Konstantin Golubev

Konstantin Alekseyevich Golubev was a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church who was numbered among the New Martyrs of the twentieth century. He was born in 1852 in the village of Bogorodskoye in the Serpukhov district of the Moscow Governorate, in the family of a deacon. Like many sons of clergy in imperial Russia, he received a church education and studied at the Moscow Theological Seminary, after which he was ordained to the priesthood.

His pastoral ministry was spent in the town of Bogorodsk (today Noginsk) in Moscow province, an industrial center with a substantial working population. He served as a parish priest and was later known by the rank of archpriest (protoierey). In the last decades of the Russian Empire his duties would have included the celebration of the liturgy and sacraments, preaching, and the religious instruction of his parishioners amid the social changes of the late imperial period.

After the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 the Orthodox Church faced systematic hostility from the new regime. Clergy were frequently arrested on political charges. In 1918, during the Red Terror, Archpriest Konstantin was seized by the Cheka. He was executed that year in or near Bogorodsk. Surviving records of the precise circumstances of his arrest, interrogation, and death are sparse, as is typical for many victims of extrajudicial killings in that chaotic period.

In August 2000 the Jubilee Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, meeting in Moscow, glorified a large number of New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. Hieromartyr Konstantin Golubev was among those canonized. He is remembered as a priest who remained faithful during the first wave of Soviet persecution of the Church. Details of his family life and of any local commemorations beyond his inclusion in the synaxis of the New Martyrs are not firmly established in readily verifiable sources.