Alexis Troitsky

Holy Hieromartyr Alexis Troitsky, a priest, was born on 1 February 1875 in the city of Kolomna, in the family of the psalm-⁠reader Nicholas Troitsky of the church of Saint John the Theologian, who died in 1893. He reposed in the camp on 20 February 1942. He was numbered among the holy New Martyrs on 6 October 2005. The Russian Church honours him among the New Martyrs of Moscow.

After his father's death his mother became a prosphora-⁠baker at a city church and died in 1903. In 1896 Alexis finished four classes of the Moscow seminary, and in 1900 he was appointed psalm-⁠reader at the church of the Nativity of Christ in the village of Besedy, in the Podolsk district. In 1902 he was ordained deacon, and in 1903 moved to the church of the Icon of the Saviour Not Made by Hands in the village of Volynskoe, near Moscow, and settled in the nearby village of Davydkovo. On 19 July 1920 he was ordained priest for this church, and on 21 October 1921 the assembly of parishioners elected him rector in place of the late Priest Kolokolov, an election confirmed at once by a vicar of the diocese of Moscow. In 1929 he was arrested on a charge of having set fire to the church, but after three days he was released because it could not be proved. In 1934 the church at Volynskoe was closed by the authorities, and from 1935 he served at the church of the Intercession at Fili. It is known that he visited the sisters in the village of Davydkovo, among them Venerable Martyr Alexandra Kasparova, for whom he served services and whom he communed.

In early November 1937, in fulfilment of the order to destroy the clergy, the NKVD heard witnesses who portrayed him as a man dissatisfied with the state order. The proof, in their view, was the zeal with which he fulfilled his duties, his care to enlighten people with the light of Christ, the fact that he went to the homes of the collective farmers with molebens and often served memorial services at the cemetery, where crowds gathered. They said that he told the collective farmers that the Soviet authorities oppress the clergy and the faithful and arrest priests.

On 17 November 1937 Father Alexis was arrested and imprisoned at Taganka. Of the words about the constitution that were laid to his charge, he said that he had read the constitution and the rules of the elections but had spoken with no one about them, and that conversation he wholly denied. He admitted that the previous summer he had served memorial services with the believers of Davydkovo at the cemetery, without the authorities' permission, and that he had gone to homes, sometimes uninvited, on patronal feast days, but he denied any counter-⁠revolutionary talk. On 23 November 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced him to ten years in a camp. On 23 December 1937 he arrived at a camp on the White Sea-⁠Baltic Canal, and on 30 July 1941 he was sent to Kuloylag in the Arkhangelsk region. Priest Alexis Troitsky reposed in custody on 20 February 1942 and was buried in an unknown place. He is commemorated on 20 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, the Synaxis of the Moscow Saints and the Synaxis of the Saints of the Arkhangelsk Metropolis.