Michael Stroev

Holy Martyr Michael Stroev (Mikhail Stepanovich Stroev) was born on 6 September 1876 in the town of Voskresensk (now Istra), Zvenigorod district of Moscow province, to Stepan Stroev, a former serf painter attached to the New Jerusalem Monastery. All the grandfathers and great-⁠grandfathers of Stepan had been painters. Left without a father at nine, from the age of twelve he helped his grandfather, an artist, who was his first teacher of painting. In 1902 he married Anna Grigorievna Grigorieva, a worker in a textile factory. In 1904 he entered the evening courses of the Stroganov school. In 1909 he founded the first Volunteer Fire Society in the district, of which he remained a lifelong member.

In 1916 he was called into the Astrakhan reserve regiment stationed at the town of Morshansk, Tambov province. Returning home after the war, he was appointed head of the fire brigade of the Voskresensk district and completed the provincial fire courses. Later, because of his health and age, he was moved to be head of the volunteer fire team of the factory. Accustomed to work from childhood, he urged his children to work, often reminding them of the proverb, "Labour feeds, idleness spoils." A deeply believing man, in the time of persecution by the godless power he was churchwarden of the church of the Holy Trinity in the village of Troitskoe, bearing without complaint this heavy and, for those times, dangerous obedience.

In the 1930s the chairman of the village council sold the school building to a Soviet professor for a villa and proposed that the school move into the wooden church, built more than three hundred years before and counted an architectural monument even in the godless time. The faithful opposed it and asked Mikhail Stepanovich to complain to the authorities. The matter was examined, and the authorities obliged the chairman to cancel the sale as illegal, so that the children stayed in the old building and the faithful kept their church whole for services. But the persecution of 1937 spared no one. In November 1937 both priests of the Trinity church, Alexander Mashkov and John Orlov, the deacon Peter Troitsky and the churchwarden Michael Stroev were arrested and held at Taganka in Moscow.

The investigator told him that the testimony of the accused Mashkov exposed him as a member of a counter-⁠revolutionary group. Mikhail Stepanovich answered that he was not a member of such a group and rejected Mashkov's statements. Of the priest John Orlov and the deacon Peter Troitsky he said that he knew them well and had good relations with them, that he visited them in the line of duty, and they came to him too. On 27 November 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced him to ten years in a labour camp, and he was sent to work at the camp pig farm in Siberia. Mikhail Stepanovich Stroev died in captivity, at the Suslovo section of Siblag, on 16 March 1938, and was buried in an unknown grave.

He is commemorated on 16 March, the day of his death, in the new style, with the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church (a movable day), on 29 August with the Synaxis of the Saints of Kuzbass (a movable day) and on 5 September with the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow (a movable day).