Alexander Kolokolov

Saint Hieromartyr Alexander Kolokolov (1880 to 1937) was an archpriest in the Tver province and was shot on 29 December 1937. He is commemorated on 29 December, 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 on 7 March 1880 in the village of Nikolskoe-⁠Neverevo, Korcheva district, into the family of the priest Nicholas Kolokolov. He finished the Tver seminary and in 1913 was ordained priest at the church of Saint Nicholas in his native village. His whole life was bound to this village and church. He knew all his parishioners, had a sufficient peasant holding and did not depend on their gifts. From 1914 he was an active member of the Tver Orthodox Missionary Society. For zealous and blameless service he received a pectoral cross in 1928.

The persecutions renewed at the end of the twenties did not pass him by either. In 1929, taking advantage of the fact that Father Alexander was not only a priest but also a homeopathic doctor, the authorities fined him a thousand rubles for medical practice. A year later he was arrested for non-⁠payment of taxes and sentenced to one year in a labour camp and three years of exile. In 1933, when he returned from exile, Archbishop Thaddeus appointed him rector of the church in his native village and raised him to the rank of archpriest. In January 1937 he was arrested again, accused of having baptized a child in water so hot that he scalded it. The court sentenced him to three years in the camp, but the charge was so absurd that the case had to be dropped, and Father Alexander was released. For his parishioners he was a model of an Orthodox pastor. He desired confession, longed for the Kingdom of God and did not fear even a martyr's death.

On 20 December 1937 NKVD officers arrested him and imprisoned him at Kashin. The investigators called "duty witnesses". One said that Father Alexander gave religious sermons in the Kimry and Goritsy districts, that he had gathered believers at his house several times to ask for the opening of the church, that in August, when the farm workers had to work, he had sent some of them to Moscow and Kalinin, and that he told the farm workers not to work on their days off but to go to church. He also said that in the spring of 1937, when it had not rained for a long time, he told the farm workers that, because they had ceased to believe in God, God was punishing them, and that for this reason, on the feast of Saint Elijah, the farm workers did not go out to work but demanded that the icons be carried out to the fields.

On the day of the arrest the investigator asked whether he admitted guilt of counter-⁠revolutionary agitation and religious propaganda. He answered no: "I love the Church, I believe in God. I will never renounce either faith in God or the priestly rank." The chief of the NKVD section of Goritsy came himself to interrogate him and repeated the facts; Father Alexander said that he did not admit guilt before the Soviet authorities: he had devoted his life to serving God and would serve Him, whether in freedom or in prison; as God's servant, he was bound to care for people's souls and their salvation, and from this he could not turn away in any case. The representatives of earthly power seemed to him now servants of the "powers of darkness", and for this reason he could not admit guilt before such a power. On 27 December the NKVD troika sentenced him to death. Archpriest Alexander Kolokolov was shot two days after the sentence, on 29 December 1937.