Sergius Astakhov

Holy Hieromartyr Sergius Astakhov was a deacon in the Moscow region who died as a martyr in a camp on 31 December 1942, at the age of sixty-⁠five.

Life He was born on 5 June 1877 in Moscow into a working family and studied at the people's school. From 1893 he sang in a church choir. He married Anna Nikiforovna and they had six children, the eldest of whom, Natalia, died of typhus in 1917. From December 1920 he was a psalm-⁠reader at the church of Saints Peter and Paul in Lefortovo; relatives remember that at home he prepared his psalms and prayers, playing the violin to a metronome. On 6 September 1921 he was vested in the sticharion by Bishop Nikanor (Kudryavtsev) of Bogorodsk, a vicar of the Moscow diocese. From that autumn he lived in Troitskoe-⁠Ratmanovo (now Ivashevo, Noginsk district) and served at the church of the Holy Trinity, being invited at times to the church of the Ascension in Obukhovo. On 22 January 1922 Bishop Nikanor ordained him deacon.

Arrest and martyrdom On 26 November 1937 he was arrested, with the clergy of the church in Obukhovo, on a charge of counter-⁠revolutionary agitation. The indictment described a group of hostile clergy near the church, led by the archpriest rector Sokolov, and accused Deacon Sergius of having spoken among villagers, in July 1937 on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, about the hard life on the collective farms and of praising "counter-⁠revolutionary terrorists". At his interrogation on 28 November he admitted no charge. On 1 December an NKVD troika sentenced him to eight years in a camp, which he served in Bamlag, at Svobodny in the Amur region. In 1942 he was arrested again in the camp, sentenced to death and shot there on 31 December 1942.

He was rehabilitated on 19 July 1989 by the Moscow region prosecutor, in respect of the repression of 1937. The Holy Synod of the Russian Church numbered him among the New Martyrs and Confessors on 17 July 2001. He is commemorated on 31 December and, in the new style, 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.