Vladimir Pasternatsky

Holy Hieromartyr Vladimir Pasternatsky was born on 2 July 1885 in the village of Dudichi, Igumen district, Minsk province, in the family of the priest Hilarion Pasternatsky, and died in 1938 at Smolensk. He graduated from the Minsk seminary in 1908, married Natalia, daughter of the priest Theophanes Sosinovsky, and they had eight children. In 1908 he was ordained a priest at the church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul in the village of Pesochnoe, where his father-⁠in-⁠law served; he served there until 1932. In the 1920s he was appointed dean and raised to the rank of archpriest. In 1931 his family was ordered to pay a tax so large that they could not pay it, and the authorities took their cow. In 1932 he was moved to the Saviour-⁠Ascension church in the town of Kopyl.

In 1933 all churches in the Kopyl district were closed and the priests arrested; only his church remained. The NKVD summoned him more and more often and, threatening him, demanded that he publicly renounce the priesthood, promising in exchange steady work, for example as an accountant, but he categorically refused. The authorities demanded a tax they knew he could not pay and expelled his children from school. At a family council the priest, supported by his wife, told the children: "God has sent us this trial and we must bear it without murmuring." Being the only priest in the district, he went from morning to evening answering calls, baptizing newborns and burying the dead. In March 1936 he was arrested on a charge of usurping the authority of an administrative official, because he kept a record of all those baptized and buried; on 24 March 1936 he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment and sent to labour colony no. 1 in the settlement of Khalch, in the Gomel region.

His wife was left alone, without means, with three minor children, but parishioners helped as they could. In 1936 she moved with the children to Roslavl. In December 1937 Father Vladimir was released and reached his family on 12 December, but a day later he was arrested again, charged with having carried out "active counter-⁠revolutionary agitation about war and the downfall of Soviet power, about the supposed famine in the Soviet Union and the oppression of religion". The landlord of the family's flat was a witness against him. At his interrogation on 23 December 1937 he denied having been an agent of German intelligence. He was shot at Smolensk on 21 January 1938. He is commemorated on 21 January, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church (7 February, movable), the Synaxis of the Saints of Belarus (11 July), of Smolensk (8 August) and of the new martyrs of the Smolensk land (8 December).