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Biography

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Gavriil Fedorovich Maslennikov was a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church who was martyred during the Soviet persecutions of the 1930s. He was born in 1871 in the village of Bolshoye Murashkino in Knyagininsky district of Nizhny Novgorod Governorate, then part of the Russian Empire, to a peasant family. After attending a parish school he entered church service as a psalmist in the 1890s. He was ordained deacon in the early 1900s and priest in 1916.

As a member of the white (married parish) clergy he served in rural churches of the Nizhny Novgorod region, including the village of Kladbishchi in Lukoyanov uezd. The years after 1917 brought severe trials for the Orthodox Church: churches were closed or confiscated, clergy were taxed and restricted, and anti-religious propaganda intensified. Father Gavriil continued to serve through these decades, later ministering in the village of Ichalki in the Mordovian ASSR.

In the summer of 1937 the NKVD launched mass operations that targeted remaining clergy as alleged counter-revolutionaries. Maslennikov was arrested on 6 August 1937. An extrajudicial troika of the Mordovian NKVD sentenced him to death on 20 October 1937. He was executed by shooting on 5 November 1937. Like the great majority of those killed in the Great Terror, he was buried in an unmarked grave whose location has not been identified.

During perestroika he was rehabilitated by Soviet authorities in 1989 as a victim of political repression. In August 2000 the Jubilee Bishops' Council of the Russian Orthodox Church glorified the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, including Priest Gavriil Maslennikov as a hieromartyr. He is commemorated on the anniversary of his death and as part of the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors and the Synaxis of the Saints of Nizhny Novgorod.

His biography is known chiefly from service records and the investigative file of 1937. No extensive personal writings or detailed accounts of his pastoral work have come down to us, which is typical for many of the locally venerated new martyrs of the Soviet era. His life stands as one example among thousands of parish priests who remained at their posts until they were arrested and killed.

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