Peter Grudinsky

Holy Hieromartyr Peter Grudinsky was a deputy of the Second State Duma, then, from 1921, a priest of the Orthodox Church, and was condemned to death in 1930 in the Soviet persecutions. He is canonized as a holy hieromartyr and honoured among the saints of Belarus. His commemoration is on 10 February by the old calendar, which is 23 February by the new, and, on movable days, in the Synaxis of the Belarusian Saints (7 July) and in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church (9 February).

Peter Feofilovich Grudinsky came of a family of Orthodox townsfolk. His father rented church land. As a child he loved to sing in the church choir and helped his father with the peasant farm. He finished the Glusk people's school and the Glusk district school. He served as a volost clerk in the village of Gorodok in the Bobruisk district and worked the land, holding twenty desyatins, partly allotted and partly bought.

In February 1907 he was elected a member of the Second State Duma from Minsk province, in the group of non-⁠party deputies. He was a member of the commissions on inquiries and on local courts and spoke on the agrarian question. After the February Revolution he took part in the State Conference in Moscow. In 1906 he had married Irina.

In 1921 he was ordained priest at the church of Saint Nicholas in the village of Timkovichi, Slutsk district (now Kopyl district, Minsk region). He was arrested on a charge under article 76 of the criminal code of the Belarusian SSR (anti-⁠Soviet agitation). The arrest order stated that it had been learned that the priest of the Timkovichi church, Peter Grudinsky, a former member of the Duma, had links with former officials and through them carried on anti-⁠Soviet agitation. The correspondence of Father Peter with his wife has been preserved in the case file. In one letter she asked him to lay aside his priestly rank, but he refused. On 23 February 1930 a three-⁠man tribunal of the political police for the Minsk region sentenced him to death by shooting.

On 28 April 1989 he was rehabilitated by the prosecutor's office of the Belarusian SSR. On 28 October 1999 the Holy Synod of the Belarusian Orthodox Church canonized him as a holy hieromartyr, and on 20 August 2000 the Council of Bishops of the Russian Church did so too, on the proposal of the Belarusian Exarchate.