ARTÉMIEV, PIOTR. — Russian deacon, b. c. 16165 at Surdal, m. a martyr for the Catholic faith in the prison of the Solovetz monastery near Arkhangelsk on 30 March (Old Style) 1700. He pursued his studies at the Moscow Academy. During a journey to Venice, the young A. was secretly converted to Catholicism through the agency of P. Tikhovskij, a Jesuit. This did not prevent him from receiving the diaconate at the hands of Patriarch Adrian upon his return to Moscow. Attached to the service of a church in Petropavlovsk, he soon began to manifest publicly his belief in Catholic doctrines. Denounced and condemned to degradation, he was first imprisoned in the Vajgelskij monastery at Kholmogory (1698), then in that of Solovetz (1699). He did not long withstand the rigors of imprisonment and the cold. Feeling death approach, he availed himself of the right to ask for absolution from a heterodox priest, but it is not known whether he obtained II. He expired after predicting the conversion of his homeland to Catholicism and after composing an apology of Catholic truths commonly rejected in the Russian dissenting Church.
ARTÉMIEV, PIOTR
BIBL.: M. Jugie, Un martyr catholique russe du XVIIe siècle: Pierre A., in Échos d’Orient, 17 (1914–15), pp. 5–13; id., Nouveaux renseignements sur Pierre A., ibid., 26 (1926), pp. 49–52. In these accounts will be found the use of Russian sources, the principal of which are: M. Nikolskij, in Pravoslavnoe Obozrenie (Orthodox Review), 3 (1863), pp. 246–70; S. M. Soloviev, Histoire de Russie, Paris 1879, I, XIV; V. also: Litterae secretae Iesuitarum qui in Russia Petro Magno regnante fuerunt, ed. M. O. Koialovich, St. Petersburg 1904, pp. 215, 230, 250, 356, 369.