Peter Uspensky

Holy Hieromartyr Peter Uspensky, a priest, served for almost a quarter of a century in the Serpukhov district and died in a camp in Siberia on 12 March 1938, condemned because he had tried to gather a parish in the village of Fedoskino.

He was born in 1876 in the village of Alekseevskoe, Kolomna district, Moscow province, in the family of the priest Basil Uspensky. After the seminary he was ordained deacon in 1901, and in 1905 priest for the church of St John the Forerunner in the village of Ivanovskoe, Serpukhov district, where he served until 1929, when he retired for reasons of health.

In 1937 he returned to service and in mid-⁠August was appointed to the church of St Nicholas in Fedoskino, in the Dmitrov district. The church had been closed because it had no priest. To gather the parishioners and register the legally required group of twenty, Father Peter asked the chairman of the village council for permission to hold a parish meeting. It was refused, so he sent the churchwarden from house to house to learn who wished to sign.

On 26 November 1937 an NKVD officer questioned witnesses who had known him for only three months; one of them added, at the officer's prompting, that the lists were meant to find out who would not vote in the Soviet elections. The next day the priest was arrested and interrogated. He denied any anti-⁠Soviet agitation and said that the lists had been made only to meet the demands of the civil authorities for the registration of clergy. He was then sent to Taganka prison in Moscow.

On 2 December 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced him to ten years in a labour camp. He departed to the Lord on 12 March 1938 in the Suslovo section of the Sibla camp; the recorded cause of death was paralysis of the heart muscle. His burial place is not known.

He is commemorated on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 1 March (a movable date), on 29 August (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kuzbass and on 5 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, in the new style.