Sergius Uspensky

Holy Hieromartyr Sergius Uspensky was an archpriest in Moscow, a former soloist and an ascetic in the world, and he was shot at Butovo on 19 December 1937. His face appears in Pavel Korin's painting "Departing Russia".

Youth He was born in 1878 in Mozhaisk, studied at the ecclesiastical schools of the Donskoy and the Zaikonospassky monasteries, and in 1898 graduated from the Moscow Seminary, where he worked for four more years as a supervisor. He had a very fine voice and artistic gifts, and in 1900 he was accepted without competition as a soloist of the Bolshoi Theatre, but the artist's life did not please him, since the spiritual life drew him. From 1901 he was psalm-⁠reader at the church of Saint Pope Clement on Pyatnitskaya Street and married Anna Petrovna Rozanova; they had three children.

Ministry In 1904 Metropolitan Vladimir of Moscow ordained him deacon for the church of the Protection on Lyshchikova Gora; in 1910 he was moved to the church of the icon of the Mother of God "The Unburnt Bush", in 1917 he was raised to protodeacon, and on 30 August 1920 he became a priest. In 1919-1922 he combined his service with work at a railway office. In 1924 he was raised to archpriest and named rector of the Unburnt Bush church, which was destroyed in 1929, its bricks used to asphalt the streets of Moscow. Then he served at the church of Spas-⁠Peski on the Arbat, where his uncle, the mitred archpriest Sergius Vasilievich Uspensky, senior dean of Moscow, had served for years and died in 1930, and when that was closed, at the church of Saint Nicholas "on the Shchepy" near Smolenskaya Square. His parishioners called him "an ascetic of the spirit in the world", a kind and helpful man, who aided many families of the repressed. It is known that for many years he supported the family of Archpriest Zabavin, rector of the Unburnt Bush church, who was held at Solovki, and many gifts for the persecuted passed through his hands.

Arrests and death On 29 January 1933, before the late Liturgy, he was called to a sick person to give communion, and on leaving the church he was told to get into a car and was taken to the Lubyanka, with the Holy Gifts and his pectoral cross. He was charged as a member of a counter-⁠revolutionary organization of Christian youth, a participant in illegal meetings and a spreader of anti-⁠Soviet agitation. On 10 April 1933 the Special Council sentenced him to three years of exile in the Northern Territory, at Kargopol and then Vologda. After a year he was released because of illness, with the ban on living in six central regions; he settled in Mozhaisk, supported by his son. He was arrested again on 30 November 1937 and brought gravely ill to the town prison, and an NKVD troika sentenced him for "hostile attitude to Soviet power and counter-⁠revolutionary activity". He was shot on 19 December 1937 at the Butovo range.

He is commemorated on 20 December 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.