Alexis Krotenkov

Holy Hieromartyr Alexis Krotenkov, a priest, was born in 1878 in the village of Neklyubka in the Surazh district of the Chernigov province, in the family of the Belarusian peasant Peter Krotenkov. He was shot on 18 April 1930, for having defended the church of the village of Nitsinskoe, in the Urals.

In 1902 he finished the teachers' school at Prisna and taught at the parish school of his village. After the pastoral courses in Moscow he was ordained priest on 13 March 1911, for the church in the settlement of Ushkevsky, in the Turinsk district of the Tobolsk province. In 1915 he was moved to Nizhne-⁠Romanovskoe, and in 1929 to the church of Saint Nicholas in the village of Nitsinskoe, in the Irbit region, where he served until his arrest in 1930. The parish numbered, besides the village, four hamlets, with 2160 believers. In 1925 the church had been seized by the Renovationists, but the faithful resolutely rejected them and brought the church back to the Orthodox. Father Alexis soon showed himself a zealous pastor and preacher, loved by his parishioners.

At the end of 1929 the authorities decided to close the church. After the parish had paid all the obligatory dues, one of them twice, the village council demanded an additional insurance payment of 524 rubles, then of 1196. Father Alexis said that if the money could not be raised even from gifts, the church still should not be given up: better to die for the Orthodox faith than to leave the holy place to mockery. On 8 January 1930 a parish meeting of five hundred and twenty-⁠five people voted unanimously against the new payment. The church warden was arrested, and the priest, the church council and some fifty believers stayed the night in the church, locked from within, with a watch on the bell tower. When the militia came to seal the church, the people crowded round the warden and cried that they would give up neither the church nor the warden; the authorities then withdrew. On 16 January an OGPU agent, posing as a Soviet official, persuaded the priest's wife to call him home. Father said "They will arrest me, I feel it", prayed before the icon of the Mother of God of Athos, and went out; he was arrested on the way and imprisoned at Irbit. The church was closed and sixteen people were arrested.

At the interrogation he admitted only that, at the faithful's request, he had stayed overnight in the church, in the hut, and said he had made no agitation or sermons against the authorities. The indictment of 25 March 1930 named him the organiser of a kulak grouping and charged that in his sermons he urged people to stay faithful to the Church of Christ and not to enter the collective farms, and that he had hung in the church an Orthodox calendar with a quotation from Holy Scripture (3 Esdras 8:56 to 61). On 11 April 1930 the OGPU troika sentenced him to death. Priest Alexis Krotenkov was shot on 18 April 1930 and buried in an unknown common grave. He is commemorated on 18 April and in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, and in the Synaxis of the Saints of Yekaterinburg, on 11 February.