George Bogoyavlensky

Holy Hieromartyr George Bogoyavlensky, a priest, was born on 1 January 1883 in the village of Matrenka in the Nizhne-⁠Usmansky district of Tambov province, to the psalmist Alexander Bogoyavlensky. In the First World War he served as a regimental clerk, and after the revolution as a psalmist in a church. In 1930 he was ordained a priest at the church of the Protection of the Mother of God in the village of Verkhny Teleliui, in the Lipetsk region.

In the spring of 1935 the authorities decided to close the church and, to do this, to arrest the priest. Some collective farmers, the chairman of the farm and the secretary of the village council gave false testimony, saying that Father George had reviled Soviet power and agitated against the collective farms, and that in the house of the farmer Stolpovsky, before a vigil to which the host had invited him, he had agitated against the authorities and made the farmers drunk. Stolpovsky, called as a witness, firmly rejected the lies.

On 8 May 1935 he was arrested, imprisoned in the prison at Usman and interrogated the next day. He said that he had held no conversations about the collective farms and had not reviled the authorities. In December 1934 he had entered the church used as a grain depot and had seen the plunder: the silk curtain of the church was missing, the glass of the icons was gone, and the twelve sheets of iron kept for the roof had vanished, as had the drainpipes on the front. The watchman, asked where they had gone, cursed him, saying that here everything belongs to the people. The priest replied that here it was not the people's but the state's, and that the church and the group of believers answered for it. As to the chairman's claim that on 6 January he had come drunk to the council and called Soviet power April snow, he called it a lie. He asked the investigator to call witnesses who would confirm that no such words had been said, but the request was rejected.

On 23 July 1935 the closed session of the visiting bench of the Voronezh regional court began. Father George said that he did not plead guilty and that the charge had been brought out of personal scores with the chairman of the council. Some of the witnesses called repeated the lies, on fewer points than at the preliminary investigation, and the main witnesses were not called at all. The same day he was sentenced to five years in a labour camp and sent to the Far East.

In March 1938 the arrested hierarchs and clergy were moved from the camp to the prison at Blagoveshchensk. On 17 March 1938 an NKVD troika condemned them to death. On 1 June 1938 Archbishop Onuphry (Gagalyuk), Bishop Anthony (Pankeev), the priests Hippolytus Krasnovsky, Mitrophan Vilhelmsky, Alexander Yeroshov, Michael Deineka, Nikolai Sadovsky, Vasily Ivanov, Nikolai Kulakov, Maxim Bogdanov, Alexander Saulsky, Pavel Popov, George Bogoyavlensky and the psalmist Michael Voznesensky were shot and buried in an unknown common grave.

He is commemorated on 1 June, on 7 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church (a movable day), on 1 August, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kursk, and on 23 September, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Lipetsk (new style).