Sergius Smirnov

Holy Hieromartyr Sergius Smirnov was a priest in Yaroslavl province and the Tver district and was shot on 3 November 1937. He was glorified in the year 2000.

Persecution

He was born on 15 June 1893 in the village of Borok, Poshekhonye district, Yaroslavl province, in the family of the priest John Smirnov. He finished the school at Rybinsk and was for two years a teacher in his native village. His father urged him to become a priest, and he went to the Yaroslavl Seminary, then married Nadezhda, a devout peasant girl who sang in the choir. In 1919 he was ordained priest in the village of Sannikovo, forty kilometres from Borok, in a poor parish with no house for the clergy; Nadezhda's father helped them buy one. He served there until 1935 and they had four children. He was a zealous pastor and a great lover of the poor, sharing his last piece of bread.

Arrest and martyrdom

In 1935 the authorities demanded a tax that he could not pay. All his property was entered in the register and the family was driven from their home and wandered from one rented place to another, for people, though they loved him, feared to keep him long. Someone gave him three kilograms of rye; he took a mortar to pound it and was reported for milling, and so he was arrested and sentenced to a year in a camp for non-⁠payment of tax. While he was in the camp all the inhabitants of Sannikovo were moved out, and the village was drowned by the Rybinsk reservoir. Released after a year, he went to Tver to Archbishop Thaddeus, who sent him to the church of the Exaltation of the Cross in the village of Teblishi. For eight months he lived there alone, then he was given a small house, and in April 1937 he brought his family.

He was arrested on 11 October 1937, the third day after the day of Saint Sergius. At the search they took everything, even an old worn cassock. The next day his wife and his daughter Maria went to the district centre and saw Father Sergius behind a barred window, who called to his wife, "Nadia, hold fast, do not weep, you have the children on your shoulders, you must raise them," and to his daughter, "Mashenka, obey your mother and help her." A guard thrust the girl away from the window, and the family was driven from the house; the director of the flax mill, though a communist, took on Nadezhda as a cook and gave her a room. The local NKVD chief proposed to the priest, "Renounce your rank and you will be a teacher at the school in Teblishi"; he refused: "No, never. I am a priest, a priest's son, my great-⁠grandfather was a priest." After a week he was moved to the prison of Bezhetsk and the interrogations began. He rejected the charges one by one: agitation in the collective farms, campaigning against the loans (saying he had signed for fifty roubles of the hundred and fifty asked), praise of tsarism, spreading counter-⁠revolutionary letters, organizing sectarians. To the charge that he had held services to disrupt the harvest he answered that he had served only on the days appointed. Beyond that he would say nothing more, so as not to bear false witness against himself or others. He was fifty-⁠four and left a wife, two daughters and a son, the youngest only seven. The witnesses called said that they had known him only a few months. On 20 October the indictment was drawn up, and on 1 November the troika sentenced him to death; he was shot on 3 November 1937.

He was numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church at the Jubilee Council of Bishops in August 2000. He is commemorated on 3 November and, in the new style, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, on 5 June in the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl, on 11 July (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vologda and on 18 July (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver.