Peter Kravets

Holy Hieromartyr Peter Kravets, a deacon, was born in 1885 in the town of Nikolaevsk, Samara province (now Pugachev, Saratov region). Until 1914 he was a salesman for a cloth merchant. In 1907 he finished the school for medical orderlies and in 1914-1918 was an orderly on the German front. From 1918 he served in the Red Army and was demobilized in 1923. In 1921, while still in the army, he was ordained deacon at the Holy Trinity Old Cathedral in Saratov and sent to serve in his native town. He was first arrested in 1923, for belonging to the Tikhonite community, but the real cause was his fight against Renovationism; he spent two weeks in prison. In the twenties he was arrested twice in Saratov (the second time, in 1926, for anti-⁠Soviet agitation), without being convicted.

In 1930 Metropolitan Seraphim Alexandrov of Saratov named him psalmist at the church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul in Saratov; documents mention that he raised him to protodeacon. When the metropolitan moved in August 1933 to Kazan, he took his protodeacon with him, and he served there at the Epiphany church. On 5 March 1935 he was arrested at Kazan, and on 13 September the same year the Special Board of the NKVD sentenced him to three years in a camp, for supposedly carrying on anti-⁠Soviet and antisemitic agitation, spreading defeatist rumours and, through his son, disrupting the discipline of pupils. He was sent to Karlag.

On 19 September 1937 he was arrested in Karlag, on the ground that he had belonged to a group of former priests, like Nikolsky, and had said that they were sent to Tartaul to perish. Besides him and the Holy Hieromartyr Leonid Nikolsky, eight more clergy and one layman were tried in the same case. He did not admit guilt, but did not deny that he had sung before believers prayer songs composed by himself. By the decision of the Karaganda region troika of 31 October 1937 all eleven new martyrs were sentenced to death and, three days later, on 2 November 1937, the sentence was carried out. He was rehabilitated on 28 April 1989 and 23 March 1990, and on 20 August 2000, after the Jubilee Council of Bishops, he was numbered among the saints.

He is commemorated on 2 November, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and on 12 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Saratov, in the new style.