Gabriel Fomin

Holy Martyr Gabriel Fomin was born in 1882 in the village of Ivachevo in the Zaraisk district, in the family of the peasant Khariton Fomin. A deeply believing man, he helped the priest at church and served as watchman, which suited him because of his situation at home, being unmarried. Sometimes he sang in the choir at the church of Zechariah and Elizabeth in the village of Goretovo, so that some who came rarely to church thought that he was a psalm reader. He died in a camp on 22 April 1942.

In 1925-1926 he lived in the village of Gorodets in the Kolomna district and helped the priest of the church of Saint Nicholas. In 1928 he was deprived of the vote, in 1932 he was arrested and sentenced to three years for failing to deliver grain quotas to the state. All his property, with house and outbuildings, was confiscated, so that he was literally left without shelter. Returned from detention, he settled in the village of Sushkovo in the Kolomna district, today Lukhovitsy, and began to help the priest Sergius Lyubomudrov at the church of the Kazan icon there.

On 7 September 1938 he was arrested and charged with spreading counterrevolutionary slander. The same day the investigator brought the charge that in June 1937, at the station of Sushkovo, among passengers, and in November 1937 among collective farmers, he had spoken of the coming fall of the Soviet power. Since Gabriel would not admit the false charges, witnesses were called, among whom some were secret collaborators of the NKVD, who confirmed their written denunciations. He was questioned again, but again he did not confirm. Then he had confrontations with them, but even then he showed firmness and courage. On 2 October 1938 the investigation was completed, and the indictment said that Fomin G. Kh., questioned as the accused, did not admit guilt but was sufficiently exposed by three testimonies and three confrontations.

After the end of the investigation he was held in the Taganka prison in Moscow. On 25 April 1939 he was examined by a doctor, who established that he had tuberculosis of the ankle, which left him little chance of surviving imprisonment. For almost a year the martyr stayed in prison, neither sentenced nor acquitted, while the authorities reorganized the system of troikas and reintroduced court hearings, held in the same secret way. Only on 16 August 1939 did the hearing of his case take place. At the trial, Gabriel said that he had been a watchman at the church and sometimes sang in the choir, that he did not admit guilt, because he had never done any counterrevolutionary acts, that he did not know the witnesses and had never quarrelled with them, that the conversations named in the indictment he had not spread anywhere, and that he had never been a psalm reader, but the witnesses said so because he sometimes sang in the choir. The same day the court sentenced him to five years in a labour camp and three years of loss of civil rights. Gabriel Kharitonovich Fomin died on 22 April 1942 in the NKVD concentration camp of Unzhlag and was buried in an unknown place. He is commemorated on 22 April.