Basil Ezhov

Holy Martyr Basil Ezhov, a peasant, by his full name Basil Kireevich Ezhov, was born in 1867 in the village of Pokrov in Nizhny Novgorod province, in a peasant family. In 1930 he was arrested for non-⁠payment of taxes and sentenced to five years in a labour camp.

In the autumn of 1937 he was arrested a second time, together with the priests of nearby parishes. They were accused of having "on a religious basis carried on anti-⁠Soviet agitation by spreading rumours of the unprofitability of the collective farms and their coming collapse, urged people to leave the collective farms, and given money from the church fund to those who had left". From the same village of Pokrov, Gagino district, the peasants Alexander Blokhin, born in 1879, Peter Lonskov, born in 1881, and Stephen Mityushkin, born in 1874, were also arrested, charged with having on 6 July 1937 "organized a solemn service that kept peasants from work on the collective farm". It was the day of the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God, in memory of the deliverance of Moscow from the invasion of Khan Akhmat in 1480. On 8 September 1937 they were arrested and held first in Gagino, then in the prison at Arzamas. Basil and the others did not admit guilt. They were condemned to death and shot on 17 September 1937, and the bodies were buried in an unknown common grave. In August 2000 the Jubilee Council of Bishops numbered them among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.

Saint Basil is commemorated on 17 September, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, and on 12 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Nizhny Novgorod, all in the new style.