Vladimir Preobrazhensky

Holy Hieromartyr Vladimir Preobrazhensky was a priest in the Kaluga region, and in exile in Kazakhstan he was shot on 31 December 1937. He wrote religious poems, which became the ground of his condemnation.

The priest

He was born on 3 October 1873 in the village of Troitskoe in Smolensk province, in a family where his grandfather, John Antonovich (1792-1855), had been sacristan at the church of the Holy Trinity and had taken part in the war of 1812. His father, Gregory, did not follow his own father's path. Vladimir finished the Kaluga seminary in 1895 and was appointed psalm-⁠reader at the church of the Protection in the village of Logino, where he was also teacher at the parish school. In 1896 he was ordained priest for the house church of a charitable institution in the village of Babaevo and was teacher of religion and of singing, and in 1900 he also taught beekeeping. Between 1901 and 1908 he served in the diocese of Tver, at the church in the village of Bogorodskoe (Mlevichi), where he founded a brotherhood in the name of Saint John the Forerunner and a temperance society, and in 1907 was chosen elector for the State Duma. At his request, in 1908 he returned to the diocese of Kaluga and became rector of the church of the Holy Trinity at Troitskoe on the Vzdyn, in the Medyn district. He was teacher of religion and chairman of the brotherhood of the Holy Trinity. He was married to Alexandra Vasilievna (born in 1875) and they had four children: Maria, Paul, Nicholas and Anna. For his service he received the skufia, the epigonation, the kamilavka and, in 1916, the pectoral cross.

The arrests

After 1917 he went on serving in the same church. In 1929 he was arrested and sentenced by the OGPU Collegium to three years in a camp and sent to Solovki, where, by the will of God, he stayed alive, above all because he spent all three years as a "free settler". He was arrested again on 22 August 1936, and on 9 February 1937 he received five years of exile in Kazakhstan. He worked as a collective-⁠farm peasant in the village of Orlovka, Chayan district, South Kazakhstan region. On 24 December 1937 he was arrested in exile with the priest John Mironovsky and the monk Victor Matveev, accused of organizing an illegal house of prayer. At the search religious poems written by him were found, "The Dream of the Exiled Priest" and "The Thought of the Old Pastor in Exile". At the interrogation he said that he was guilty of nothing but being a religious man, that politically he stood on Soviet ground and that he had been arrested and exiled only for his faith. He said he had organized no gatherings, that twice old women had gathered at his lodging to sing spiritual verses and that he had left. He kept the poems as a memento, one in memory of his murdered son, and only one had he sent to his brother.

The troika decreed death on 30 December, and on 31 December 1937, at midnight, the sentence was carried out. The place of his grave is not known. He was rehabilitated in 1989 and in 2000 was canonized by the Jubilee Council of Bishops. He is honored especially in the parish of the Holy Trinity in Kondrovo, the place of his birth and ministry, where he served his last Liturgy. In 2018 a chapel in his name was begun there, with the dome and cross raised in October 2019, and the first icon of the New Martyrs of Kaluga was painted, with his image.

The saint is commemorated on 31 December and, in the new style, on 7 February (movable) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 31 July in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kaluga and on 8 December in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Smolensk Land.