Konstantin Minyatov

Konstantin Alexandrovich Minyatov was a lawyer in Russia, born in 1874 at Oryol and killed at Yekaterinburg on 29 June 1918. He was numbered among the new martyrs and confessors of Russia in August 2000, at the Jubilee Council of Bishops, for veneration throughout the Church. He was a layman, a man who, after many trials, came to be deeply bound to the Church.

Youth

He was born in the family of an artillery captain, Alexander Vikentievich, and his wife, Alexandra Konstantinovna Minyatov. His father came from the nobles of the Kovno district and was a Catholic, while his wife was Orthodox; the infant was baptized in the Orthodox church of the Exaltation of the Cross at Oryol. His father died soon, and his mother married a state councillor, Rupasov, owner of the estate of Glinki, near the station of Zhukovka. The family then moved to Tashkent, where Konstantin entered the gymnasium in 1883, but, after another move, he graduated in 1892 from the Oryol gymnasium. He entered the imperial University of Saint Petersburg, the faculty of physics and mathematics and that of law. As a student he married Nadezhda Pavlovna Yagodovskaya, the daughter of a priest. In 1893 he was sent by the Saint Petersburg Society of Naturalists to the biological station at Solovki and visited Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway for scientific purposes.

Years of falling away and return

He engaged in politics, from moderate socialist, Marxist positions. In 1894 he was drawn into the investigation of the "People's Right Party" and was expelled from the university. In 1895 the police put him under secret surveillance. In 1897 he left for Germany, while his wife remained in Russia, under police watch. In Germany he began to attend regularly the embassy church in Berlin, whose rector at that time was Archpriest Alexei Maltsev. Nadezhda Pavlovna urged her husband to write to the government and ask for pardon, and in September 1900 he sent a letter to the deputy minister of the interior, Prince Svyatopolk-⁠Mirsky. The request was supported by the intercessions of the chief procurator of the Holy Synod, K. P. Pobedonostsev, and of Archpriest Alexei Maltsev. Konstantin Minyatov returned to Russia, where he graduated from the University of Yuriev. Soon administrative surveillance was lifted from him, and from his wife.

He lived at Kazan and from 1905 at Moscow, where he practised law, as a sworn attorney. He was defence counsel, together with the famous lawyer N. P. Karabchevsky, in the trial of the former prefect of Moscow, A. A. Reinbot. He moved away from socialism and came to liberal views. He was a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party. After the trials he had passed through and after rethinking his life up to then, he became a deeply churchly man. His daughter, at the beginning of Great Lent in 1914, wrote to her brother: "I send you father's portrait, taken on the fifth day of his fast. Until now he eats and drinks nothing but water (for seven days) and has grown terribly thin".

Martyrdom

In the summer of 1917 he moved with his family to Tyumen. He joined the delegation of the Tobolsk diocesan congress which in May 1918 went to Yekaterinburg to ask the local soviet to release Bishop Hermogenes (Dolganev). But the members of the delegation were themselves arrested by the Bolshevik power and shot. Konstantin Minyatov died on 29 June 1918. His sons: Viktor Konstantinovich (1896 to the 1960s), an engineer, professor of strength of materials at the Kemerovo mining institute, and Alexander Konstantinovich (1908 to 1937), professor of theoretical mechanics in the higher schools of Tomsk, a docent, arrested and shot.