Alexis Moskvin

Holy Hieromartyr Alexis Moskvin, a priest, was born on 17 March 1891 in the town of Bezhetsk, Tver province, in the family of an official of the district military board. He was shot on 3 November 1937, at Kalinin (Tver). He was glorified by the Council of Bishops of the Russian Church in the year 2000.

He studied at the spiritual school at Bezhetsk and then at the seminary of Tver. A seminary certificate survives from which we learn that the young man did not study brilliantly, though his conduct was excellent; he finished in 1912, in the second category. He married the daughter of the priest of Savtsino, Nikolai Alekseevich Nosov, and in the same year was ordained priest at the church of the village of Savtsino, where he served almost eighteen years.

On 6 February 1930 Father Alexis and ten others from the surrounding villages were arrested on the false charge of taking part in a "kulak anti-⁠Soviet grouping", and he was sentenced to exile in the Northern Territory. In 1933 he returned to the Kalinin region and was appointed to the church of the village of Borisovo, in the Kesovaya Gora district.

On 8 October 1937 he was arrested again, imprisoned at Kashin and charged with counter-⁠revolutionary activity aimed at wrecking the collective farms. False witnesses said that he obstructed grain collection, urged the peasants to keep the feasts and collected money for the church. At the interrogation of 19 October he said that in June 1937, together with the church warden Zadonsky, he had explained to the faithful a paragraph of the contract for the repair of the church and why money had to be collected, but that he had urged no one to disobey the authorities. Nevertheless on 1 November 1937 the NKVD troika of the Kalinin region sentenced him to death. He was shot at Kalinin and buried in an unknown place.

His wife, Pavla Nikolaevna, and their five children remained living in a stranger's house, secretly helped by people who loved him. His daughter Angelina, fourteen, went to Kashin to see her father in prison, but was told he was not there; the way home, she said later, she made in tears. The widow never learned what had happened to her husband and died in 1974; the daughters learned their father's fate only in 1990. He was rehabilitated on 10 September 1989. He is commemorated on 3 November, on 7 February and in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver, on 18 July.