Alexis Krasnovsky

Holy Hieromartyr Alexis Krasnovsky, a priest, was born in 1886 in the village of Rozhdestveno in the Moscow district, in the family of the psalm-⁠reader John Krasnovsky. He was shot on 11 August 1938, in the Bamlag camp. He served in churches of the Orekhovo-⁠Zuevo and Naro-⁠Fominsk districts in the diocese of Moscow.

He studied at the parish school, was ordained deacon and, after the revolution, priest, serving at a church in the Orekhovo-⁠Zuevo district. In 1931 he was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison for failing to fulfil the farm quota and not handing over the seed demanded by the authorities. The priest appealed in court, the quota was cancelled as impossible, and after half a year he was released and returned to his service. In 1934 he was appointed to the church in the village of Novinskoe in the Naro-⁠Fominsk district; in 1936 the church was closed and he was moved to the church at Maurinskoe, where he served until his arrest in 1937.

On 23 September 1937 a priest who was an NKVD collaborator was called as a witness and said that Father Alexis was an enemy of the authorities. Other informers, among them the psalm-⁠reader John Protasov, gave false testimony. On 1 October the investigator questioned him for about five minutes; he answered that he had carried on no anti-⁠Soviet agitation. Taken to Taganka, he was questioned again on 10 October and did not admit guilt. On 11 October 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced him to ten years in a labour camp. He asked for a confrontation with the false witnesses but was refused, and was sent to Bamlag, arriving on 20 November 1937. On the way he was robbed by bandits. At the station of Takhtamygda, in column 46 of the first section, a medical commission found him unfit for work. In a letter of 10 January 1938 to his wife, Anna Nikolaevna, he wrote that he was alive and asked her to write more often.

On 3 March 1938 a new case was begun against him and other prisoners of Bamlag: they were accused of forming a counter-⁠revolutionary group of former clergy who gathered on Sundays in the barracks, read the Gospel, sang church hymns and gave sermons. On 31 March 1938 the NKVD troika sentenced them all to death, without any of them being interrogated. Priest Alexis Krasnovsky was shot on 11 August 1938 and buried in an unknown common grave. He is commemorated on 11 August, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and in the Synaxis of the Moscow Saints.