Alexis Skvortsov

Holy Hieromartyr Alexis Skvortsov, a priest, was born on 9 February 1875 in the village of Velino, in the Bronnitsy district of the Moscow province, in the family of the priest Peter Skvortsov. He was shot on 4 July 1938 at Butovo, near Moscow, after two arrests. The Russian Church honours him among the New Martyrs of Moscow.

In 1895 he finished the Moscow seminary, and in 1897 he was appointed psalm-⁠reader at the church of the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist in the Ivanovsky Monastery in Moscow. He was ordained deacon on 5 March 1898, and in 1917 priest at the same church, and in 1920 he received the kamilavka. After the monastery was closed in 1918, and the cells turned into cells for political prisoners, the church of Saint John remained a parish church, where he served until its closing. From the end of 1926 he served at the church of the Dormition in the settlement of Gzhel. In 1929, when the priest of the church of Saint Michael the Archangel in the village of Zagornovo was arrested, the church council called Father Alexis, and from then on the family moved there.

In the early 1930s the OGPU looked for a pretext to arrest him. In a collective farm at Zagornovo, the new chairman, sent by the district committee in place of one who knew the people well, ruined and plundered the farm, and people began to leave. To cover his failure, the chairman spread a rumour that the kulaks wished to kill him and other leaders; OGPU officials wrote that in the village there was a grouping led by the priest Alexis Petrovich Skvortsov, preparing a terrorist act. A witness said that his wife had become withdrawn and, learning that she often visited the priest, concluded that the priest had changed her thinking.

On 12 December 1932 Father Alexis was arrested and imprisoned at Butyrka. On 23 December he said at his interrogation that he took care not to speak, that he preached rarely, and that he had indeed asked the faithful for help in paying a large tax, since there was not a kopeck in the church box; he did not admit guilt. Although there was no evidence, on 26 February 1933 the OGPU troika sentenced him to five years of exile in Kazakhstan. Returned, he served again at the church at Zagornovo, where his family had stayed.

On 25 March 1938 he was arrested again. The next day he answered that he, the deacon and the warden sometimes gathered in the church hut, that they spoke of the services and the excessive tax, and that he did not admit guilt. Arrests followed even among the NKVD's own men, and until May the investigation stopped. On 14 May he was questioned again and denied any counter-⁠revolutionary activity. On 7 June 1938 the NKVD troika sentenced him to death. Priest Alexis Skvortsov was shot on 4 July 1938 and buried in an unknown common grave at Butovo. He is commemorated on 4 July, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and the Synaxis of the Moscow Saints.