Andrew Gnevyshev

Holy Martyr Andrew Gnevyshev, church warden of the church of Saint Nicholas at Bezhetsk, was born on 3 August 1872 in Bezhetsk, in the family of the merchant John Gnevyshev. He died in the camp, on 7 March 1941. The Russian Church honours him among the New Martyrs and Confessors.

His father traded in flour and Andrew inherited the occupation: he traded in flax seed and flax fibre and became a great expert in the field. Without leaving his trade he was a sorter at the French firm "Ernest Maquet", which had him as its representative at Bezhetsk. In the First World War he was called to the front as a private. After the revolution all his property, warehouses, shops and houses, was taken by the authorities. The house in which he lived with his wife burned in a fire in 1921, and he built a new one on the same spot, but this too was taken from him, and he had to rent lodgings. Yet he never lost heart over the loss of property: God gave, God took. By 1937 only a horse was left to him, with its winter and summer harness, which allowed him to work as a carter in a state institution.

A deeply believing man, he was church warden of the church of Saint Nicholas at Bezhetsk, where the vicar of the diocese of Tver, Bishop Gregory Kozyrev of Bezhetsk, then served; with him and his priest brothers he had long friendly relations. When the time of persecution came, the NKVD organs drew up lists of all servants of the church and believers for arrest. On 3 November 1937 the arrest paper for Andrew Ivanovich was drawn up, saying that he belonged to "a counter-⁠revolutionary church grouping of former traders and nuns". On the night of 2 to 3 November he was arrested, imprisoned at Bezhetsk and questioned at once. He admitted only that he had been invited once, about 1932 to 1933, to the name day of Bishop Gregory Kozyrev, and that he sometimes went to the bishop's home on church matters. He denied all the charges: that he had spoken of the unprofitability of the collective farms, that he had spoken against the authorities and that he had threatened a crusade of the Pope of Rome. At the last demand to confess counter-⁠revolutionary activity, he said: "I declare that I will tell the investigation nothing about counter-⁠revolutionary activity, because I never carried any on."

On 27 December 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced him to ten years in a camp. After the change in the leadership of the NKVD and the shooting of Yezhov, his wife, Antonina Ivanovna, laboured to obtain her husband's release, but the sentence remained unchanged. The church warden Andrew Ivanovich Gnevyshev died on 7 March 1941 in the Kargopollag camp, Arkhangelsk region, and was buried in an unknown grave. He is commemorated on 7 March, on 7 February, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver, on 18 July, and on 1 November, in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Arkhangelsk Metropolis.