Alexander Lyubimov

Saint Hieromartyr Alexander Lyubimov (1884 to 1918) was a priest at the church of Saint Elijah in Polonsk, in the Pskov province, and was shot on 10 September 1918, together with the deacon Vladimir Dvinsky. He is commemorated on 13 September, on 7 February with the synaxis of the new martyrs, and on 11 July with the saints of Pskov.

He was born on 13 July 1884 in the village of Polonsky Pogost, Pikalikhino volost, Pskov province, into a priest's family. Finishing the Pskov seminary in 1905, he was a teacher of religion at the parish school near the metochion of the Nikandr Hermitage in Porkhov, then taught Russian and Church Slavonic at the church school in Porkhov. On 11 February 1906 Archbishop Arsenius (Stadnitsky) ordained him deacon, and the next day priest, at the church of Alexander Nevsky at the church school in Porkhov. In 1907 he became priest at the church of Saint Elijah in Polonsky Pogost, his native village. It was a large parish, with an almshouse. About a hundred schismatics lived in the neighbourhood, and Father Alexander laboured much to bring them back to the Orthodox Church. He was teacher of religion at four schools at once; from 1910 he was a member of the Board of Trustees at the diocesan girls' school; he was rewarded in 1910 with the priest's hip-⁠cloth, and in 1914 with the skufia.

The deacon Vladimir Petrovich Dvinsky was born on 13 June 1858 in the same village, into the family of the priest Peter Dvinsky, of a line of priests; the family lived in the ancestral house beside the church of Saint Elijah. At sixteen he entered the Pskov seminary, but had to leave after a year, unable to pay, and the consistory gave him a place as psalm-⁠reader at the church of his village. A year later he was tonsured to the stikharion by Bishop Paul of Pskov and Porkhov. After ten years, married, in 1888 he was appointed deacon to the same church and ordained deacon by Bishop Hermogenes (Dobronravov). He was teacher of religion at two schools, gave his five children an education, and served forty years at the same church, thirty of them as deacon, a rare example of constancy for those times.

After the coup of October, Father Alexander and Father Vladimir continued their joint service in the parish. When the persecutions against the Church began, both remained faithful to their duty: they preached, explained the meaning of what was happening and called the parishioners to defend church property. In the summer of 1918 they read in church the most important decisions of the third session of the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church of 1917 to 1918, calling the faithful to stand in defence of the Church (among other things, not to allow the plundering of church property). Soon denunciations against them began to arrive; their fellow villagers wrote to the Bolsheviks that the priests "held rallies near the church and outside it, read the council's decisions and explained that monastery and church lands could not be taken".

On 10 September 1918 they were arrested. They were accused of "counter-⁠revolutionary actions, monarchism and agitation in church among the peasants against the decree of the Council of People's Commissars" and of having, at the time of the 1905 revolution, denounced their fellow villagers to the police. Before the arrest their houses were searched; books and even gramophone records were declared monarchist. The interrogation was short, each was questioned only once; both firmly rejected the charges of counter-⁠revolution. After a brief investigation by a section of the Petrograd Cheka, they were sentenced to death, and the sentence was carried out at once, by a group of Chekists, in a grove beyond the Polonsk churchyard.