Alexis (Belkovsky) was Archbishop of Great Ustiug (Veliky Ustyug) in the Russian North, a hierarch who endured the Soviet persecution of the Church and died in 1937. He is venerated as a hieromartyr and confessor and is numbered among the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.
By tradition he was born in 1842 in the village of Rozhdestvino, in the Kashira district of Tula province, into the family of a priest, Filipp Evfimovich Belkovsky. He entered the priesthood, later received monastic tonsure, and was eventually raised to the rank of archimandrite before his consecration to the episcopate.
On September 5, 1904, he was consecrated bishop of Great Ustiug as a vicar (suffragan) of the Vologda diocese. By a decree of the Holy Synod in October 1916 his see was reconstituted, and in the early 1920s he was elevated to the rank of archbishop, taking up the administration of the Great Ustiug diocese during the turbulent years that followed the Russian Revolution.
Already very aged, Archbishop Alexis was arrested in the autumn of 1937, in his ninety-fifth year. According to the accounts preserved of his arrest, officers of the NKVD carried him from his home on a sheet, as he could no longer walk. After a short imprisonment he died in November 1937 and was buried in the city cemetery of Great Ustiug. He was glorified among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia at the Jubilee Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church in the year 2000.
