1885 - 1953
A deacon of Alma-Ata who died a confessor of the faith (1953)
The Holy New Hieromartyr Peter Sorokin, Deacon
Peter Ivanovich Sorokin was a Russian deacon who died in a Soviet labor camp in 1953 after repeated arrests and imprisonment under the persecution of the Church. He is numbered among the Synaxis of New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia and is commemorated on September 3 (Old Style); his commemoration is associated with the Diocese of Alma-Ata, at whose representation he was glorified.
Born in 1885 in the village of Dyatlovka in the Moscow region, he was educated at the town school of Bogorodsk and worked for a time as a clerk at a textile factory. He served in the Imperial Guard as a choir singer in the years before the First World War, and during the war years he worked as a scribe while also singing for wounded soldiers.
Sorokin was ordained a deacon in 1925 at the Resurrection Church in Zvenigorod. Through the following years he served at parishes in and around Moscow, including the Transfiguration Church in Zvenigorod and churches at the Danilov Cemetery.
He was first arrested on November 4, 1937, and in December of that year was sentenced to ten years of hard labor; he was held in camps in Yakutia, Vladivostok, and Siberia until 1947. After his release he resumed his service as a deacon, in Slavyansk and Vyshny Volochek.
He was arrested a second time on October 14, 1949 on charges of anti-Soviet activity, convicted in 1950, and exiled to Akmolinsk in Kazakhstan. A third arrest followed on October 4, 1951, after which he was sentenced to a further ten-year term. He died on September 16, 1953 in the Ozerlag labor camp in the Irkutsk region; the place of his burial is not known.
Deacon Peter Sorokin was glorified as a martyr by the Bishops' Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in August 2000, among the Synaxis of New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, on the representation of the Diocese of Alma-Ata.
Among the Synaxis of New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia