Theodore Palshkov

Holy Martyr Theodore Palshkov, a psalm-⁠reader, was born in 1871 in the village of Prudki in the Kasimov district of the Ryazan province, in the family of the psalm-⁠reader Luke Pavlovich and his wife Alexandra Fyodorovna Palshkov. He received the crown of martyrdom by shooting on 17 February 1938, at the Butovo firing range near Moscow.

In 1894 Theodore finished the Moscow seminary and began to teach without pay at the two-⁠class Skorbyashchensky parish school in the Yamskaya Kolomenskaya district. In 1890, by decision of the Moscow City Duma and with the money of benefactors, among them the mayor Nikolai Alexandrovich Alekseev, the Skorbyashchensky church and several buildings of the Alekseevsky psychiatric hospital had begun to be built. In 1896 Bishop Tikhon (Nikanorov) of Mozhaisk consecrated the church, which was on the upper floor of the central administrative building, and in the same year Theodore Lukich was appointed psalm-⁠reader there. In 1901 he was elected a member of the commission for organizing public popular readings in Moscow. From 1903 he taught at the Sunday school at the tea-⁠house of the Danilov branch of the First Moscow Temperance Society, and from 1904 he was a teacher at the parish school of the same society. All this time he continued to serve as psalm-⁠reader at the Skorbyashchensky church, and after the church was closed under Soviet power he served as psalm-⁠reader in churches of the Moscow diocese.

In 1935 he settled in Moscow, but in 1936 he was summoned to the passport office, his passport was taken and he was ordered to leave Moscow, so he moved to his brother in Mozhaisk. In 1937, shortly before his arrest, he took work as a watchman. He was arrested on 17 January 1938 and held in Taganka prison. At the interrogation the investigator asked whether he considered the Tikhonite current or the Renovationist one correct; he answered that, being a venerator of Patriarch Tikhon, he considered the Tikhonite current correct. Asked about his attitude to Soviet power, he said that it was hostile, because, as a servant of the cult wounded by the authorities' persecution of religion and clergy, deprived of electoral rights, of the right to live freely in Moscow and of a passport, he had expressed his dissatisfaction to those around him. He also said that no one had supported his words, and that on the contrary he had been warned to be careful, since he might be arrested. After the interrogations the duty witnesses, his neighbours in the street, were heard and signed the required records, and on 9 February 1938 the investigation was completed. On 14 February the NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and the psalm-⁠reader Theodore Lukich Palshkov was shot on 17 February 1938 and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo firing range.

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