Alexei Skorobogatov

Holy Martyr Alexei (Alexei Semyonovich Skorobogatov) was born in 1889 in the village of Seredyakovo, Solnechnogorsk district, Moscow province, and was shot on 5 April 1938 at the Butovo firing range. The Russian Church numbered him among the saints as a martyr in 2000, for veneration throughout the Church. He is commemorated on 23 March by the old calendar (5 April by the new) and in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.

His father, Semyon Skorobogatov, was a gardener, and his mother a peasant woman. In 1909 he passed as an external student the examination at the two-⁠class teachers' school, received pedagogical training and was appointed to the parish school at Ashcherino. From 1911 to 1915 he taught at the school at Aleksino. In the First World War, in 1915, he was mobilized and served with the rank of second lieutenant. From 1918 to April 1921 he served in the Red Army at the staff of the 15th Inza rifle division, first as copyist, then as clerk, later as assistant to the chief of staff of the division for supplies. After demobilization, in 1921, he lived in the Ruza district of the Moscow region. He married Natalia Golubeva (born 1890) and they had three children: Valentina (1922), Anna (1926) and Ivan (1929).

From 1921 to 1923 he was psalm-⁠reader at the church of Saint John the Baptist at Ashcherino. At the end of the 1920s, during collectivization, he was deprived of his house, horse and cow. From 1935 he lived in the settlement of Ivanovo in the Ruza district and was head of the Ivanovo primary school. He was arrested on 2 January 1938 on a charge of conducting counter-⁠revolutionary agitation and imprisoned in the Butyrka prison. At the interrogation he confirmed that he had been an officer in the tsarist army and that from 1921 to 1923 he had been a church reader at the church of Ashcherino, but said that he had carried on no counter-⁠revolutionary activity. The higher organs of the NKVD returned the case for further work, with the instruction to question one or two more witnesses, since the witnesses questioned had given weak material. On 8 March 1938, after the completion of the case, the NKVD troika for the Moscow region sentenced him to death, under article 58-10, for "counter-⁠revolutionary agitation against the measures of Soviet power and the party". He was shot on 5 April 1938 at the Butovo range.