Gregory Berdenev

Holy Martyr Gregory Berdenev was a peasant of the Ryazan region, sentenced to death in 1937 in the time of the Bolshevik persecution.

He was born on 24 January 1890 in the village of Pogost in the Kasimov district of Ryazan province, to a poor peasant family. As a child he attended three classes at the village school and, as is the usual lot of peasant children, began to work early, first in his father's household. In the First World War, from 1914 to 1918, he fought in the tsarist army. At thirty he married the peasant woman Elena Nikitichna, and the Lord gave them three children: Nikolai (1926), Zinaida (1930) and Claudia (1932).

His household was modest: a house with outbuildings, a goat, two sheep and a cow. From his father he had learned the carpentry trade and worked at the Pogost shipyard as a wood-⁠turner and carpenter. From his father too he knew shoemaking, as a craftsman, and was known all around as a good cobbler. He was, in short, a man skilled at everything: farmer, carpenter and shoemaker. The chairman of the village soviet wrote of him, in a note to the NKVD, a characterisation in the words of a barely schooled man, calling him an active and inveterate churchman who believed in God and was no friend of Soviet power. It came to us in the form of a denunciation, but it is a fine testimony for a believer; and the indictment too called him an active churchman.

Accused in a case of an insurgent organisation, he was arrested on 6 November 1937. At the single interrogation he admitted guilt on no point of the charge and incriminated no one. On 6 December 1937 he was sentenced to death by shooting, under article 58, points 10 and 11.

He is commemorated on 23 December, on 23 June, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Ryazan, and on 7 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church (new style, the last being a movable day).