Joseph Smirnov

Holy Hieromartyr Joseph Smirnov was archpriest of the cathedral at Soligalich and received a martyr's death in 1918, together with three other men of the Church, in a bloody reprisal that followed an uprising of the townspeople. The Church remembers him among the new martyrs of the twentieth century.

Soligalich in the winter of 1917-1918

At the end of 1917 the Bolsheviks seized power in the town of Soligalich in Kostroma province. Their emissary, Vasily Vyluzgin, proclaimed a military-⁠revolutionary committee and set up the dictatorship of a single party. On 23 January 1918 Soviet power issued the decree separating the Church from the state, and in protest processions were held across the country. On 11 (24) February a procession was held at Soligalich as well, in which Archpriest Joseph Smirnov, Fr Vladimir Ilyinsky, the deacon John Kastorsky and John Perebaskin, the superintendent of the church school, took part.

The next day, representatives of the Soviet came to the nearby Theodorovskaya convent of the Mother of God, announced that on the following day they would take the grain, leaving fifteen pounds for each healthy person, and wished to send the sick and the aged to an almshouse. The priest of the convent church asked the town Duma to defend the convent against plunder, and the Duma resolved to support his request. The next day several hundred believers from the town and surrounding villages gathered at the convent to defend it. The crowd, of some six hundred people, then went to the Soviet building. Vyluzgin declared a state of war and fired into the air, and disorderly fire was opened from the building, which lightly wounded several people and killed one, Pavel Vasilievich Orlov. The crowd seized Vyluzgin, wounded him lightly, and at midnight armed men stabbed him with a bayonet in hospital.

The reprisal

After a week a punitive detachment of three hundred and fifty Red Guards arrived from Kostroma, led by the commissar Zhurba. Fifty-⁠two people were arrested, and ninety-⁠five were drawn into the case in all. There was no real investigation. Zhurba later answered that he took the deaths of the people upon himself. When the punitive troops came to the convent to arrest the nuns and the priest, the father of Fr Vasily Ilyinsky, Fr Vladimir Ilyinsky, eighty-⁠five years old and retired, came out in his son's place and was arrested.

On 22 February (7 March) 1918 there were shot, among others, Archpriest Joseph Smirnov, Fr Vladimir Ilyinsky, the deacon John Kastorsky and the superintendent John Perebaskin. The execution took place at night, and the bodies were thrown in a pit at random. The townspeople who asked for the bodies were refused. A cross and a fence were put up at the mass grave, torn down by the godless in the thirties and restored in 1996.

The four saints

Joseph Sergeyevich Smirnov was born in 1864. After the Kostroma seminary he was a teacher at the church school in Soligalich. In 1886 he was ordained priest for the cathedral of the Nativity of the Mother of God, was confessor of the town prison and inspector of the parish schools of the district. In 1905 he became rector of the cathedral, was a deputy of the town Duma and of the district assembly, and in 1907 was raised to the rank of archpriest.

Vladimir Ivanovich Ilyinsky was born in 1833 and served as priest in the village of Solda. In 1918 he was eighty-⁠five, long retired, and living in Soligalich. John Kastorsky was born in 1848 in the village of Nikolo-⁠Berezovets, the son of the deacon Alexis, served as watchman and reader at the cathedral and as psalmist at the Theodorovskaya convent, and in 1880 was ordained deacon. John Pavlovich Perebaskin was born in 1862, finished the Kostroma seminary in 1880 and the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy in 1884 with the degree of candidate of theology, and from 1897 was superintendent of the church school in Soligalich, where he also taught church singing, history, geography and Greek.

The saints are commemorated on 5 February in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kostroma, on 7 February (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, and on 7 March (a movable day), in new style.