Alexis Gorbachev

Holy Martyr Alexis Gorbachev, a psalm-⁠reader and cantor, was born on 5 February 1892 in the village of Kurovskaya, in the Peremyshl district of the Kaluga province, in the family of the peasant Gregory Gorbachev. He was shot on 23 November 1937. The Russian Church honours him among the New Martyrs and Confessors.

He attended the village school. From 1911 he served as a psalm-⁠reader in the church of the village of Muromtsevo. In the autumn of 1937 he was arrested and questioned on a charge of counter-⁠revolutionary activity; he did not plead guilty.

On 19 November 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced to death, in the same case, Archbishop Augustine Belyaev, Archimandrite Ioannicius Dmitriev, Protopriest John Speransky, the psalm-⁠readers Alexis Gorbachev and Apollon Babichev, and Mikhail Arefyev, a member of the church council. All were shot on 23 November 1937 and buried in an unknown common grave. They are commemorated in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kaluga.