Ismail Kudryavtsev

Holy Hieromartyr Ismail Kudryavtsev was a priest in Tver province and was shot on 23 September 1937 for defending a church from closing. He is numbered among the new martyrs and confessors of the Russian Church.

He was born in 1876 in the village of Saduno, Kimry district, Tver province, in the family of the peasant Ivan Kudryavtsev. He completed three grades of the parish school. He was called up for the army, where he served from 1898 to 1902 as a senior non-⁠commissioned officer, then was discharged and returned home. Between 1908 and 1910 he was a village constable in a village of the Kimry district. After the revolution of 1917 he chose the way of church service and was ordained a priest. In the years of persecution at the beginning of the thirties he was arrested and sentenced to five years of exile, but after two years he was allowed to return home because of illness and served at the church in the village of Arkhangelskoye, Kimry district.

The beginning of 1937 brought the closing of churches. The executive committee of the Kimry district resolved to close the church at Arkhangelskoye, on the invented pretext that it was in danger of collapse. Father Ismail managed to defend the church, but on 7 August 1937 the NKVD arrested him. A cultural worker of the village stated that he, a former kulak deprived of voting rights, was conducting anti-⁠Soviet agitation among the faithful and had urged them not to obey the decision. At the investigation the priest said that he had been deprived of his voting rights and that the holding he had left to his son was seized in 1929, that in 1932 he was arrested by the OGPU and returned in 1934. He also said that he had not carried on anti-⁠Soviet agitation and that he was telling only the truth, that he had not fought against Soviet power.

On 8 August the indictment was drawn up, and on 20 September the NKVD troika resolved that he be shot. The priest Ismail Kudryavtsev was shot two days later, on 23 September 1937. He was numbered among the saints, the new martyrs and confessors of Russia, by the Jubilee Council of Bishops in August 2000, for veneration by the whole Church. He is commemorated on 7 February (a movable day), in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 18 July (a movable day), in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver, and on 23 September, in new style.