Gleb Apukhtin

Holy Hieromartyr Gleb Apukhtin, a priest (1885-1937), was arrested several times for his faith. He was exiled in 1929, sentenced in 1935 to ten years in the camps and finally shot on 23 September 1937.

He was born in 1885 in the town of Oboyan in Kursk province, to a peasant family, and in 1902 he finished the Oboyan town school. The time of his ordination is not known exactly, but he was a deacon even before the revolution. In 1919 he was mobilised and until 1920 was a private in the 13th Army, stationed at Lugansk. In 1925 he was ordained priest and began to serve in the church of the village of Borovoe, in the Nizhne-⁠Usmansky district of Voronezh province.

In 1929 he was arrested for the first time, on a charge of non-⁠payment of tax. He served the five years of exile first at Kansk in the West Siberian region, then in the Kalinovka district of Kiev region. In 1934 he returned to serve in Borovoe.

On 28 March 1935 he was arrested again, accused of systematic anti-⁠Soviet and defeatist agitation and of insulting the leaders of the state, and even of resisting the removal of the bells from the church. He was sentenced to ten years in a labour camp and sent first to the camp at Michurinsk, then to Volgolag, in the Uglich district of Yaroslavl region. In the camp he worked as a courier. The administration tried to use him to spy on the other prisoners, but he did not become an informer; on the contrary, he himself became the target of slander and denunciation.

In 1937 he was arrested in the camp for refusal to work, with charges of counter-⁠revolutionary agitation among the prisoners, of sabotaging the construction of Volgostroy, of praising the tsarist order and of spreading rumours of war and the fall of Soviet power. The file says that he sought to win the trust of the camp authorities while in fact giving false information. On 22 September 1937 the troika of the NKVD for Yaroslavl region condemned him to death, and on 23 September he was shot.

He is commemorated on 23 September, on 7 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 5 June, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl, and on 17 September, in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Voronezh Metropolis (new style, some days movable).