On September 23 (September 10 on the Julian Calendar) we commemorate Saint Ismail Kudryavtsev, Priest, New Martyr of the Communist Yoke, who reposed in the Lord in 1937.
Hieromartyr Ismael was born in 1876 in the village of Sadunovo, Kimry district, Tver province, to the family of a peasant, Ivan Kudryavtsev. He completed three years of a church parish school. He was drafted into the army, where he served with the rank of senior non-commissioned officer from 1898 to 1902, when he was demobilized and returned home. From 1908 to 1910, he served as a police officer in one of the villages of Kimry district.
After the revolution of 1917, he chose the path of church service and was ordained a priest. During the persecutions of the early 1930s, he was arrested and sentenced to five years of exile, but two years later, due to illness, he was allowed to return to his homeland, and he began serving in the church in the village of Arkhangelskoye, Kimry district.
The beginning of 1937 was marked by the closure of churches. The Kimry District Executive Committee ordered the closure of the church in the village of Arkhangelskoye under the fictitious pretext of its emergency condition. Father Ismail managed to defend the church, but on August 7, 1937, the NKVD arrested him. The village cultural worker was interrogated and testified:
I know that a religious minister, former dispossessed kulak Ismail Ivanovich Kudryavtsev, who lives in the village of Arkhangelskoye in the Kimry District, systematically conducts anti-Soviet agitation among believers, directed against the Soviet government. I know that Ismail Ivanovich Kudryavtsev, contrary to the decision of the Presidium of the Kimry District Executive Committee in early 1937 (which stipulated the immediate closure of the church due to its technical unsuitability, which could cause accidents during services), organized believers to disobey the said decision and called on believers to disobey the Soviet government.
During the interrogation, the investigator asked Father Ismail:
Were you deprived of your voting rights and subjected to dispossession?
- Yes, indeed, I was deprived of my voting rights, and the farm that I left to my son, Fyodor Ismailovich Kudryavtsev, was dispossessed in 1929.
Have you ever been convicted?
- I don't know whether I was convicted or not, but in 1932 I was arrested by the OGPU under Article 58 and returned in 1934.
The investigation has information that you are conducting active counter-revolutionary agitation among the population against the Soviet government and the party. Do you admit this?
- I was not involved in anti-Soviet agitation.
The investigation demands truthful testimony from you, but you are lying and trying to cover up the traces of your crime: as someone hostile to the Soviet government, you were spreading provocative rumors against the existing system.
- I am showing the investigation only the truth; I did not fight against the Soviet government.
On August 8, an indictment was drawn up and the case was transferred to the NKVD Troika, which on September 20 issued a resolution to shoot the priest. Father Ismail Kudryavtsev was shot two days later, on September 23, 1937.
He was canonized as a New Martyr and Confessor of Russia at the Jubilee Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church in August 2000 for universal veneration.