Constantine Slovtsov

Holy Hieromartyr Constantine Slovtsov, a priest († 1918), was a graduate of the Tobolsk seminary and served in the village of Yegorshinskoe in the Irbit district. His full name was Constantine Vissarionovich Slovtsov.

On 22 October 1912 His Grace Mitrophan (Afonsky), bishop of Yekaterinburg and Irbit, ordained him deacon, and two days later, at the Nativity church of the Kyshtym works in the Yekaterinburg district, raised him to the rank of priest. His first place of service was the Ascension church of the Polevskoy works in the same district. In September 1913 he was transferred to the village of Yegorshinskoe in the Irbit district, to the church of the Holy Prophet Elijah.

In the years of the revolution priests in the Irbit district began to leave their parishes. Father Constantine could also have left the village, which had become a gathering place of groups hostile to the Church, but he did not, and did not leave his parishioners without spiritual guidance but went on serving, placing all his hope in God. At the beginning of July 1918 a punitive detachment came from Yegorshino station to the village of Sarafannoe to arrest and shoot the priest Florentius Troitsky; he was not at home and hid in the forest for two days.

Before the arrival of the Whites, an uprising against the Bolsheviks broke out in Yegorshinskoe: the railway workers and employees mobilised into the Red Army, who were to be taken to Yekaterinburg, rose up, being unpaid for a month and not given the promised flour and ration. The revolutionary committee asked for help from Pavlovsky's detachment, which was in another district. Pavlovsky returned quickly and demanded that the "organisers of the uprising" be handed over to him, deciding himself whom to count as such. In his memoirs he wrote that among the leaders was Father Constantine Slovtsov. All of them were arrested and soon shot. With Father Constantine the Red soldiers dealt with special cruelty: before his death they tormented him, stabbed him with bayonets, cut off his nose together with his upper lip, and then shot him. This happened on 20 July/2 August 1918. From the priest's body they took the epitrachelion, put it with the pyx on a cow and led it so through the village. Later the pyx was found with a Red soldier, filled with tobacco. Father Constantine's dwelling was plundered.

By his martyr's death Father Constantine showed devotion to the Orthodox faith and the Church, and the courage and greatness of spirit of a simple village shepherd. By decision of the Holy Synod of 17 July 2002 he was glorified in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. He is commemorated on 2 August, the day of his death, on 11 February, with the Synaxis of the Saints of Yekaterinburg, and on 7 February, with the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, in the new style.