Vladimir Speransky

Holy Hieromartyr Vladimir Speransky was a priest in the village of Zaprudnya near Moscow and was shot on 21 October 1937 at the Butovo firing ground.

He was born on 23 March 1877 at Suzdal, in the family of the priest Basil Speransky. He finished the Vladimir seminary in 1899 and for two years was a teacher. In 1901 he was ordained deacon and then priest, and served first in the village of Petrovo in Ekaterinoslav province, then in other places of that region, the last being the town of Alexandria. In 1933 he moved to the Moscow region and served in the Taldom district, at the church of the Transfiguration in the village of Zaprudnya, which the locals, by old custom, still called Gari.

In January 1937 a young man of the village, who worked as a clerk at the military commissariat of Egoryevsk, came on leave, and on his way back, walking to the station of Verbilki, had the priest as his companion. The priest asked him about life in the army, about food and weapons. He said that on the Far Eastern front the army had all it needed. The clerk asked him what he thought of the order of things, and the priest answered that before there had been the tsar and now there was Stalin, no difference: here they praise Stalin, in Germany Hitler. After they parted, the young man found the conversation suspicious and wrote to the NKVD that the priest was gathering intelligence. Called in on 17 April, he could prove nothing. In August 1937 the order for mass arrests arrived, and an official of the Taldom NKVD had an informer gather data about the priest. On 15 August the informer reported that the priest had once lived like a landowner, had been exiled and had returned with a hidden hostility to Soviet power, but that he was loved and respected, and that his sermons, on Gospel themes, referred to current events.

At the interrogation the father denied that he had cooperated with the White troops in the years of the civil war and that he had carried out counter-⁠revolutionary agitation. He admitted only that, walking to the station, he had spoken with the soldier about conditions in the army, and said that he had passed on no information about arms. He also stated that his sermons were purely religious, though in them he condemned the teaching of the atheists, and that he is a religious idealist and rejects materialism at its root. The investigation closed on 29 August, and he was held at Taganka. On 19 October an NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and Priest Vladimir Speransky was shot at Butovo on 21 October 1937 and buried in an unknown common grave.

The saint is commemorated on 21 October 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.