Alexis Serebrennikov

Holy Martyr Alexis Serebrennikov, a psalm-⁠reader, was born on 1 October 1882 in the village of Vasilyevskoe, in the Likhvin district of the Kaluga province. He was shot on 13 October 1937 at the Butovo firing range, near Moscow. The Russian Church honours him among the New Martyrs of Moscow.

He finished the district school. From 1914 to 1916 he was a clerk in the police administration at Zvenigorod. From 1918 to 1926 he worked first in the office of the people's court, then in a land company in the town of Vereya. From 1 January 1926 he was psalm-⁠reader at the cathedral of the Nativity of Christ in Vereya. In January 1930 the cathedral was closed, and he served at the church of the Epiphany in the same town.

On 9 September 1937, in the time of intensified persecution, he was arrested and imprisoned at Mozhaisk. False witnesses said that he had made anti-⁠Soviet propaganda, that he had said the people in the collective farms work hard but receive little, and that of Tukhachevsky he had said it was a pity that good people were being shot. At the interrogation he did not admit guilt, and about Tukhachevsky he answered that he did not even know who he was, had never read about him and had heard his name only when it was written everywhere that he had been arrested.

On 9 October 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced him to death. Psalm-⁠reader Alexis Serebrennikov was shot on 13 October 1937 and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo firing range. He is commemorated on 13 October, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and the Synaxis of the Moscow Saints.