Alexis Zverev

Saint Alexis Zverev, martyr, was a missionary against the schism of the Old Believers and received a martyr's death in 1918, in the Perm governorate. He was glorified among the saints, new martyrs and confessors of Russia, by the Jubilee Council of Bishops in August 2000, for veneration throughout the Church. He is commemorated on 27 August by the new style (14 August by the old).

He was born in 1872 into a peasant family in the Moscow governorate and finished primary school. He passed from the old belief to Orthodoxy under the influence of Archpriest John Vinogradov, rector of the church of Saint Sergius of Radonezh in the Rogozhskaya Sloboda quarter of Moscow, who then became his spiritual father.

He lived in the village of Borisovo, in the Moscow district. He became an anti-⁠schism missionary in the diocese of Moscow, receiving the blessing of Metropolitan Vladimir (Bogoyavlensky) to preach vested in a sticharion in the local church of the Holy Trinity (in the 1900s). In summer, in the absence of the rector, he led regular conversations with the Old Believers in the Saint Nicholas monastery of the Edinoverie (united faith) in Moscow, with the blessing of its abbot, Archimandrite Paul (Lednev).

In 1917 he was elected as a layman from the diocese of Moscow a member of the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, and took part in all three sessions, in the seventh, ninth and tenth departments. In 1918 he was a member of the commission of the Council for investigating the murder at Perm of Archbishop Andronik (Nikolsky). When the commission, having finished its investigation, was returning to Moscow, soldiers of the Red Army burst into the railway car, killed all the members of the commission and threw their bodies from the train. The materials of the investigation and the money collected for the needs of the Council were stolen. Local peasants found the bodies of the martyrs and buried them. Pilgrimage began at the grave, but the authorities dug up the bodies and burned them.

His writings include the book Processions of the Cross in the Village of Borisovo, Orthodox and Old Believer, published in Moscow in 1911.