Alexis Gavrin

Venerable Martyr Alexis Gavrin (in the world Alexei Petrovich Gavrin) was a monk of the Russian Orthodox Church, born in 1883 in the village of Pichaevo, Tambov governorate, and shot on 10 December 1937 at the Butovo firing range near Moscow. He was numbered among the saints for veneration throughout the Church by decision of the Holy Synod of 17 July 2001. He is commemorated on 27 November (10 December) and in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.

He was born into the family of the peasant Pyotr Gavrin, who was well-⁠read and served as village scribe. He graduated from the parish church school. Called up for the army, he served in the 7th Caucasian Reserve Regiment, quartered at Tambov, where in 1905 he graduated from the military veterinary orderly school. In 1916 he moved to Moscow and settled near the church of the Deposition of the Robe. In 1923 he was tonsured a monk. He increased his ascetic labours and for his piety became known to many believers. He was also known as a good veterinarian. In the 1930s his spiritual father was the protopresbyter Alexander Khotovitsky, rector of the church.

He was arrested on 22 October 1937 and imprisoned at Butyrka. At the interrogation he said that he had shown discontent at the Soviet power's persecution of religion, the closing of churches and the arrest of clergy, and had said that the power of the antichrist would not last long and that the time would come when the Orthodox faith and the Church would reign again. He testified that he urged the believers, by humility and love of God, to strengthen the Church; that many people from villages around Moscow visited him, who knew him as a veterinary orderly and came to ask help for sick cattle, but also other counsel, such as whether to join the collective farms, and to those who asked about the collective farms he had said not to join, saying that the Soviet power would soon perish, because many were discontented with it.

On 23 November 1937 the NKVD troika of the Moscow region sentenced the monk Alexis to death because he had carried on systematic anti-⁠Soviet agitation, glorified, for counter-⁠revolutionary ends, the grave of the late hieromonk Aristoklii, organising pilgrimages to it, and taken an active part in a counter-⁠revolutionary church-⁠monarchist grouping. He was shot on 10 December 1937 and buried in the common grave at Butovo. He was rehabilitated in June 1989.