Isidore Reshetkin

Holy Martyr Isidore Reshetkin was a reader, that is a psalmist, in a village in Siberia, and died a martyr's death in 1921, killed by Red soldiers together with the priest Leonid Lebedev. He is numbered among the new martyrs and confessors of the Russian Church.

He served in the church, not yet fitted out, dedicated to Holy Prince Alexander Nevsky and the Holy Martyr Xenia, in the village of Sannikovsky, whose rector was Fr Leonid Lebedev. The church was consecrated in 1994 in honour of the Holy Trinity. In 1921, after a punitive detachment came to the village, the relatives of Soviet activists killed in the anti-⁠Bolshevik Ishim uprising pointed to Fr Leonid Lebedev as responsible for their deaths. Isidore Reshetkin was arrested together with the priest. The Red soldiers stripped them completely and led them to death on a hill behind the village. Before the execution, Isidore and Leonid put their fingers together to make the sign of the cross, but their fingers were cut off and they were hacked down with sabres. According to another version, Isidore Reshetkin and Fr Leonid Lebedev were shot by the communist Magdalin, commander of the detachment, who wished to kill them with his own hand.

The relatives were not allowed to take the bodies from the place of execution, and the remains were buried only after ten days, in the village cemetery. In 2000 a veneration cross was set up at the place where the martyrs died. Isidore Reshetkin was glorified by the Jubilee Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000. He is commemorated on 7 February (a movable day), in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, in new style.