Paul Smirnov

Holy Hieromartyr Paul Smirnov, an archpriest, was born on 6 December 1877 in the village of Tishkovo in the Serpukhov district, in the family of the priest Feodor Konstantinovich Smirnov. He finished the spiritual school at Perervino in 1893 and the Moscow seminary in 1899, married Claudia and they had four children. On 22 January 1902 he was ordained priest for the church of Saint Elijah in the village of Ilinskoe-⁠Skulnevo. There he spent most of his ministry, taught the Law of God to the children, and in 1914 the building of the parish school, raised through his efforts, was consecrated. He received a pectoral cross in 1921, was raised to archpriest in 1924, received a cross with decorations in 1927 and was named dean.

The village was divided between a faithful majority and an aggressive atheist minority which had taken power. In 1929 the atheists forbade him to serve molebens at Pascha in the villages of the parish, but Father Paul held the Paschal processions with the peasants. He was arrested and sentenced to six months of forced labour at Kashira, where he was not imprisoned but was not allowed to serve. In February 1930, with collectivization, he was dispossessed of his house and goods and lived in rented rooms. The peasants rose in his defence: on 15 April about seventy demanded at the village council the reopening of the church, the return of the goods of the priest's family and the striking from the collective farm of those enrolled by force. They gathered signatures and in the end the dispossession was cancelled and the church reopened, and the services resumed.

The local activists went on writing denunciations. On 15 August 1930 the head of the administrative department searched the priest's house, found copies of petitions for the reopening of the church and the lowering of taxes, and concluded that he was supporting alien elements. Only four people in the village were willing to testify against him, and those were communists or their relatives. The same day Father Paul and his wife were arrested. The priest said that he did not admit guilt, that he had two or three enemies in the village on principle, and that his arrest only served to promote some activists. On 25 September 1930 an OGPU troika sentenced both to three years of exile at Semipalatinsk, in Kazakhstan.

Returning from exile, on 8 March 1934 he was appointed rector of the church of Saint Nicholas in the village of Kacharovo, Mozhaysk district. He was arrested again on 29 November 1937, then held at Mozhaysk. Witnesses, among them the chairmen of the collective farm and of the cooperative and the head of the post office, said that right after the arrest many dissatisfied women gathered in the house of the church warden, and that the priest had said the elections to the Supreme Soviet were not democratic. Father Paul rejected the accusations and answered questions by saying that he knew no priests and few parishioners. On 7 December 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced him to ten years in a camp. Archpriest Paul Smirnov died in captivity in a camp in the Novosibirsk region on 1 March 1938, on the day when the Church commemorates the holy Martyr Paul of Caesarea, and was buried in the camp cemetery, in an unknown grave.

He is commemorated on 7 March (a movable date), on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 29 August (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kuzbass and on 5 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, in the new style.