Sergius Losev

Holy Hieromartyr Sergius Losev was a priest in the village of Kapotnya, now within Moscow, and died a martyr in a camp on 29 September 1942, while his wife Varvara was shot at Butovo.

He was born on 20 September 1893 in the village of Vanilovo, Bronnitsy district, in the family of the psalm-⁠reader Alexander Dmitrievich Losev. He graduated from the Kolomna ecclesiastical school in 1908 and the Moscow Seminary in 1915 and served for two and a half months as psalm-⁠reader. At that time he married Varvara, a teacher, who became his faithful helper. In the same year he was ordained deacon, and a year and a half later priest. From 1926 until his arrest he served at the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God in Kapotnya. Throughout the persecution he did all he could to keep the church from being closed, often asking his parishioners to help pay the taxes the local authorities laid on the church.

On 27 November 1937 he was arrested, imprisoned at Taganka and questioned the next day. He admitted that he had organized collections among the collective farmers and the workers of the cracking plant, but denied that the money was for himself, saying it went to the needs of the church. He admitted that services were held at harvest time, but without purpose, on feasts and Sundays. He rejected the charge of counter-⁠revolutionary agitation. The chairman of the village council wrote a character report, and the testimony of duty witnesses was added. On 7 December 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced him to ten years in a camp, and he was sent to a camp in Azerbaijan. He fell asleep in captivity on 29 September 1942 and was buried in an unknown place.

The same false witnesses also denounced his wife, saying that she had told them they had put her husband in prison and had threatened them with revenge. Varvara Ivanovna, born in 1894 in a peasant family that later moved to Moscow, where her father was a shoemaker, received a good education and worked as a teacher. She was arrested on 16 February 1938 and held at Yegoryevsk. She denied all the charges, saying she did not know why her husband had been arrested, but she considered that he had harmed no one. On 25 February an NKVD troika sentenced her to death, and she was shot on 7 March 1938 and buried in an unknown common grave at Butovo.

Father Sergius is commemorated on 29 September 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.