Peter Ostroumov

Holy Hieromartyr Peter Ostroumov (Pyotr Petrovich Ostroumov), a priest, was born on 1 July 1875 in the village of Troitskoe in the Klin district of Moscow province, in the family of the deacon Pyotr Ostroumov. In 1896 he finished the teachers' seminary in the Podolsk district and was a teacher in a school in the Zvenigorod district. In 1899 he was ordained deacon for the Nativity of Christ church in the village of Petrovskoe, Klin district, and in 1909 priest for the Holy Trinity church in his native village of Troitskoe. There he lived through the persecution by the atheist authorities.

In 1929 the local authorities wished to close the church, but an obstacle was the priest, known and respected in the village. So they decided to arrest him. Witnesses were interrogated, among them the head of the reading-⁠hut and the chairman of the village council, who said that the priest had urged the people in his sermons to resist the closing of the church and gathered signatures around the village. Father Peter was arrested on 18 October 1929 and held in Butyrka. At the interrogation of 1 November he said that he had carried on no anti-⁠Soviet agitation and that the sermons he gave very rarely were of a purely religious character. He said that the signatures were gathered by the church warden and a member of the church council. On 23 November 1929 the Special Board of the OGPU sentenced him to three years of exile in the North. After his return he was forbidden to live within a hundred kilometres of Moscow and settled in the Volokolamsk district.

In 1937 he served at the Intercession church in the village of Pokrovskoe, Volokolamsk district. That year a secret informer with the code name Birch sent reports to the NKVD: the priest at Pokrovskoe was working on the believers, spreading rumours about war, saying: There will soon be war, the communists feel it and arrest peasants, shut innocent priests in prison; perhaps these are my last days, I have only the last month of November left to serve. Come, Orthodox, to confession, for soon they will close all the churches. It also said that in November 1937, at one in the afternoon, he gave a sermon in the Pokrovskoe church, asking the faithful not to leave the church, to pray and to attend it more often.

He was arrested on 2 December 1937. The same day witnesses were interrogated, who said that the priest often gave sermons urging believers not to leave the church and to pray more, because churches would soon be closed, and that he often gave sweets to the children. The priest denied carrying on anti-⁠Soviet agitation and rejected the testimony. The investigation closed on the very day of the arrest, and on 5 December 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced him to ten years in a camp. The priest Peter Ostroumov died on 10 July 1939 in a camp in the Amur region and was buried in an unknown grave.

He is commemorated on 10 July, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and on 5 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, in the new style.