Boris Semenov

Holy Hieromartyr Boris Semenov, a deacon, was born in 1900 in Saint Petersburg, in the family of Alexander Semenov, a typesetter at the printing house of the magazine Niva, and died in a camp, after 1931. He was the cell-⁠attendant and subdeacon of Bishop Augustine, with whom he was arrested. He is commemorated on 7 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, and on 23 November.

Until 1916 he studied at technical school No. 6 attached to the Goznak factory, then until 1920 worked at the factory as a labourer. In 1920 the factory was evacuated to Moscow, and the whole family moved there. Until 1922 he worked as a clerk, then, because of mass layoffs, lost his job and entered a horticultural technical school. At that time he began to help as an altar server at the church of the Archangel Michael on Pirogovskaya street, where he met Bishop Augustine and became his cell-⁠attendant and subdeacon.

When the bishop was exiled to Central Asia, Boris followed him to Pendzhikent. He worked in orchards and helped him at the services in his cell. After Bishop Augustine was appointed to Syzran, he went there too, helped him at the services as subdeacon and carried out various church errands. On his trips to Moscow, the bishop sent letters through him to Metropolitan Sergius. In December 1930 Bishop Augustine ordained him deacon. Arrested together with the bishop, he answered the investigator that Soviet power oppresses the ministers of religion by laying on them taxes beyond their strength, and that, in his view, collectivisation is acceptable for an Orthodox Christian only if it is not directed against the faith. On 28 October 1931 the Special Council of the OGPU sentenced Bishop Augustine and the deacon Boris to three years in a camp.

The prison in Syzran was far from the city, and at the departure, after the bishop's children had been met by believers at the station, the bishop passed in the column of prisoners in his cassock and with his staff and wrote on the glass for them to go home and not stand so long in the frost. The bishop was sent to a camp near Lodeynoye Pole, where the prisoners gathered resin, and then worked as a medical assistant, keeping all the fasts of the Church. The deacon Boris, the bishop's disciple, was sent to another camp, also not far from Lodeynoye Pole, and died in prison.