Paul Kuzovkov

Holy Martyr Paul Kuzovkov was born on 15 June 1875 in the village of Ivanteevka in Moscow province, in the family of the worker Vasily Kuzovkov. He finished the village school, entered the factory in 1887 and, having become a skilled worker, worked there until 1904. Between 1904 and 1906 he worked at a wagon repair plant, and from 1907 until 1932 he was a fuller at Lyzhin's factory. From 1932 until his arrest he was on duty at the water pumping station. On 1 January 1937 he was elected chairman of the council of the church of the Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God and for this he was arrested.

At the interrogation he was told that religion is opium for the people and that he was an ardent defender of it. He answered that he was not an ardent defender, but had only been elected by the people chairman of the church twenty. In the spring he had been in Moscow, at the diocesan administration, to ask what to do so that the church should not be closed, and in November he asked at the district for permission for a meeting of the faithful, to inform them of the closing of the church. Of the so-⁠called counter-⁠revolutionary group of himself, Archpriest Alexander Vershinsky and Nikolai Kopninsky, he said that council members had met at his home, but without counter-⁠revolutionary talk.

On 1 December 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced him to death, together with Archpriest Alexander Vershinsky, who had served at Torzhok until the closing of his church in 1927 and had then been called in 1937 to the church in Ivanteevka, where a denunciation accused him of monarchist sermons. The third, Nikolai Kopninsky, secretary of the auditing commission of the church council, was sentenced to eight years in a camp, and he died on 15 March 1938 in the Mariinsk camps. Paul Kuzovkov and Archpriest Alexander were shot on 8 December 1937 and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo range.

He is commemorated on 8 December, on 29 May (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and on 5 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, in the new style.