Alexis Protopopov

Holy Hieromartyr Alexei Protopopov was a priest of the Russian Church in the Moscow region. He was born in 1880, in Moscow province, and died as a martyr in 1938, in a camp, not by shooting. He is honoured in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. His commemoration is on 4 May.

He was born into the family of the psalmist Nikolai Mikhailovich Protopopov, of the village of Ilinskoye-⁠Skulnevo, Serpukhov district. He was the sixth son. In 1896 he graduated from the Pererva clerical school and in 1902 from the Moscow seminary. In 1902 and 1903 he taught the Law of God and singing at the parish school of the Saint Daniel Monastery in Moscow. In 1903 he was appointed psalmist at the Epiphany Cathedral in Yelokhovo, where on 18 April he married Antonina Ivanovna Popova, the daughter of the deacon of the church of the Saviour on the Sands, aged twenty. On 1 June he was ordained deacon. From 1904 to 1908 he was also religion teacher at the Poletaeva preparatory school.

From 1907 to 1930 he served as deacon at the church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God in Sushchevo, and from 1908 to 1918 he was religion teacher at the fifth Butyrki city primary school for girls. In 1918 his seventh child was born. From 1919 to 1921, remaining a deacon of the Kazan church, he worked as an accountant in the finance and economics department of the railway commissariat and then in a transport accounting office. After the closing of the Kazan church, from 1930 to 1934 he served as deacon at the church of Venerable Pimen the Great in Novye Vorotniki in Moscow. In 1934 and 1935 he was deacon at the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God in Orekhovo-⁠Zuyevo. In 1935 he was ordained priest and until 27 November 1937, when he was arrested, he served at the church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God in the village of Kazanskoye, Pavlovsky Posad district, Moscow region.

In December 1937 he was sentenced to ten years in a camp. He was held in the Baikal-⁠Amur camp, together with Gabriel Arkhangelsky and Fyodor Smirnov. On 31 March all were sentenced a second time and condemned to death. The sentence was not carried out, because Alexei Protopopov died of heart paralysis in the Surazhevo infirmary on 4 May 1938. In 1956 the sentence was annulled, and in 1997 Alexei Protopopov was posthumously rehabilitated also in the case of 1937. In 2005 the Russian Church numbered him among the saints.