Leonid Serebrennikov

Holy Hieromartyr Leonid Serebrennikov, a priest, was killed by a partisan detachment on the day of the Nativity of the Lord in 1919, in the village of Lermontovka. His full name was Leonid Konstantinovich Serebrennikov.

He was born on 14 April 1894 in the family of a priest in the Vilna province. From 1904 to 1910 he studied at the theological school in Vilna. From 1912 to 1915 he was a psalm-⁠reader in the Vilna province. In May 1915 he married, then attended pastoral courses in Moscow. In the same year he was ordained deacon, and in March 1916 priest, by Bishop Innocent (Soloduchin), at the Protection monastery in Moscow. After the end of the pastoral courses, in May 1916, he was appointed to the new settlers' parish of Novo-⁠Pokrovsk in the village of Lermontovskoe in the Maritime region (now the Khabarovsk territory), and in January 1917 was moved to the Protection church of the same village.

At the beginning of January 1919 a partisan detachment under Efim Garmashov entered the village of Lermontovka. Besides robberies and sabotage against the interventionists, the detachment took reprisals on people who, in its view, stood in the way of the revolution, among them priests. In one of these reprisals, on the day of the Nativity of Christ, 25 December / 7 January 1919, Father Leonid Serebrennikov was killed.

The following account of the priest's martyr death has been handed down from generation to generation: "In 1919, at Christmas, after the Christmas tree arranged at the parish school, Father Leonid was seized by a band of Bolsheviks and taken out onto the river in a terrible frost, where he was stripped and set on the ice. The father was very strong and kind. The bandits mocked the priest who, being of large stature and unusual strength, did not resist his killers. They jumped on him, rode on his back down to the river, jabbed him with knives, then made him chop a hole in the ice, stripped him and, saying 'You baptized us and we will baptize you', plunged him under the water. When, wounded already, he clung to the edge of the ice, they smashed all the fingers of his hands, then he went under, and in the morning people fished out his body and buried it". The account is confirmed also by the old people of the village.

At the initiative of the parishioners of the present church of the Archangel Michael in Lermontovka, a memorial service is served on the day of Father Leonid's death. The parishioners keep the memory of Father Leonid with reverence, and the local people honour him as the protector of the village of Lermontovka. Saint Leonid is commemorated on 7 January, the day of his death, and on 7 February, with the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, in the new style.