Apollinarius Mosalitinov

Holy Venerable Martyr Apollinarius Mosalitinov, a hieromonk (in the world Afanasy Semenovich Mosalitinov, 1873 to 1918), was born in 1873 in a peasant family of the Kursk province, Graivoron district. He was killed with bayonets on 30 August 1918, near Verkhoturye, for refusing to cease his pastoral service. He was buried in the monastery. The Russian Church honours him among the New Martyrs and Confessors. He is commemorated on 12 September, on 7 February and in the Synaxis of the Saints of Yekaterinburg, on 11 February.

Monastic life

He received home schooling. In August 1901 he entered the Saint Nicholas Monastery at Verkhoturye, and in 1903 was received, at his request, into the monastery's brotherhood. In 1904 he was mobilised and did active military service; after two years, discharged, he was received again among the brethren. On 27 March 1908 he was tonsured monk with the name Apollinarius by the abbot of the monastery, Hieromonk Xenophon Medvedev. In September 1910 he was ordained hierodeacon. He performed with great zeal the obedience of carpenter at the building of the cathedral of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, for which he received an episcopal blessing with a certificate. In all the reports on Hieromonk Apollinarius it was written "conduct very good, capable of obediences and very zealous". Shortly before the revolution he was ordained priest. He lived seventeen years in the monastery.

Martyrdom

In 1918, at the age of forty-⁠five, he died a martyr at the hands of Red soldiers. In July 1918 the military-⁠operational staff for the struggle with counter-⁠revolution demanded of the abbot that a priest be sent at once to serve in the village of Krasnogorskoe. By this peremptory demand Hieromonk Apollinarius was sent to serve at the Saviour church in Krasnogorskoe, since the local priest, Father Alexander Chernavin, had been arrested, and after release the Bolsheviks had forbidden him to serve. The village of Krasnogorskoe is not far from the village of Merkushino, where the grave of Saint Simeon of Verkhoturye, greatly venerated in the Urals, is found. Having finished the service at the church in Krasnogorskoe, Apollinarius went to Merkushino to pray at the saint's grave. At Merkushino Father Apollinarius was arrested and sent under guard to Verkhoturye. The next day, 30 August 1918, the hieromonk was cruelly killed: he was stabbed with bayonets not far from the town of Verkhoturye and the body was buried there. The priest's cross, taken from the slain priest, was handed by the executioners to the abbot of the monastery. Only after the town was freed from the Bolsheviks, among other victims of the Red terror, was Apollinarius's body found and brought to the monastery, where on 5 October 1918 the martyr was buried with due honour in the monastery's brotherhood cemetery.

Aftermath

Usually the Bolsheviks passed over executions in silence. In this case, however, the authorities announced publicly the shooting of the monk for counter-⁠revolutionary agitation: posters with the Cheka's sentence were pasted all over the town. Such lawlessness against a hieromonk gave pain to the souls of many townspeople. The Bolsheviks sought not only to destroy priests physically but also to defame the clergy and the Church in the eyes of the faithful by articles of a blasphemous character. In the newspaper "Uralsky Rabochy" there was even a special column in which materials about the Orthodox Church were published; it was called "In the camp of the long-⁠haired". Of the righteous Simeon the Soviet press wrote mockingly. In this confrontation of faith with unbelief faith prevailed, for, as the Apostle Paul testified: "God is not mocked." For Orthodox people the killing of Hieromonk Apollinarius was the death of a martyr who suffered for the witness of Christ's truth.