Vladimir Ryasensky

Holy Hieromartyr Vladimir Ryasensky was a priest in Ostashkov, Tver province, and died in a camp on 4 December 1932, on the feast of the Entry of the Mother of God into the Temple.

He was born in 1891 in Ostashkov, in the family of the priest Theodore Ryasensky. After the Tver seminary he was ordained priest for the church in the village of Spas-⁠Esenovichi and, on 2 September 1916, moved at his request to the church of the churchyard of Volgo, Ostashkov district. In the twenties he served at the church of the Sign in Ostashkov. Many times he was summoned to the Cheka and threatened to stop his sermons, but he always answered: "I have preached and I will preach."

In November 1929 Archpriest John Bobrov died, one of the oldest priests of Ostashkov and for many years dean; almost the whole town gathered at his funeral, and the procession stretched through half the town. Several priests gave addresses, and Father Vladimir recalled that Archpriest John had suffered many persecutions, had been sentenced as early as 1918 to thirty years of imprisonment, and that arrest and investigation had hastened his end. Soon he himself had to confess the faith in chains. A saddler with a workshop in Ostashkov, wishing to escape his wife's watchfulness and to go off to Moscow and to parties, invented the pretext that he went to secret counter-⁠revolutionary meetings at the Zhitny monastery, of an organization called "Red Anchor". His brother-⁠in-⁠law, a worker at a leather factory, wrote of it to the GPU of Ostashkov and, in December 1929, confirmed it at the investigation. Charges of "counter-⁠revolution" were raised also against church people: the church warden Dimitry Melnikov, the choir director Constantine Eklund, the doctor Nicholas Roslyakov and the saddler Paul Akimov. Father Vladimir was accused of having said that the destruction of religion leads to the fall of culture and of Russia, and that the rulers plunder the country's wealth and send it abroad.

None admitted guilt, and the investigation material did not withstand the slightest scrutiny, but the GPU sent the file for extrajudicial judgment. On 26 December 1930 the OGPU troika sentenced the doctor to ten years in a camp, Father Vladimir and the choir director to five years, Akimov to three years, and the warden to five years of exile in the Northern Territory. The prison of Velikiye Luki, transports through transit prisons and labor beyond his strength in the camp weakened him, and after a year and a half Father Vladimir died, on the feast of the Entry of the Mother of God into the Temple, 4 December 1932.

The saint is commemorated on 5 December and, in the new style, on 7 February (movable) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 18 July (movable) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver and on 29 August (movable) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kuzbass.