Vincent Smirnov

Holy Hieromartyr Vincent Smirnov was an archpriest in the settlement of Khimki near Moscow and was shot on 16 November 1937 at the Butovo firing ground.

He was born in 1881 in the village of Zasimye in the Klin district, Moscow province, in the family of the deacon Michael Smirnov. He studied at the seminary and was ordained priest. He and his wife, Evdokia Ivanovna, had no children. For his long and blameless service he was raised to archpriest and, in 1930, appointed rector of the church in Khimki.

On 26 October 1937, in the time of the cruelest persecution, he was arrested and held in a cell of the Krasnogorsk militia. False witnesses said that he had declared that Soviet power had ruined all decent people, that the clergy are the flower of the nation, that however much the Bolsheviks tried they would not destroy faith in God, since his church was always full, and that they must see to it that the Orthodox faith did not waver. Questioned the next day, the priest denied everything: he had never spoken against the authorities or the collective farms, it was all invented out of malice, and he did not even read newspapers.

On 14 November an NKVD troika sentenced him to death. He was shot on 16 November 1937 and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo firing ground. His wife was told that her husband had received a sentence of many years of imprisonment. On 19 November she wrote to Beria a request to review the case, saying that she did not know the reason for the arrest and the punishment and that, in her view, the troika had not examined the case but merely issued a decree. She received no answer.

The saint is commemorated on 16 November and, in the new style, on 29 May (movable) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and on 5 September (movable) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.