Vladimir Smirnov

Holy Hieromartyr Vladimir Smirnov, a priest of Moscow, was legal consultant to Patriarch Tikhon and was shot on 27 August 1937 in exile, at Chimkent.

Vladimir Konstantinovich Smirnov was born on 18 February 1885 in Moscow, in the family of a postal clerk. He graduated from the seminary and the law faculty of Moscow University. In 1911 he was ordained priest. In 1924 he was consultant on legal questions to the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, Saint Tikhon. In the same year he was arrested, accused of "counter-⁠revolutionary agitation", and spent about three months at Butyrka. Soon after his release he was raised to archpriest. He was arrested again in 1930 and 1931. In 1932 he was arrested again in Moscow, sentenced to five years in a camp and sent to Svirlag. After eleven months, because of illness, the sentence was changed to exile at Chimkent.

On 23 June 1937 he was arrested and held at Chimkent, accused of "defeatist agitation, in which he placed hope in the fascist countries that might put an end to communism in the USSR, counter-⁠revolutionary agitation against the loans, slander of the Soviet press and anti-⁠defense activity". He did not admit guilt. The troika of the South Kazakhstan regional NKVD sentenced him to death on 23 August, and on 27 August 1937 he was shot and buried in an unknown common grave in a suburb of Chimkent.

He was glorified by the Jubilee Council of Bishops in the year 2000. He is commemorated on 27 August and, in the new style, on 7 February (movable) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church.