Joseph Schensnovich

Holy Hieromartyr Joseph Schensnovich was a deacon in the Moscow region and was shot in 1937 at Butovo. The Church remembers him among the new martyrs of the twentieth century.

Youth and service

He was born on 7 June 1886 in the township of Zhirovitsy, in the Slonim district of Grodno province, into the family of a Belarusian peasant, Antony Schensnovich, a deeply Orthodox family. From youth Joseph gave his life to the service of the Church. In 1901 he finished the church school at Zhirovitsy, and in 1903 he took the course for church readers at Grodno and was appointed reader at the church of the village of Veliky Les, in the Brest district, where he served until 1915.

On 30 August 1915, because of the war, he was forced to evacuate, and at the beginning of 1916 he reached Moscow. He was a reader at the church of Saint Sergius in the Rogozhskaya Sloboda, working at the same time in the goods office of the Northern Railway. In 1918 he went to Voronezh province, to the village of Alekseyevka, and in the same year moved to Lashinovka in Kharkov province, where he again served as reader. In 1921 he finished pastoral courses at Starobelsk, and in 1922 he served at the church of the village of Schastye.

In 1924 he was ordained deacon for the church of the settlement of Vysokoye in the Kharkov region, where he served five years. In 1929 he served as deacon at the church of Saints Peter and Paul by the Yauza Gate in Moscow, and from 1930 at the Holy Trinity church in the settlement of Kupavna, in the Noginsk district. In the same year he was awarded the double orarion for blameless service. With his wife Alexandra he had three children, the youngest just born. His relatives in territory that had passed to Poland wrote that they lived well and invited him to join them. In 1933 he took his papers to the Polish embassy, intending to go to his brothers, but nothing came of it.

Arrest and martyrdom

On 5 November 1937 the heads of the NKVD of the Moscow region drew up a certificate for his arrest, writing that in Kupavna a group of churchmen were conducting counter-⁠revolutionary agitation and that Joseph Antonovich visited some women workers, winning them to the faith and giving some material help. A woman was cited as proof who, after his visits, had become an active churchgoer. On 10 November witnesses were questioned, one of whom said that the deacon forced his children to go to church.

On 12 November 1937 the rector of the Holy Trinity church in Kupavna, Fr Dimitry Bogoyavlensky, the deacon Joseph Schensnovich and Sergey Frygin, a member of the church council, were arrested and imprisoned in Noginsk. The next day the deacon was interrogated. He said that he had spread no rumours and that he had asked the Polish embassy to leave for Poland for personal and family reasons. Of the other two he said that he knew nothing, only that the priest was rector of the church and Frygin attended church. He did not admit guilt.

On 19 November the NKVD troika sentenced him to death. He was shot on 21 November 1937 and buried in an unmarked common grave at the Butovo firing range near Moscow. He is commemorated on 22 November, on 29 May in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo (a movable day), on 11 July in the Synaxis of the Saints of Belarus (a movable day), and on 5 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow (a movable day), in new style.