Aleksandr Andreyev

Aleksandr Andreyev is recorded in Russian biographical and ecclesiastical listings as a clergyman of the Russian Orthodox Church associated with the era of Soviet anti-religious persecution. The personal name and surname are extremely common, and more than one priest called Aleksandr Andreyev appears among those who suffered arrest, imprisonment, or execution in the 1920s and 1930s. Because the available public identifications for Wikidata item Q4065395 do not isolate a single, fully documented life without risk of conflating distinct men, precise dates of birth and death, places of origin, and the exact circumstances of death cannot be stated here as verified facts.

Parish clergy of the late Russian Empire typically received their formation in diocesan theological schools and seminaries. After marriage, in accordance with the long-standing discipline of the married (white) clergy, a candidate could be ordained deacon and then priest and assigned to a village or town church. The revolutions of 1917, the Civil War, the confiscation of church valuables, the renovationist schism, and the successive waves of arrests by the Cheka, OGPU, and NKVD destroyed this world. Priests were frequently charged with counter-revolutionary agitation, concealment of church property, or membership in invented monarchist organizations. Sentences included exile, forced-labor camps, and, especially during the Great Purge of 1937–1938, execution.

Those later numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia were glorified by the Russian Orthodox Church after archival investigative files, camp records, and local veneration had been examined by the Synodal Commission for Canonization in the 1990s and 2000s. Individual commemorations, when assigned, usually fall on the date of death according to the ecclesiastical calendar; many are also remembered in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors (the Sunday nearest 25 January / 7 February) and, for those shot at the Butovo firing range near Moscow, in the Synaxis of the Butovo martyrs. No widely attested special patronages—of places, professions, or illnesses—beyond the general intercession of the New Martyrs can be verified for this name.

In the absence of a securely matched primary dossier for this particular Wikidata identifier, it is not possible to confirm whether the subject was a married parish priest or a monastic cleric, whether he had children, where he was buried, or by which exact synodal act he may have been glorified. The historical reality that remains clear is the scale of the persecution itself: thousands of named clergy and countless unnamed faithful died for their refusal to abandon the liturgical and pastoral life of the Church under an atheist state. Any liturgical memory attached to an Aleksandr Andreyev of this period belongs to that larger witness rather than to a fully reconstructed individual biography.