Michael Amelyushkin

Holy Martyr Michael Amelyushkin was born on 24 September 1893 in the village of Pochinki, in the Bogorodsk district of Moscow province, to the peasant Spiridon Amelyushkin. After the village school he worked the peasant farm. In the First World War he was called into the army and served as a private until 1917. For many years he was choir director at the church of the Nativity of Christ in the village of Yamkino, and from the middle of 1937 he served in the same church as reader.

He was arrested on 26 November 1937, together with the priests of the church, and imprisoned in the town of Bogorodsk, by then renamed Noginsk. Standing witnesses said that at the end of April 1937 he had told people to come to the Paschal service and not to the May Day demonstration, and to let the Communists walk alone with red flags; for that day he had gathered all the singers he knew, so that the service might be as solemn as possible. The day after his arrest he was interrogated and said that he had carried on no counter-⁠revolutionary activity. The investigation ended there. On 1 December 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced him to ten years in a labour camp.

The reader Michael Amelyushkin died in captivity on 18 February 1942 and was buried in an unknown grave. He is commemorated on 18 February, in the new style, with the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church (a movable day) and with the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow (5 September).