On September 13 (August 31 on the Julian Calendar) we commemorate Sts Alexander Lyubimov, Priest, and Vladimir Dvinsky, Deacon, New Martyrs of the Communist Yoke, who reposed in the Lord in 1918.
Vladimir Petrovich Dvinsky was born on June 13, 1858, in the village of Polonsky Pogost, to the family of priest Pyotr Dvinsky, who served in the Ilyinskaya Church in the same Polonsk Pogost.
The Dvinsky family came from a line of clergymen. They lived in the family estate, which was located next to the church. When Vladimir turned sixteen, he entered the Pskov Seminary, but a year later he was forced to resign due to the inability to pay for his studies. In response to a petition from his father, priest Pyotr Dvinsky, the diocesan Spiritual Consistory provided Vladimir with a full-time position as a psalm-reader in the Ilyinskaya Church of his native pogost. A year later, Vladimir was ordained as a reader by His Grace Pavel, Bishop of Pskov and Porkhov.
After ten years of serving as a reader, in 1888 Vladimir Petrovich was ordained a deacon by Bishop Ermogen (Dobronravin) of Pskov and Porkhov to the same Ilyinsky Church.
Deacon Vladimir, in addition to fulfilling his direct duties, worked for many years in the field of spiritual education of the people. He was a religious teacher in the Trubnikovskaya and Zhukovskaya zemstvo schools. And he did his best to give his five children an education. Father Vladimir served as a deacon in the Ilyinskaya Church for thirty years, serving in the parish in total for forty years, showing a rare example of constancy in parish service for that time.
In 1907, Father Alexander Lyubimov became the priest at the same Ilyinsky Church.
Alexander Mikhailovich Lyubimov was born on July 13, 1884 in the same village as Deacon Vladimir, to a priest's family. After graduating from the Pskov Theological Seminary in 1905, he was assigned to the position of religious teacher at the parish school at the Nikandrova Pustyn monastery in the city of Porkhov. He subsequently worked at a school and taught Russian and Church Slavonic at the Porkhov Theological School.
On February 11, 1906, Archbishop Arseny (Stadnitsky) of Pskov ordained him a deacon, and the next day, a priest, and assigned him to the Alexander Nevsky Church at the Porkhov Theological School. In 1907, Father Alexander became a priest of the Ilyinsky Church in his native Polonsky Pogost. It was a large parish, which had an almshouse.
About a hundred Old Believers (of the Feodosiyev sect, as well as priestless Old Believers) lived in the area adjacent to the Polonsky Pogost, and Father Alexander expended much effort to return them to the bosom of the Orthodox Church. Father Alexander was widely involved in teaching, being a religious teacher in four schools at once. In addition, the diocesan administration involved the priest in work outside the parish. Since 1910, the Board of Trustees began its activities at the Diocesan Women's School, and Father Alexander joined it first as a competitive member, and then as an active member. For "useful and diligent service" Father Alexander was awarded a nabedrennik in 1910, and a skufia in 1914 for services to the Diocesan Department.
The long-term joint service of Deacon Vladimir and Priest Alexander connected them with bonds of spiritual kinship, and after the October Revolution they continued to serve together in their parish. During the difficult times when the persecution of the Orthodox Church began, both priests remained faithful to their duty: they preached, taught their flock to live according to the Commandments of God, explained to parishioners the essence of what was happening around them and called on them to defend church property, which at that time was associated with considerable risk to life.
In the summer of 1918, Father Alexander and Deacon Vladimir read out the most significant decisions of the 3rd session of the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church of 1917-1918, which contained calls for believers to stand up for the Church in the face of persecution (in particular, to prevent the plundering of church property). Soon, denunciations began to come in against the clergy. Fellow villagers reported to the Bolshevik authorities that the clergy "organized rallies near and outside the church, read council resolutions, explaining that they had no right to take away monastery and church lands."
The active preaching activity could not go unpunished for the Polonsky clergymen. The local offices of the new government began to regularly receive denunciations from the most intolerant and intoxicated fellow villagers, and on the basis of these denunciations an investigative case was fabricated against them.
On September 10, 1918, priest Alexander Lyubimov and deacon Vladimir Dvinsky were arrested. They were accused of "counterrevolutionary actions, monarchism, agitation in the church among the peasants against the decree of the Council of People's Commissars", and also of having allegedly informed on their fellow villagers to the police during the 1905 revolution. Before their arrest, their homes were searched. The books and even gramophone records found were declared monarchist. The interrogations of the clergy were brief. Each of the arrested was interrogated only once. The arrested categorically rejected all charges of counterrevolution. There is indirect evidence that the clergy of the Polonskaya Church also suffered because they prevented the Bolsheviks from confiscating grain from local peasants. By a decree of the Cheka (Soviet Secret Police) of the Karamyshevsky District, both defendants were sentenced to death.
On September 13, Father Alexander and Father Vladimir were taken out with their hands tied into a grove outside the village, where they were summarily executed by firing squad by a group of Chekists. Their bodies remained unburied for eight weeks, since the authorities did not allow them to be buried according to Christian rites under penalty of death. The Polonsky new martyrs were among the first to suffer in the Pskov land during the persecutions by the godless authorities that began in 1918.
The Holy Martyrs Vladimir and Alexander were glorified as holy new martyrs and confessors of Russia by the Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church on August 13–16, 2000. Resolution of the Holy Synod of December 26, 2002.