Demetrius Troitsky

Holy Hieromartyr Demetrius Troitsky, a priest (1905-1937), served at the church in the village of Pereterye, in the Tver region. He was born on 20 July 1905 in the family of the official of the excise department Ivan Troitsky, and received the crown of martyrdom by shooting on 3 November 1937. He was glorified in 2000. He is commemorated on 3 November, on 7 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, and on 18 July, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver.

His pious parents raised their children in faith and in love of God and neighbour, and all four of their sons became priests. The youngest was Demetrius. For three years he studied at the primary school in Kashin, then entered the clerical school, which, despite the revolution, continued to exist and only in 1921 was renamed a Soviet school of the second grade, which he finished in 1923. His father had died by then, and his priest brothers helped him to be educated. Young in years but a man in strength of soul, at twenty he was ordained priest at the church in the village of Pereterye, in the Sonkovo district. The young priest was aware that he had begun to serve in times of unceasing persecution, but this did not frighten him. At each service he gave a sermon, preparing carefully, lived the sorrows and troubles of his parishioners, strove that the fire of faith should burn unquenched in their souls, in the midst of the darkness of state atheism, supported those who were despondent and wished to teach them to care first for spiritual things and then for material, to fear sin more than persecutions. For this sincere service the parishioners loved the young priest, in whom they saw an Orthodox pastor. Church life in the parish revived, people ran more often to confession and communion and strove to give their children a Christian upbringing. This did not please the atheist authorities, who began to look for a pretext to remove him from the parish: in 1930 they arrested him for keeping fifty-⁠one roubles in silver and sentenced him to three years in a camp. He was sent to the building of the White Sea-⁠Baltic canal. After his release he returned to the same church in Pereterye. He did not change his convictions; on the contrary, the trial benefited him and strengthened his faith, and the authorities began again to look for an occasion for arrest.

The persecution

In 1936 the persecution began again with new force: most of the bishops were deprived of registration, and many priests returned from detention were refused registration. The priest was arrested and accused of violating the rules of civil registration. The Sonkovo court sentenced him to six months of corrective labour. The priest did not accept the charge, appealed through the regional court and was freed. Returning to service, the priest, knowing that the sufferings were not over and would continue with the growth of persecutions, used every opportunity for the enlightenment of his parishioners and their integration into the Church. He lived and worked as an Orthodox pastor and as a Christian, as long as the Lord gave him time. On the first Sunday of Great Lent in 1936, at the time of the Passion, the priest, in a sermon on repentance, called all, whoever they might be, to repentance: those ready to deceive, offend or sell their neighbour out of greed, those who judge their neighbour, those who leave the Church for the world, parents who look indifferently on the vices of their children, disobedient children, the young who reject the mysteries of the Church, the blasphemers of the name of Christ. And he gave as examples of repentance Peter, the sinful woman, the prodigal son, the publican and the wise thief. On the feast of the Protection of the Mother of God he spoke in a sermon of the need and the benefit that each Christian has of going to church and raising his prayers, recalling how, when the enemies had surrounded Constantinople, the inhabitants were not afraid but ran to the church and the Mother of God covered them with her veil.

Arrest and death

In September 1937 he was finally arrested, accused of counter-⁠revolutionary agitation and of corrupting the youth. Among the charges were letters to acquaintances, in which he wrote that materialists do not value the soul and ruin the spiritual foundations of the family, and a notebook of religious poems, with a portrait of Stalin on the cover, which he had simply used as a cover. The investigator also accused him of urging the schoolchildren, through moral-⁠religious instruction, not to obey their teachers and of frightening them with the word of God, because of which they had missed school and fallen behind in their studies, and of complaining that the authorities persecuted the ministers of religion as in the time of Ivan the Terrible. The priest denied all of this and said that the confessions were held on Sundays, when the schoolchildren had no school, and that in the letters he had in view only the religious point of view. In the indictment the investigator, unwittingly witnessing to the faith and confessor's labour of the priest, wrote that by his convictions he was a thorough counter-⁠revolutionary churchman, with every fibre of his consciousness and actions an opponent of socialist construction; that after returning from the camp he did not give up his convictions and began again to serve; that in sermons he carried on counter-⁠revolutionary agitation to draw the young from school and attract them to church; that, profiting from the short-⁠sightedness of the collective farm board, he was admitted to work on the collective farm and in 1936 earned a hundred workdays; that, questioned as accused, Troitsky did not admit guilt. On 1 November the NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and two days after the sentence, on 3 November 1937, he was shot.