Alexis Smirnov

Holy Hieromartyr Alexis Smirnov, a protopriest, was born in 1867 in the village of Gremyachevo, in the Venev district of the Tula province, in the family of the psalm-⁠reader Peter Smirnov. He was shot on 28 February 1938 at Butovo, near Moscow, after forty-⁠three years of service in one parish. The Russian Church honours him among the New Martyrs of Moscow.

When Alexis was seven his father died and his grandfather, a psalm-⁠reader at a church in Moscow, took him in. In 1890 he finished the Moscow seminary and was ordained priest for the church of the Nativity of Christ in the village of Filatovo, in the Zvenigorod district, where he served forty-⁠three years. Next to the church lay the estate of Anna Timofeevna Karpova, born Morozova, widow of the historian Gennady Karpov, and the painter Vasily Polenov was a frequent guest in the village; she and her brother, Sergei Morozov, built a school. These were neighbours and some of Father Alexis's parishioners. Shortly before his arrest he began to serve also at the church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God in the village of Glebovo. In 1924 he received the pectoral cross, in 1929 he was raised to protopriest, and in 1933 he received the cross with ornaments.

The local authorities tried to close the church, first by "economic" means. On 8 September 1928 the church council asked the faithful in writing to help the priest with bread, since he had been refused the ration. In January 1937 the council again asked for help with the tax payment. Hardly had 1938 begun when he was asked for yet another tax, for a year in advance, and the priest wrote to his parishioners that a cultural and income tax of five thousand eight hundred and five rubles had been imposed on him for 1938, asking them to give five rubles per household. On 4 February 1938 the NKVD heard witnesses, who said that he was an anti-⁠Soviet man, that he went from house to house collecting money for the tax, and that he said a time would come when religion would return.

On 16 February 1938 he was arrested and imprisoned at Volokolamsk. He admitted that he had collected money from the peasants and said that the authorities had laid an unbearable tax in order to close the church; he admitted that he had given church literature to those who came to church, and that in November 1937 he had told the peasants that Stalin's leadership had led everyone into a swamp. On 23 February 1938 the NKVD troika sentenced him to death. Protopriest Alexis Smirnov was shot on 28 February 1938 and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo firing range. He is commemorated on 28 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and the Synaxis of the Moscow Saints.