Peter Zinovyev

Saint Peter Zinovyev, Hieromartyr, was a village priest of the Saratov diocese and then of the Tver diocese, married and the father of four children, shot in the night of 29 December 1937 at Tver in the years of the great persecution. Born in 1894 into a family of priests, he served as priest, teacher and man of the village. On 20 August 2000 the Council of Bishops numbered him among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. He is commemorated on 16 December, that is 29 December New Style.

Family and schooling

He was born on 19 June 1894 in the village of Bereznyaki, Volsk district, Saratov governorate, into the family of Deacon Konstantin Ivanovich Zinovyev and Evdokia Porfiryevna. He was baptized on 24 June in the church of Saint Nicholas. The family had eight children: the daughters Alexandra, Raisa and Maria and the sons Mikhail, Pavel, Vasily, Ivan and Peter; four of the boys, Mikhail, Pavel, Ivan and Peter, became priests, and Vasily went into the army. He spent four years at the ecclesiastical school at Volsk, graduating in 1908, the year his father died, between 1908 and 1914 he attended the Saratov seminary, and in 1914 he received his certificate, in the second category, and a place as reader at the church of the Descent of the Holy Spirit in Saratov.

On 15 January 1916 he married Maria Dmitrievna Uspenskaya, a priest's daughter, born on 20 January 1897 at Baranovka, a graduate in 1913 of the diocesan girls' school at Volsk. The wedding was performed in the church of the Archangel Michael at Baranovka by his father-⁠in-⁠law, Archpriest Dmitry Vasilievich Uspensky.

Village priest

In February 1916 he was ordained priest at the church of the Archangel Michael at Staraya Lopasteika, by Bishop Palladius of Saratov and Tsaritsyn. He taught at the parish school, in June 1916 was elected chairman of the school's board of trustees, and from 1 September 1916 was a teacher at the zemstvo schools at Novo-⁠Lopasteika and Kizotovka. The family lived as peasants: they farmed twenty-⁠two desyatins of land and kept a cow. They had four children: Konstantin (1916), Serafima (1918), Gennady (1924) and Zoya (1926).

Years of persecution

After the establishment of Soviet power repressions of the clergy began in the Saratov governorate, with confiscation of church and private property of priests and closing of churches. The family stayed at Staraya Lopasteika until the middle of the 1920s, until the closing of the church and the schools, and then was forced to change the place of service, wandering from village to village. In 1931 Fr Peter moved with his family to Petrovsk, where he served in a church until the beginning of 1935. His brothers were repressed: Mikhail was exiled in 1930, Pavel was arrested on 30 July 1931 and sentenced to ten years in camp, and in February 1935 Ivan was exiled without charge from the Lower Volga region. The same awaited Peter. At that time the cathedral of Alexander Nevsky in Saratov was closed and dismantled.

In spring 1935 the secret police demanded that he leave the region at once, and with other priests of the Lower Volga, following Archbishop Thaddeus Uspensky, he moved with his family to the Tver diocese, as priest at the church of the Exaltation of the Cross at Bezhetsk. They settled on Kooperativnaya Street no. 65. The eldest son, Konstantin, finished school at Petrovsk and entered a teachers' school, and the other children went to school no. 1 at Bezhetsk, where Lev Gumilev had studied from 1926 to 1929. The eldest daughter, Serafima, graduated in July 1937 and entered a teachers' institute. In August 1937 Yezhov sent to all organs of the NKVD order no. 00447 on the repression of former kulaks and other "anti-⁠Soviet elements". On 14 November 1937 his brother Ivan, priest at Semendyaevo, was arrested, and he was shot on 29 November. Fr Peter could do nothing for him, and could only pray and await his own arrest.

Arrest and martyrdom

In the night of Saturday 19 December 1937 a commissar of the Kalinin NKVD, Fyodorov, came to him with a warrant for search and arrest, and Fr Peter was taken to the prison at Bezhetsk. Eighteen informers' reports were placed in the file, who had followed him, noting every sermon and remark, and the testimony of three witnesses, probably under pressure. At the interrogations he behaved with great dignity and denied the charges; so as not to harm his eldest son Konstantin, already a teacher and no longer living at Bezhetsk, he said not a word about him. The indictment, of 21 December 1937, charged him with anti-⁠Soviet agitation, "expressing malice and terrorist judgments about the leaders of the party and government", slandering candidates to the Supreme Soviet, spreading rumours of a hard life in the USSR, of famine on collective farms and of imminent war with Germany, and that at services he had called the people to resist Soviet power for closing churches. He confirmed only his words about the famine on collective farms in 1932 and 1933 and denied the rest. On 27 December 1937 the troika sentenced him to death, and on 29 December, at one in the morning, he was shot. In the Tver diocese, between August 1937 and November 1938, around five hundred clergy and active believers were shot.

It is not known where he was buried; the file says nothing of the place of shooting and burial. It is supposed that the shootings were done at night in the prisons of Kalinin and that the bodies were buried in special NKVD zones, among them the old cemetery "Burning Bush", where the remains of Archbishop Thaddeus, shot on 31 December 1937, two days after Fr Peter, were found.

Rehabilitation and veneration

On 26 July 1989, on the basis of the decree of 16 January 1989 of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the Kalinin regional prosecutor's office annulled the decision of the troika in the case of Peter Konstantinovich Zinovyev, fifty-⁠two years after the execution; in the same year his brother Ivan was also rehabilitated. On 20 August 2000, at the close of the Jubilee Council of Bishops, Priest Peter Zinovyev was numbered among the saints, for veneration throughout the Church, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.

After the arrest his wife, Maria, and the younger children left Bezhetsk for the village of Tatevo in the Olenino district. The fate of the older children was hard: Konstantin was sent as a teacher to western Ukraine and was killed there by armed nationalists, and Serafima died after giving birth in October 1941, during the German occupation. Maria, with her daughter Zoya and granddaughter Lyudmila, got out through the marshes from the occupied territory, but her health was so shattered that she died after a short illness.