Athanasius Milov

Saint Hieromartyr Athanasius Milov (1877 to 1937) was a priest in a village of northern Kazakhstan and was shot in 1937. He is commemorated on 7 February, together with the synaxis of the new martyrs and confessors of the Russian Church, and on 5 December.

He was born in 1877 in the village of Soldatskoe, in the Nizhny Lomov district of the Penza province, and finished a three-⁠class school in his native village. Until 1930 he served as a priest in the village of Shchuchye (today in the Mamlyutka district of the North Kazakhstan region). He kept up ties with the clergy of the church of Saint Nicholas in Petropavlovsk, which had remained faithful to Orthodoxy during the spread of the Renovationist movement. He also lived in Kuznetsk, and in 1932 moved to the village of Prudki, then returned to Shchuchye. In 1937 the church council put him forward as a candidate for the Supreme Soviet, but his candidacy was rejected by the collective farm workers.

Father Athanasius was arrested on 28 November 1937 on a charge of counter-⁠revolutionary activity, which was said to consist in an intention to "boycott the elections to the Supreme Soviet". He did not admit guilt. He was shot by the sentence of the NKVD troika of the North Kazakhstan region of 2 December 1937. The place of his burial is unknown. The Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints through the Bishops' Council of the year 2000.