Gregory Voinov

Holy Hieromartyr Gregory Voinov, an archpriest, was born on 26 January 1875 in the village of Teply Stan in Moscow province, in the family of the psalmist Alexander Voinov. After finishing the Bethany theological seminary in 1898, he became a teacher at the parish school attached to the church of the Kazan icon of the Mother of God at the Kaluga Gate. He married and had six children.

On 27 June 1900 he was ordained priest at the Holy Trinity church in the village of Teply Stan, where he served until 1931. He was rewarded with the epigonation in 1907, the skufia in 1912 and the kamilavka in 1916. In 1922, at the confiscation of church valuables, he objected to the removal from the church of a silver cross, given to the church in the seventeenth century. The same day the plenipotentiary of the confiscation commission sent the militia section a report in which he wrote that the priest had begun anti-⁠Soviet agitation, saying that gold and silver were being melted down for cigarette cases. On the basis of the report the head of the militia ordered his arrest on 6 May 1922, and on 16 May he was interrogated. He said that the silver cross weighed about half a pound and was some three hundred years old, that he had asked that it be left to the church, since otherwise it would be melted down abroad for cigarette cases, while for them it was an old treasure, and that he had not agitated against the confiscation.

The case reached the Revolutionary Tribunal. At the trial in November and December 1922 Father Gregory did not plead guilty. Of Patriarch Tikhon's appeal he said that he had not received it and therefore did not read it, that the confiscation had gone quietly, that he had been in prison for eight months and asked the tribunal to return him to his family. The tribunal sentenced him to three years in prison. First he was held in the OGPU internal prison at the Lubyanka, then at Lefortovo and Taganka in Moscow. After seven months he was released. In 1924 he received the pectoral cross, and in 1928 he was raised to the rank of archpriest. On 20 June 1931 he was moved to the church of the Archangel Michael in the village of Kubinka, Zvenigorod district.

On 27 November 1937 he was arrested and imprisoned at Taganka. He was accused that on 25 October 1937 he had come to the stadium Kubinka Shoemaker at a rally for the nomination of candidates to the Supreme Soviet and that, when the candidacy of the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, was discussed, the priest waved his hand and said that our people would not be nominated anyway, that Soviet power nominates its own people, that he had nothing to do there, then muttered something and left. On the night of 29 November the investigator interrogated him; asked why he had been arrested before, he said that the second time he had been called to account was in 1923 for allegedly beating a cow, but had been acquitted in court. He said he kept in touch only with his brother Peter, a priest in the village of Pokrovskoe. He said he did not admit guilt of counter-⁠revolutionary activity.

On 3 December an NKVD troika sentenced him to death. Archpriest Gregory Voinov was shot on 8 December 1937 and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo firing range near Moscow.

He is commemorated on 8 December, on 29 May, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo, and on 5 September, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow (new style, the last two being movable days).