Vladimir Ushkov

Holy Martyr Vladimir Ushkov was church warden and later psalm-⁠reader of the church in the village of Konobeevo near Moscow, and died in the Onegolag camp on 21 March 1942.

He was born in 1885 in the village of Konobeevo in the Bronnitsy district, in the family of the peasant Egor Ushkov. He finished the village school, married and had four children. Besides farm work he also did haulage. Called up in 1914 for the First World War, he was gravely wounded, lost an arm and was demobilized. After the revolution he set up a workshop for buttons. In the twenties he was elected warden of the church of the Holy Trinity in his native village. In 1930 his property was taken and, having nothing with which to pay taxes, he was arrested on 2 February 1930 and sentenced to five years in a camp and five years of exile. He appealed, and in April 1930 he was released on the ground that, if he had traded, he had done so "not systematically but to have a livelihood, being burdened with a large family; a disabled veteran of the imperialist war, he cannot work at a regular job". He returned to the village and was again warden, and from the second half of the thirties he served as psalm-⁠reader in the church.

On 19 January 1938 he was arrested and, after short interrogations in the district prison, was held at Taganka. The chairman of the collective farm said that Ushkov, though he belonged to the collective farm, did not go to work, said that it was sinful to work on the collective farm, carried on religious propaganda and said that on church feasts one must not work in the fields, and he cited as a fault also his service in church. At the interrogation of 23 January he admitted that he had been psalm-⁠reader for about a year and earlier had been on the church council, but denied counter-⁠revolutionary activity and rejected all the testimonies. The investigation closed on 9 July 1938, and on 19 September the Special Council of the NKVD sentenced him to five years in a camp. He died in the camp, at Onegolag, on 21 March 1942, and was buried in an unknown place.

The saint is commemorated on 21 March and, in the new style, on 7 February (movable) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and on 1 November in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Arkhangelsk Metropolis.