Andrew Voskresensky

Holy Hieromartyr Andrew Voskresensky was an archpriest of the Russian Church who served in Moscow. He was born on 2 October 1884 and shot on 31 October 1937 at the Butovo firing range near Moscow. He was canonized in the year 2000. He is commemorated on 18 October by the old calendar, which is 31 October by the new.

His father, Archpriest Vladimir Voskresensky (1848 to 1931), was rector of the church of the Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God in Moscow. In January 1931 a special board of the political police sentenced him to three years of exile, and he died on the way. Andrew graduated from the Zaikonospassky clerical school, then from the Moscow Theological Seminary, and in 1908 from the Moscow Theological Academy with the degree of candidate of theology.

In 1909 he was appointed assistant inspector at the Novgorod Seminary. He married Vera Sergeyevna Bulatova.

In 1912 he was ordained priest at the church of the Dormition of the Mother of God in Kazachya Sloboda in Moscow. He was soon raised to the rank of archpriest and named rector. He later served at the church of Saint Gregory of Neocaesarea on Bolshaya Polyanka and at the church of the Holy Trinity on the Sparrow Hills. His last place of service was the church of the Archangel Michael in the village of Karpovo, in the Voskresensk district. For his service he received in turn the epigonation in 1915, the skufia in 1917, the kamilavka in 1920 and the pectoral cross in 1923.

Father Andrew was arrested on 7 October 1937 on a charge of agitation against the leaders of the Soviet government and the collective farms, and was held in the prison at Kolomna. Witnesses were brought who testified against him. Their statements were read to him, and he refuted them one after another.

On 17 October 1937 a three-⁠man NKVD tribunal sentenced him to death by shooting. He was shot on 31 October 1937 and buried in an unknown grave. His son Alexander became a Hero of the Soviet Union; he and his sister Lyudmila learned the truth about their father only after 1960, when the case file could be consulted. Another son, Anatoly, had died in 1934.

Father Andrew was glorified among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia of the twentieth century at the Jubilee Council of Bishops of the Russian Church held in Moscow in 2000. The painter Valery Degtyarev of Voskresensk wrote an icon of the saint and gave it to the church at Karpovo.