Sergius Kudryavtsev

Holy Hieromartyr Sergius Kudryavtsev was an archpriest in the Moscow and Saratov regions and was shot at Volsk on 15 December 1937.

He was born on 1 July 1881 in the village of Fryanovo, Bogorodsk district, in the family of the psalm-⁠reader Dimitri Feodorovich Kudryavtsev of the church of Saint John the Forerunner. He studied at the Moscow Seminary but left in 1902 from the fifth class. He was then an assistant teacher and a teacher at parish schools of the Klin district, and afterwards deacon in the village of Aniskino, where he married Ekaterina Ivanovna, née Pavlova, from a peasant family. They had four children: Olga, Boris, Nicholas and Basil. On 19 June 1911 he was ordained priest as second priest of the same church, and his brother Nicholas took his place as deacon. At the start of the war in 1914 he was sent to the front, apparently as a regimental priest, and returned to parish work in 1916. At the end of that year he was named to the church of Saints Cosmas and Damian in the village of Kuzmino, Serpukhov district, where he served until 1924, and then to the Dormition church in the village of Shmatovo. Of his service there he later recalled that the yearly income was only 350 roubles, but the parishioners, knowing his poverty, also gave him flour and potatoes. In 1925 he was priest at the church of the Sign of the Mother of God in Ushakovo, Kashira district.

In 1930 the community of Aniskino asked for him again as priest, and from 25 July he served once more at the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God. Between 1934 and 1936 he was exiled to Kirzhach. In August or September 1937 he moved with his son Nicholas to Khvalynsk in the Saratov region as rector of the church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, where he served very briefly. On 27 November 1937 he was arrested by the Khvalynsk NKVD and taken to the prison at Volsk. At the search they took his passport, two service records, fifteen small crosses, ten prayer books, his priestly vestment and a pre-⁠revolutionary identity card. The next day he was questioned; he answered that he knew nothing of a counter-⁠revolutionary group of clergy and that he had told the truth and had nothing else to say. On 10 December an NKVD troika of the Saratov region sentenced him to death, and the sentence was carried out at Volsk on 15 December 1937. The place of burial could not be established.

He is commemorated on 15 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, on 5 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow and on 12 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Saratov.