Demetrius Glivenko

Holy Hieromartyr Demetrius Glivenko, a priest, was born on 1 January 1879 in Taganrog, in the family of the state bank clerk Pavel Glivenko. He graduated from the seminary and was ordained priest. In the second half of the 1930s he was rector of the church of the Holy Trinity in the village of Karacharovo, in the Ukhtomsky district of the Moscow region. He received the crown of martyrdom by shooting on 22 March 1938, at Butovo, near Moscow, together with the archpriests Sergius Lebedev, Sergius Tsvetkov and Alexis Smirnov. He is commemorated on 22 March, on 29 May, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo, and on 5 September, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.

The arrest

In January 1938 the authorities arrested the priests of the Ukhtomsky deanery of the Moscow diocese, among them the archpriests Sergius Lebedev, Sergius Tsvetkov and Alexis Smirnov and the priest Demetrius Glivenko, and imprisoned them at Taganka. Father Demetrius was interrogated. He denied that he was a member of a counter-⁠revolutionary group led by the dean Vladimir Fyodorovich Vozdvizhensky, that he had carried out counter-⁠revolutionary activity or that he held hostile views toward socialism. After a week he had a confrontation with the priest Sergius Sakharov, who gave the testimony the investigation required. Father Demetrius rejected it, saying that he had not belonged to any group and had done no counter-⁠revolutionary activity. On 15 March 1938 the NKVD troika condemned to death the priests Sergius Lebedev, Sergius Tsvetkov, Alexis Smirnov and Demetrius Glivenko, and on 22 March they were shot and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo firing range.

His companions

Sergius Lebedev was born on 3 July 1875 in Moscow, in the family of the deacon Pavel Lebedev. He graduated from the seminary in 1895 and in 1898 was ordained priest at the church of the Smolensk icon of the Mother of God of the Novodevichy Monastery. In 1901 his wife Sophia died, and he was left with a three-⁠year-⁠old son. He went to his confessor, the hieromonk Alexis of Zosima, who told him to stay at the monastery, for it was better among doves than among wolves. Once, at the relics of Saint Sergius, he felt, as he told it, that he had dipped his face into a flowering rose bush, and joy came into his soul. He became archpriest in 1920, was sentenced in 1922, then released in 1923, and in 1931 was arrested again and sent for three years into exile in the North because of a photograph that appeared in the New York Times. Freed in 1934, he became secretary to Metropolitan Sergius. Arrested on 21 January 1938, he bowed to the ground before his mother and told her that they would not meet again in this life. Sergius Tsvetkov was born in 1869 in Moscow, in the family of the priest Nikanor Tsvetkov, graduated from the seminary in 1892 and in that year was ordained deacon, and in 1902 priest, at the church of the Resurrection in the village of Veshnyakovo; in 1919 he was arrested together with his son Nikolai, a tsarist officer, who was shot. Alexis Smirnov was born in 1870 in the village of Golubovo, in the family of the priest Sergei Smirnov, was a psalm-⁠reader from 1897, a deacon from 1908 and a priest from 1927; from 1937 he served at the church of the Dormition in the village of Kosino. All of them denied the charges.