Boris Voskoboynikov

Holy Hieromartyr Boris (Semyon Timofeevich Voskoboynikov, in the world) was bishop of Ivanovo. He was born on 1 September 1875 in the village of Aleksandrovka, in the Pavlovsk district, Voronezh province, and was shot on 6 December 1937 at Lisya Balka, in the Shymkent region of Kazakhstan. The Russian Church numbered him among the saints in 2000, at the Jubilee Council of Bishops in August, among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.

He was born into the family of a priest. In 1897 he graduated from the Voronezh seminary. On 7 March 1898 he was ordained deacon and served at the Lukinskaya church in the village of Nizhnyaya Gnilusha, then at the Transfiguration church in the settlement of Urazovaya. In 1903 he was ordained priest and served at the Epiphany church in Novorozhdestvenskoe. On 11 October 1907 he was released from service in order to enter the St Petersburg Theological Academy, from which he graduated in 1911 with the degree of candidate in theology. He taught religion at the Alexandrovskaya girls' school (from 1910) and at the Nikolaevskaya commercial school of the St Petersburg merchants (from 1911). On 1 March 1918 he was appointed investigator of the third district of the capital.

He had two sons: Leonid, who in 1937 worked in a research institute in Leningrad, and Tikhon, who lived in France, at Bordeaux, having gone abroad with Kolchak's troops. In the mid-1930s he was a mitred archpriest and rector of the cathedral of the city of Ivanovo. In March 1936 he was tonsured a monk. On 7 March 1936 he was consecrated bishop of Kineshma, vicar of the diocese of Kostroma. From 31 March 1936 he governed the Ivanovo diocese temporarily, and from 1 July 1936 he was bishop of Ivanovo.

In the spring of 1937 he was arrested. He was accused of having taken part in the anti-⁠Soviet activity of counter-⁠revolutionary groups of clergy and monks, liquidated in 1937 in the city of Ivanovo and in the Lezhnevo district. More precisely, it was said that in his diocese, in the village of Voskresenskoe, the relics of Blessed Cyprian were venerated, and that healings took place through his prayers. In February 1937, with Bishop Boris's blessing, the relics were moved from a closed church to an open one, which aroused the displeasure of the authorities. According to other data, at the beginning of 1937 the clergy asked the bishop for permission to move Cyprian's relics from the closed Voskresenskaya church to an open church. The bishop gave his blessing, but the move did not take place. So the sources do not agree on whether the relics were moved.

By decision of the Special Council of the NKVD of 9 August 1937 he was sent into exile in Kazakhstan for five years. While still on the way he was arrested again and sentenced to death. On 6 December 1937 Bishop Boris was shot in the Shymkent region of Kazakhstan and buried in an unknown common grave.