Sergius Solovyov

Holy Hieromartyr Sergius Solovyov was a priest of the Dormition church in the village of Shubino near Moscow and was shot at Butovo on 17 February 1938.

He was born on 26 September 1883 in the village of Shubino, Bronnitsy district, in the family of the priest Michael Konstantinovich Solovyov and Ekaterina Dimitrievna, who had ten children. In 1894 he entered the Donskoy ecclesiastical school, which he finished in 1899, and in 1906 he graduated from the Moscow Seminary and was named teacher at the two-⁠class school of the Nikolo-⁠Ugresha Monastery, where he was also teacher of the Law of God to the brethren. He soon married and had a daughter. On 26 August 1910 Metropolitan Vladimir of Moscow assigned him to the Dormition church in Shubino, and on 17 October Bishop Tryphon (Turkestanov) ordained him priest. He served there all his life, and until the persecution he taught at the parish and zemstvo schools. In 1923 the parish, with the village of Shubino and the villages of Borisovo, Zamenye, Skripino, Motyakino, Pestovo and Bazushno, numbered one thousand three hundred and forty people; at that time he became dean of the fourth district of Bronnitsy. His wife had died and he was left with a daughter of ten. At the end of the twenties he defended the church together with his parishioners when the authorities wished to close it.

During the persecution at the end of the thirties the authorities gathered material for his arrest; on 21 January 1938 the priest Basil Krestov of Saltykovo was questioned as a false witness. On 26 January Father Sergius was arrested and imprisoned at Kolomna, and on 31 January he was questioned; asked by the investigator to admit guilt of anti-⁠Soviet activity, he answered with a categorical refusal. On 11 February an NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and on 17 February 1938 he was shot and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo range near Moscow.

He is commemorated on 17 February and, in the new style, on 29 May (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and on 5 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.