Peter Lonskov

Holy Martyr Peter Lonskov (Pyotr Vasilievich Lonskov), a peasant of the village of Pokrov, was born in 1881. He was arrested on 8 September 1937 together with nine other clergy and laymen of the Gagino district, Nizhny Novgorod region. None of them admitted guilt. They were charged with having organized on 6 July a solemn service in which four priests and a multitude of believers had taken part. Although no political sermon was given after the service, the service itself was regarded as an anti-⁠state action, because it drew peasants from work on the collective farm.

On 17 September 1937 eight of them were sentenced to death and shot: the priests John Romashkin, Nikolai Khvoshchev, Alexander Nikolsky and Peter Lebedinsky, and the peasants Vasily Yezhov, Peter Lonskov, Stephen Mityushin and Alexander Blokhin. Nothing else is said of Peter individually.

He is commemorated on 17 September and on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, in the new style.