Peter Gavrilov

Holy Hieromartyr Peter Gavrilov, an archpriest, was born in 1870 in the village of Utkino in the Mamadysh district of Kazan province, in the family of the peasant Gavriil Gavrilov. In 1888 he finished the teachers' seminary, and in 1903 the missionary courses. In 1895 he was ordained priest, and for his blameless and zealous service was raised to archpriest. In 1929 he was exiled from Barnaul to Narym. He returned after four years and served in a church in Biysk. On 1 November 1936 he was arrested; the first interrogation took place on 4 November, and the investigations went on for months.

He was accused of having taken part in a counter-⁠revolutionary organization whose aim was to overthrow Soviet power by arms at the moment of a Japanese intervention. He denied it: he had not even thought of it. The investigator mentioned to him the priest Alexander Rozanov and the dean Daniil Noskov and made him say who had come to him and why. Father Peter said that the talks with them were purely religious, about the need for an episcopal see at Biysk, and repeatedly rejected that he had belonged to any organization. Confrontations with false witnesses followed, among them a man who claimed to have read news from Spain in the church watchman's hut; Father Peter rejected everything.

On 25 July 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced to death Archbishop Jacob (Maskaev) of Barnaul, Archpriest Peter Gavrilov, the priest John Mozhirin, the monk Theodore Nikitin, Ivan Protopopov and others. Archbishop Jacob, the priests Peter and John and the monk Theodore were shot on 29 July 1937 and buried in an unknown common grave. The layman Ivan Protopopov was shot on 4 August 1937.

He is commemorated on 29 July, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and on 26 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Altai, in the new style.