Matthew Solovyov

Holy Martyr Matthew Solovyov was born on 10 October 1868 in the village of Senino in the Taldom district, Tver province, in the family of the peasant Efim Solovyov. From 1889 to 1893 he served at Kronstadt, in the 148th regiment, as junior non-⁠commissioned officer, and from 1894 to 1902 he was a police officer in the Semyonovskaya and Ozerskaya volosts. After the revolution he settled in the village of Senino and took up farming. In 1929 he was elected chairman of the church council of the church of the Annunciation in the village of Georgiye-⁠Khotcha, Taldom district, and also carried the obedience of psalmist in the same church.

To the godless men who demanded that he give up his service in the church and join the collective farm he answered with a categorical refusal. The authorities took from the church the watchman's house and made a bakery of it. Matthew Efimovich went to Moscow to ask for the decision to be reversed. To one who asked how it had turned out, he said that he had gone for nothing, that wherever one goes one gets nowhere, they take no notice of them, all the chiefs are busy looking for Trotskyites. In the summer of 1937 the godless authorities began the most merciless persecution of the Russian Church.

On 10 September 1937 the Taldom district department of the NKVD arrested the psalmist Matthew Solovyov and shut him in the preliminary detention cell in Taldom. The next day he was questioned. The investigator asked him in detail about his life and his police service, then accused him of anti-⁠Soviet statements, of criticism of collective-⁠farm life and of an anti-⁠Soviet activity he was supposed to have carried on among the peasants. He categorically rejected all the false charges. Asked with whom he kept close ties in the village, he said with the priest Alexander Nevsky, with whom he served in the same church and to whose home he often went on church matters, but that they had no political talk. On 16 September the investigation was closed, and Matthew Efimovich was moved from Taldom to Taganka in Moscow. On 10 October 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced the psalmist to death by shooting. The chairman of the church council, the psalmist Matthew Solovyov, was shot on 13 October 1937 at the Butovo range and buried in an unmarked common grave.

He is commemorated on 13 October, the day of his death, in the new style, on the movable day around 29 May in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and on the movable day around 5 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.