Boris Uspensky

Holy Martyr Boris Uspensky was a layman and died in a camp on 15 December 1942, sentenced together with his father, the Holy Hieromartyr Konstantin Uspensky. He was born on 24 July 1895 in the village of Karavaevo, in the Vladimir province. He is commemorated on 15 December, on 7 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 29 August, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kuzbass, and on 5 September, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.

Boris was the eldest of six children. He graduated from the theological seminary, and when the world war began, turned by the Bolsheviks into a civil war, he was mobilised into the Red Army, where he worked as a clerk. After demobilisation he worked as an accountant, and in the last years he lived with his father. False witnesses said that Boris had said that during the service it is a sin to work and that one should go to church and pray to God, and the Lord would give a good harvest.

His father, Konstantin, born on 9 April 1872 in the village of Alekseevskoe, graduated from the Moscow seminary in 1892 and served for more than forty years as a priest at the church of Saint Nicholas in Vasyutino, becoming archpriest in 1925. In the time of the persecution, in the 1930s, the school where he had taught religion was used for gatherings of the atheists, the bells were taken down, and a fire broke out in the village that burned twenty-⁠four houses; at the priest's prayer, as he came out on the steps of the church with the icon, the fire stopped at the church fence. In the autumn of 1937 the investigators forced some of the villagers to give false testimony.

On 6 November 1937 Archpriest Konstantin and his son Boris were arrested and imprisoned at Noginsk. At the investigation the father denied all the charges brought by the false witnesses, among them that he had said in August, at the distribution of apples on the feast of the Transfiguration, that the apples of the collective farm were from Satan. He said that he had given out the apples in silence, according to the order of the Church. Boris too did not declare himself guilty. On 12 November the NKVD troika condemned the archpriest to death, and Boris to ten years in a camp. Archpriest Konstantin Uspensky was shot on 25 November 1937 at Butovo and buried in an unknown common grave. Boris Konstantinovich Uspensky died in Siblag, in the Kemerovo region, on 15 December 1942.