkov (1896 to 1942) was a priest in southern Ukraine and died in the camp at Usollag on 14 March 1942. He is commemorated on 14 March, on 7 February with the synaxis of the new martyrs and confessors of the Russian Church, on 14 February with the saints of the Perm metropolis, on 2 December with the new martyrs of the Crimean metropolis, and on 28 December with the saints of Crimea.

He was born on 9 April 1896 in the settlement of Sudak, in the Taurida province, into the family of the priest Alexander Ioakimovich Ilyenkov. He finished the Taurida seminary and went to his father, who after 1917 had moved with his family to the village of Chernigovka, in the Berdyansk district. There he met his future wife, Paraskeva; they had three children. He decided to receive the priesthood when the persecution of the Church had already begun; his wife opposed it and tried to dissuade him, but he was unyielding, and in 1924 Bishop Sergius (Zverev) ordained him priest and sent him to Novopavlovka. By his fervent and beautiful service he quickly won authority among the parishioners, for whom the service often remained the only consolation of a hard life.

In 1930 some drunken Komsomol members tried to wreck his house; they fired through the window and the bullet hit the samovar. A woman, seeing what was happening, cried out: "They have killed Father, the wretches," and the Komsomol members, frightened by the noise, ran away. In the thirties, under the pretext of dekulakization, the plundering of peasant farms began. Even then the peasants did not abandon the priest but brought food and grain to his house. Soon his house was searched and, finding two sacks of grain, they took them, but the priest resisted, saying that he had a large family. The officials beat him and dragged him by the beard. Father threw down the sacks, the grain spilled on the ground, and he was accused of scattering and spoiling collective farm property; he was arrested and held in prison for a week. After half a year the village church was closed, and the priest had to leave with his family for Berdyansk. He served there at the Protection church with other priests left without parishes, earning the family's keep as a watchman, labourer or porter, sometimes taking day work cleaning public latrines.

In the summer of 1937 all the priests gathered around the Protection church were arrested, among them Father Alexander Ilyenkov. At first he was held in the Berdyansk prison, where the investigators beat him cruelly, demanding that he sign false testimony; to all questions he answered briefly that he did not admit guilt. After the investigation he was moved to the prison in Zaporozhye. On 29 October 1939 the NKVD troika sentenced him to five years in the camp and he was sent to Usollag, near Solikamsk. He died in custody on 14 March 1942 and was buried in an unknown grave. In the night of 13 to 14 March his daughter, who was in a German concentration camp and knew nothing of her father's fate, had a dream: in the sky a beautiful bud opened and from it appeared the face of the Saviour, and beside it her father, kneeling and praying, in blue vestments with rosy gleams. Many years later she learned that the dream had coincided with the day of her father's death.