Grigory Averin

Grigory Ivanovich Averin was a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. He was born in 1889 in the village of Averkievo, Bogorodsky district, Moscow Governorate, in the Russian Empire, into a peasant family. After a church education he entered service as a psalm-reader in a parish of the Vladimir region. In the years after 1917 he was ordained deacon and then priest and served in parishes of the Ivanovo region while the Soviet state was closing churches, seizing property, and placing clergy under fiscal and police pressure.

In the early 1930s he was arrested and sent to the camps, then released and allowed to resume parish work. During the mass NKVD operations of 1937 he was arrested again, accused of counter-revolutionary activity, and condemned to death by an extrajudicial troika. He was shot in 1937 in Ivanovo. As with many victims of that year’s executions, the place of burial was not recorded and remains unknown.

In August 2000 the Jubilee Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church glorified him as a hieromartyr together with a large company of bishops, priests, monastics, and laypeople who had suffered under Soviet rule. He is commemorated in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia and among the saints associated with the Ivanovo land. Surviving information about him comes mainly from investigative files, brief service records, and the dossiers assembled for canonization rather than from a full contemporary biography, which is typical for parish clergy killed in 1937.

His life belongs to the history of the white clergy of central Russia who remained at their posts through revolution, civil war, famine, church schisms, and state terror, and who were destroyed in the anonymous machinery of the Great Terror. The outline of his origin, ordination, arrests, and execution is attested in the materials used for his glorification; day-to-day pastoral detail is sparse.