Cyprian Annikov

Holy Martyr Cyprian Annikov, a psalm-⁠reader, was born in 1875 in the village of Zelenoe in the Kozlov district of the Tambov province, in a peasant family. His full name was Cyprian Grigorievich Annikov. He received only a basic schooling, worked the land and was a cobbler, a trade he practised for twenty-⁠five years. He had married Tatiana Ananieva.

From 1915 to 1918 he served in the army. In 1929 the family, which had a sound farm, was dispossessed as "kulaks" and driven out to Kazakhstan. In 1930 Cyprian managed to return to Moscow and found work as a concrete worker at a concrete plant, where he stayed two years, while his wife remained in Kazakhstan. Being a believer, he carried out the duties of a psalm-⁠reader; in the arrest warrant of 1937 he is called a "kulak psalm-⁠reader".

On 18 October 1932 he was arrested, probably in Moscow, on a charge of counter-⁠revolutionary activity and sentenced to ten years in the camps under articles 58-10 and 58-11 of the criminal code. He served his term at the Novo-⁠Ivanovsk camp point of Siblag. He was then 62 years old.

On 1 October 1937 he was arrested again, in the camp, and questioned on the same day. He was accused of taking part in a counter-⁠revolutionary group led by another prisoner, Kroshechkin, with whom he was said to have spread propaganda against the authorities. Cyprian firmly rejected the charge: he admitted neither a group nor propaganda. He said that he had sometimes read the newspapers with that man and had prayed with him in the yard behind the barracks. After his arrest the head of the farm wrote an unfavourable report on him, accusing him of working without zeal and of urging prisoners not to go out to work.

On 28 October 1937 the troika of the NKVD of the Novosibirsk region sentenced him to death, together with Archbishop Pavlin (Kroshechkin) and Bishop Arkady (Ershov). He was shot on 3 November 1937 and buried in an unknown place.

Saint Cyprian was numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia at the Jubilee Council of Bishops in August 2000. He is commemorated on 3 November, the day of his death, in the new style, and with the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia on 7 February and the Synaxis of the Saints of Kuzbass on 29 August.