Alexei Sharov

Holy Hieromartyr Alexei (Alexei Dimitrievich Sharov) was an archpriest, born on 7 February 1883 (our record gives 1882) in a clerical family of the Moscow province, and shot on 17 February 1938 at the Butovo firing range. The Russian Church numbered him among the saints in 2000, at the Jubilee Council of Bishops of 13 to 16 August, among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. His commemoration is on 4 (17) February.

His father, Dimitry Filaretovich, an honorary citizen, in the rank of provincial secretary, ran the post office in the village of Irininskoe, and his grandfather, Filaret Petrovich, had been psalm-⁠reader at the church of that village. In 1900 he finished the Don theological school, and in 1906 the Moscow theological seminary. After the seminary he worked as a teacher in a parish school. In 1908 he was ordained priest for the church of the Exaltation of the Cross at Dmitrievsky Pogost, in the Klin district, where he served all his life. In 1930 he was raised to the rank of archpriest.

In 1930 Father Alexei was put on the list of those to be dispossessed as kulaks and forcibly moved. After the appearance of Stalin's article "Dizzy with Success", the removal was cancelled, and the authorities contented themselves with taking a cow from the priest's family and imposing a higher tax. As awards he received the epigonation in 1916, the skufia in 1921, the kamilavka in 1923, the pectoral cross in 1927 and the palitsa in 1930.

He was arrested on 26 January 1938 and imprisoned in the Butyrka prison. At the interrogation he was asked whether he knew of the counter-⁠revolutionary activity of certain very religious men, the Fedotov brothers and the churchwarden Klyushkin, arrested by the NKVD. He answered that he knew them well as very devout people and was on good terms with them, but that he knew nothing of their counter-⁠revolutionary activity. When accused of having, as a servant of the cult, expressed anti-⁠Soviet views against the policy of the party and the Soviet power, he said that he did not admit guilt and that he had never anywhere expressed counter-⁠revolutionary opinions.

The "special troika of the NKVD" for the Moscow region sentenced him to death on 8 February 1938, under article 58, points 10 and 11, for anti-⁠Soviet agitation. He was shot on 17 February 1938 and buried at the Butovo range. He was rehabilitated in 1989 by the prosecutor's office of the Moscow region.