Alexis Nikolsky

Saint Alexis Nikolsky (1877-1938), hieromartyr, was an archpriest at Troitskoe-⁠Kainardzhi near Moscow, a graduate of the church schools, a village priest and a confessor of the faith in the time of persecution. He was shot on 8 March 1938 at Vesyegonsk and was glorified in 2000. He is commemorated on 8 March (23 February by the old calendar) and in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.

Youth

He was born on 10 February (29 January) 1877 in the village of Genino, Serpukhov district, Moscow province, in the family of the priest John Nikolsky, who served at the church of Saints Boris and Gleb and then at the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God in the village of Lyalovo. From childhood he wanted to follow his father's path. He finished the Zaikonospassky church school (1892), the Bethany seminary (1898) and the Moscow Theological Academy (1902), as candidate of theology. In 1902 he was assistant rector at the Tver seminary, the next year he went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land with a group of seminarians, and then he was a teacher at the church school in Roslavl.

In 1904 he married Anna Nikolaevna Kopeva, daughter of Archpriest Nikolai Kopev, rector of the church of the Transfiguration in Nalivki. He declined a high post offered by his father-⁠in-⁠law and, in the same year, was ordained priest, asking for a village church rather than a city one. Metropolitan Vladimir appointed him rector of the Holy Trinity church at Troitskoe-⁠Kainardzhi. From 1907 he taught religion at the school in Kozhukhovo.

Hard years

The revolution of 1917 brought great want to the family, and the peasants gave him a piece of field for hay, potatoes and a garden. In 1921, at the confiscation of church valuables, he persuaded the commission to accept the objects by weight rather than by number, and while they drank tea and played football on the lawn, trusted people hurriedly gathered silver from acquaintances. He collected the quantity required, and the commission left content with silver spoons and forks, in place of the sacred vessels, which were saved. In 1929, at twenty-⁠five years of service, he received the mitre and held a celebration, to which delegations came from all around. Earlier he had brought a bell from a church slated for demolition and set it on his bell tower, where it still hangs.

In 1930 he was arrested for counter-⁠revolutionary activity and sentenced to three years of exile, sent to fell timber on the river Pinega near Arkhangelsk, then to the village of Vaimusha. In exile he befriended a priest from Vesyegonsk, and they served together in secret during Holy Week and at Pascha. During this time his family was put out of their house and deprived of property. He was released in 1933, without the right to live in the Moscow region, raised to archpriest and appointed to Malo-⁠Fominskoe near Vesyegonsk, where he repaired the church closed after its rector's arrest, and the family was reunited.

Martyrdom

On 16 February 1938 he was summoned to the district centre "for a passport check" and imprisoned at Vesyegonsk, accused of anti-⁠Soviet agitation. The witnesses were two collective-⁠farm brigade leaders, related to each other, who claimed to have heard at a funeral service words about many people dying, churches being mocked and destroyed and believers oppressed. At the investigation he answered that he had only given a short sermon in which he expressed surprise that he had to bury three dead in one day and urged the collective farmers to submit to the will of God, without anti-⁠Soviet agitation. On 6 March the NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and on 8 March 1938 he was shot and buried in an unknown common grave. He was rehabilitated in 1989 and in August 2000 the Council of Bishops numbered him among the saints.