Alexis (Aleksey Ivanovich) Zinoviev was a Russian Orthodox priest who was shot during the Soviet persecution of the Church in 1937 and is numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. He is commemorated on September 3.
According to the available accounts, he was born on March 1, 1879, in the village of Grekovo-Kazanskoe in Voronezh province, the son of a priest, John (Ioann) Zinoviev. He studied at the Tula Theological Seminary from 1898 to 1904, and on completing his studies was ordained to the priesthood and assigned to a parish church in the village of Voskresenskoe in the Chernsky district of Tula province. In 1914 he was transferred to a church in the town of Yefremov.
In 1935 the civil authorities seized his church and converted it into a grain storehouse. Deprived of a place to serve, Father Alexis continued his ministry by holding prayer services in the homes of devout parishioners until a renewed wave of arrests reached him in 1937. He was charged with anti-Soviet activity and with conducting unauthorized religious services, and was held for a time in the Taganka prison in Moscow.
On September 15, 1937, an NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and he was shot the following day, September 16, 1937. He was buried in an unmarked common grave at the Butovo firing range near Moscow, where many thousands of victims of the persecution were executed. He was glorified among the New Martyrs of Russia at the Jubilee Bishops' Council of 2000.
