Alexis Nikitsky

Holy Hieromartyr Alexis Nikitsky, a priest, was born on 6 March 1891 in the village of Mikhalevo, in the Bronnitsy district of the Moscow province, in the family of the priest Mikhail Pavlovich Nikitsky. He was shot on 28 February 1938 at Butovo, near Moscow. He was numbered among the holy New Martyrs of Russia by a decision of the Holy Synod of 12 March 2002, for veneration throughout the whole Church.

In 1902 he finished the three-⁠class school at Mikhalevo, in 1906 the Donskoy spiritual school, and in 1912 the Moscow seminary, and then taught at a factory school near the Balashikha station. In 1913 his father died, and in 1914 he was ordained priest in his place, at the church of the Nativity of Christ in Mikhalevo. After the arrival of Soviet power he was mobilised into the rear militia of the Red Army, tended horses, worked as a clerk and then as a telephonist at Khodynka. Demobilised in 1921, he asked the bishop to be received as a priest in the diocese of Moscow and from March 1922 served at the church of the Holy Trinity in the settlement of Udelnaya, until his arrest.

In 1929 his house was taken from him, as one deprived of the vote. The taxes on clergy and on parishes were so high that paying them demanded sacrifice. The servants of the church at Udelnaya wrote in 1937 a petition for reduction, after the district finance office had raised the tax on clergy income several times over. The NKVD made a quiet investigation, at the end of which Father Alexis and Deacon Simeon Kulyamin were arrested on 26 January 1938.

Questioned on 30 and 31 January and on 6 February, he said that he had written the petition at home, that the others had signed it in the altar, and that they had no aim other than a lowering of the tax. He also said that on 2 May 1937 he had gone to the home of Metropolitan Seraphim Chichagov at Udelnaya, invited to serve a moleben, and that after the moleben he drank a glass of tea and left; the metropolitan usually invited them at Christmas and Pascha, because in his old age he could no longer go to church. He denied any counter-⁠revolutionary agitation and any talk of closing churches. The priest and deacon were held in the Taganka prison.

On 16 February 1938 the NKVD troika sentenced them to death for "counter-⁠revolutionary agitation against the elections to the Supreme Soviet, spreading rumours of the closing of churches and the arrest of clergy". On 28 February 1938 Priest Alexis Nikitsky and Deacon Simeon Kulyamin were shot at Butovo and buried in an unknown common grave. That day the prison photographer photographed them, so that amid the mass executions the executioner would not make a mistake. He is commemorated on 28 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and the Synaxis of the Moscow Saints.