Ananiy Dubnitsky

Priest Ananias Gervasievich Dubnitsky (1884-1938) was parish priest of the Protection church in the village of Staroe in the Poltava diocese and was shot on 1 June 1938. He is numbered among the holy new martyrs and confessors of the Orthodox Church, canonized by the Church.

He was born on 1 (14) October 1884 in the village of Kozlovka, Poltava province, in the family of the priest Gervasy Dorofeevich and Euphrosyne Dubnitsky, one of seven children. His elder brother Vasily also became a priest. He graduated from the theological school in Lubny and the seminary in Kyiv, was ordained in 1910 and received the parish of the Protection in Staroe, in the Zolotonosha district (today Vasyutyntsi). He married Maria Akimovna Kuzmenko, born in 1890 and raised by her devout grandmother; they had five children: Nikolai (1917), Alexander (1918), Olga (1924), Anna (1928) and Seraphima (1929). Until the events of October 1917 they led the life of an exemplary village priest's family.

In 1929 the family was stripped of all it had and thrown out in the middle of winter; the parishioners took them in and helped them. The priest was asked to submit to the authorities and was offered more than once the chance to renounce the faith and the priesthood, in exchange for a post as teacher or clerk. The church had been turned into a warehouse, and its bells thrown down, broken up and sold for melting. Because he did not give up his priesthood he was arrested twice. In 1929 he was tried "for non-⁠payment of taxes" and received two years of forced labour, which he served in full. In 1932 he was arrested again, on a charge of "illegal healing"; the judge stood up to the investigator and he was released "for lack of evidence" in the courtroom itself. To his brother Anton, who worked on the railway and urged him to leave everything and move in with him, he wrote: "I suffer for the faith, and so I must suffer for it to the end."

On 25 August 1937 he was arrested by the Irkliiv section of the NKVD. He was ill in the lungs and fifty-⁠three years old, and in the night activists broke up everything in the house, wrapped him in a blanket and threw him into a van. He was held in Poltava; the family was not allowed to see him and learned nothing of his fate until the rehabilitation. His file is part of a five-⁠volume investigation in which sixty-⁠five inhabitants of the Irkliiv, Chornobai and Zolotonosha districts were condemned to death in the spring of 1938, accused of belonging to an insurrectionary organisation; the rehabilitation commission established that no such organisation ever existed. The NKVD troika of the Poltava region condemned him to death on 9 April 1938, and the sentence was carried out on 1 June 1938.

The case was reviewed in 1956-1957 and on 3 April 1958 the commission decided to close the case and rehabilitate him. The saint's two youngest daughters, Anna and Seraphima, were still living in the village of their forebears, singing in the choir of their father's parish.