Sergius Tsvetkov

Holy Hieromartyr Sergius Tsvetkov was an archpriest in the Moscow region and was shot at Butovo on 22 March 1938, together with three other priests of the Ukhtomsky deanery.

The priest He was born in 1869 in Moscow, in the family of the priest Nikanor Tsvetkov. He graduated from the Moscow Theological Seminary in 1892 and in the same year was ordained deacon for the church of the Resurrection in Veshnyakovo, and in 1902 priest for the same church. From 1892 he taught the Law of God in schools of the area, at Vykhino, Lyubertsy and in Moscow. In 1917 he was named spiritual father of the deanery, in 1918 he received the pectoral cross, and in 1920 he was raised to archpriest.

The arrests He was first arrested in 1919 by the Cheka, together with his son Nicholas, who was seized as an officer of the tsarist army and shot; Father Sergius spent three weeks in prison and was released. In January 1938 he was arrested again, along with other priests of the Ukhtomsky deanery. At his interrogations he admitted that he knew Archpriest Vladimir Vozdvizhensky well and often visited his home, but he denied membership in any counter-⁠revolutionary group, any slander against the authorities and any defeatist mood. Priest Sergius Sakharov, who had agreed to give the testimony the investigators wanted, was brought face to face with him, but Father Sergius rejected all of it.

Martyrdom On 5 March 1938 the inquiry was closed, charging that the priests had organized themselves in the autumn of 1937 into a counter-⁠revolutionary group led by Vozdvizhensky. On 15 March an NKVD troika sentenced the archpriests Sergius Lebedev, Sergius Tsvetkov and Alexis Smirnov and the priest Dimitri Glivenko to death, and on 22 March 1938 they were shot and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo range.

The saint is commemorated on 22 March 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.