Boris Kozlov

Holy Martyr Boris Kozlov was a layman, a peasant of the Kaluga province, and received the crown of martyrdom by shooting on 5 December 1937 at Sukhinichi, together with the Optina monks Eutychius, Avenir, Savva and Mark. He was born on 23 July 1886 in the village of Sleptsovo, in the Kozelsk district, in the family of the peasant Anton Kozlov. He is commemorated on 7 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 31 July, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kaluga, on 24 October, in the Synaxis of the Saints who shone forth at the Optina Hermitage, and on 5 December.

Like many peasant children of that time, he went to earn his living in Saint Petersburg and took a job at the Putilov factory. The atheist environment at the factory was hard to bear for a devout young man from the country, and he left. Between 1909 and 1911 he was a labourer at a monastery in Petersburg, then served a landowner in Maloyaroslavets, worked in Kaluga and in 1920 returned to his native village to farm. In 1926 he was elected warden of the church of the Protection in the village of Pokrovskoe, near Sleptsovo. Probably because he carried out his duty with too much zeal, he began to annoy the atheists, who, wishing to close and ruin the church, laid on him a task of supplying firewood, which he could not fulfil. The court sentenced him to a year of forced labour and a fine of three hundred roubles. After serving his sentence he settled in Kozelsk, where he worked as a stableman at the city hospital, in which he also lived, and gave all his free time to the church, singing in the choir of the church of the Annunciation. His closest friends were the monks of Optina who lived in Kozelsk. With them he was arrested on 28 October 1937 and imprisoned at Sukhinichi.

Witnesses said that in August 1937 he had maintained that God would save people from the barbarians who close the churches, that he went secretly to church on feast days, where he met the monks, and that at home he read church books. The investigation charged him with organising monks around the hospital and with placing the monk Tikhon there as a watchman. He denied any propaganda against Soviet power, denied that he had gone to gatherings of the monks, but said that he went to church and sang in the choir beside nuns. On 21 November 1937 the NKVD troika condemned him to death, together with the monks Eutychius Didenko, Avenir Sinitsyn, Savva Suslov and Mark Makhrov. On the feast of the Entry of the Mother of God into the Temple, 4 December, they stood in prayer, though in prison. The next day, 5 December 1937, they were shot and buried in an unknown common grave.