Michael Voznesensky

Holy Martyr Michael Voznesensky (Mikhail Matveevich Voznesensky) was born on 14 April 1900 in the settlement of Foshchevataya, Korocha district of Kursk province, to the priest Matthew Voznesensky, killed by the godless in 1919. Michael studied at the theological seminary in Belgorod, which he could not finish because of the revolution of 1917. Then he served as reader in the churches of the Belgorod diocese and was arrested in 1935. He was a nephew of Metropolitan Eleutherius (Bogoyavlensky) of Lithuania. At the interrogation the investigator asked him with which relatives he corresponded. He answered that with his brother, his sister and his uncle, Metropolitan Eleutherius of Lithuania, who in his letters had expressed the wish that he be with him, but he had thought this impossible and did not ask to leave abroad; he had written to him of his hard life, of how the relatives lived, of his spiritual acquaintances and of the church division in Russia.

On 2 July 1935 he wrote to the procurator of the Kursk region a petition. He said that on 22 May the end of the inquiry had been announced to him, and that after a grave illness of a month and a half he had been able to study the material of accusation; that the accusation was baseless, that the three-⁠month inquiry had found no proof of agitation, that he had heard good opinions of himself from people of all kinds, and that after almost five months under arrest he did not consider himself guilty. He had asked for confrontation with the two witnesses, whose testimony seemed to him false and dictated by another will. Soon after, the investigator summoned him to interrogation, and in a second petition to the procurator Mikhail Matveevich related that on 2 August the investigator had not allowed him to enter his statements in the record and had driven him away with shouts and curses; that throughout the inquiry he had been treated with partiality, with shouts, stamping of feet and words like "parasite", "renegade", "you should have been shot long ago", so that, being for the first time in his life under inquiry, he had been literally terrorized and had given, naturally, perhaps, unsuitable testimony. At the court session he rejected all the charges.

On 11 September 1935 the sentence was read: Bishop Anthony and the dean Mitrophan Vilgelmsky received ten years of imprisonment, the priest Alexander Yeroshov and the reader Michael Voznesensky five years, and the priest Michael Deyneka three years. They were sent to the Far East, to the camp in which Archbishop Onuphrius (Gagalyuk) of Kursk was held. In March 1938 they were moved to the prison at Blagoveshchensk, and on 17 March the NKVD troika sentenced them to death. Michael Voznesensky was shot on 1 June 1938 together with Archbishop Onuphrius, Bishop Anthony and the other clergy, and buried in an unknown common grave.

He is commemorated on 1 June, 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) and, on 1 August, with the Synaxis of the Saints of Kursk.