New Hieromartyr Stephen Kuskov

Stephen (Kuskov) was a hieromonk associated with Nikolskoye in the Tver region of Russia, numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia who perished in the Soviet persecution of the Church. He is commemorated on September 4, and is also remembered within the Synaxis of the Tver Saints, where regional records group him with the clergy and monastics of the Vyshny Volochek district.

By the account of regional new-martyr records, his secular name was Stepan Ivanovich Kuskov, and he was a hieromonk of the Nikolo-Stolpen Monastery near Vyshny Volochek. The same records relate that during the years of the Russian Civil War he served at Petropavlovsk; after the withdrawal of the White forces he moved to the Kuban region, and he afterward returned to his homeland and to the Nikolo-Stolpen Monastery, which by that time had been closed by the Soviet authorities.

He was put to death in 1937, during the height of the mass repressions against the Russian Orthodox clergy. Regional sources record that he was shot in the prison at Vyshny Volochek. As with many figures of the New-Martyr tail, the surviving biographical detail is drawn from local diocesan and archival research rather than an early hagiographic life, and particulars beyond these should be treated with the caution proper to such records.