Gabriel of Arkhangelsk

Holy Hieromartyr Gabriel of Arkhangelsk, a deacon, by family name Arkhangelsky, was born in 1885 and died shot on 5 July 1938, in a camp. He was a deacon of the church of Saints Peter and Paul at the Mariinsky hospital in Moscow.

He was born in the village of Arkhangelskoe in the Volokolamsk district of the Moscow province, in the family of the psalm reader Nicholas Arkhangelsky. In 1906, dismissed from the fourth class of the Volokolamsk church school, he was appointed psalm reader at the church of Saints Peter and Paul on the river Klyazma, in the village of Petropavlovskoe; in 1909 he was moved as psalm reader to the church of the Archangel Michael at Arkhangelskoe, and in 1911 to the church of Saints Peter and Paul at the Mariinsky hospital in Moscow. From 1907 he was a teacher of singing in parish schools. On 28 September 1915 he was ordained deacon at the church at the Mariinsky hospital. From 1934 he served in the church of the Transfiguration on Preobrazhenskaya Square, where the persecutions of the late thirties caught him.

On 11 December 1937 several members of the clergy of the churches of the Transfiguration and of the Epiphany at Yelokhovo were arrested, among them Deacon Gabriel, and imprisoned in the Taganka prison. The next day he was interrogated. The investigator wished to learn who else had served with him, how often they gathered and why, whether there had been political conversations when they met at Archbishop Sergius of Dmitrov, vicar of Moscow. The deacon answered that at the clergy's visits to the archbishop no political discussions were held, only that, at the publication of the new constitution, the archbishop congratulated them on the civil rights obtained. He was told that he had spread provocative rumours about the persecution of religion, about an approaching war of the fascist states with the USSR and the defeat of the latter, but he denied it. On 16 December the deacon Michael Toluzakov was interrogated, used as a witness whenever they had not enough data to frame a charge, who said that Arkhangelsky was hostile to the Soviet power, had drawn believers to church and, at the closing of the church at Krasnaya Presnya, had urged them to mass demonstrations and to gathering signatures of protest.

On 20 December 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced Deacon Gabriel to ten years in a labour camp, and on 5 February 1938 he arrived with a convoy of prisoners in the city of Lesozavodsk, at the 19th section of Bamlag. Almost at once a new case was begun against him and the clergy gathered in column 145. In early March 1938 informers reported that the priests gathered in the camp sang prayers aloud and talked of the coming church feasts. On 12 March Archpriest Leonid Kharyuzov was interrogated, who admitted guilt of counterrevolutionary conversations among prisoners, then the priest John Sokolov, and after that the witnesses. In all thirty-⁠one people were brought to account, of whom four admitted guilt, and the others did not, among them Deacon Gabriel. On 31 March 1938 the NKVD troika sentenced them all to death by shooting. They were however kept for a time, going on with work; some died in torments before the execution, like the priest Alexis Protopopov. On 5 July 1938 all the arrested who had lived to this last day on earth were shot, among them Deacon Gabriel Arkhangelsky. He is commemorated on 5 July.