Alexei Benemansky

Holy Hieromartyr Alexei Benemansky was an archpriest of the Russian Church. He was born on 6 January 1881 in the village of Baranya Gora, Tver province, and was shot on 4 December 1937. He was numbered among the saints as a hieromartyr in the year 2000, for veneration throughout the Church.

He was the son of Priest Konstantin Benemansky. He graduated from the Tver seminary (1902), and in 1904 he was ordained priest. He served at the Tver convent of the Nativity of Christ and taught the Law of God. After the closing of the convent he moved to the church of the Icon of the Mother of God of the Sorrowful. In the summer of 1919 he was elected a member of the diocesan council.

The first arrest was during the civil war, in 1920, and he was sent to work behind the front. The second, in the autumn of 1922, in the campaign for the confiscation of church valuables, brought a sentence of two years of exile in Turkestan, from which he was freed in 1924. At the end of 1926 he returned to Tver and continued the struggle against the Renovationists. He was rector of the Sorrowful church. The third arrest was on 15 March 1932; on 26 March he was interrogated and did not admit guilt. In July 1932 he was sentenced to three years of exile in Kazakhstan; after his exile ended, he returned to Tver.

The fourth and last arrest was in 1937. He was accused of taking part in a counter-⁠revolutionary fascist-⁠monarchist organization led by the hieromartyr Thaddeus, archbishop of Tver. He did not admit guilt. In one of his diaries thoughts about the future are preserved which frightened him: if there, where no one knows them, they enjoy so much kindness, would they soon be forgotten in the place where they had laboured and for whose cause they took up the cross? They are their own people and suffer for the cause of the Church; and he urges the person to whom he is writing to be a good Christian and to be gentle with all, at home, at school and in the street.

On 4 December 1937 Archpriest Alexei Benemansky was shot, by sentence of the three-⁠man tribunal of the political police. The place of his burial is not known. On 19 September 1999 he was canonized as a locally venerated saint of the Tver diocese. He was numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia by the decision of the Jubilee Council of Bishops in Moscow, from 13 to 16 August 2000. He is also commemorated in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.