Basil Ivanov

Holy Hieromartyr Basil Ivanov, a priest, was born on 25 February 1875 in the town of Stary Oskol, Kursk province, in the family of the tailor Andrei Ivanov. After the town school and four classes of seminary in Kursk, he was appointed in 1910 psalm-⁠reader at the church in Ust-⁠Stuzhen. On 28 May 1910 he was ordained deacon for the church in Yarygino and appointed religion teacher at the parish school. In 1913 he was moved to the church of the Archangels in Lyubostan, then to Naumovka. On 15 February 1919, on the feast of the Meeting of the Lord, he was ordained priest for the church in Dolbino, and in 1922 he was moved to Rovenki in the Ostrogozhsk district.

On 13 January 1930 he was appointed to the church in Nizhny Ikorets. The clergy of the Voronezh diocese were then troubled by the declaration of Metropolitan Sergius, and before him the priest Sergius Butuzov had served in the church, and then together with him the priest Peter Korystin, both subject to Archbishop Dimitry Lyubimov. Father Basil was a simple man who did not understand the subtleties of the church disputes of the time, and served there only two weeks; at the end of January 1930 he was arrested and held in Voronezh, in the same cell with many priests of the deanery. At the interrogation of 16 March he said with whom and when he had served, that he had heard Father Sergius Butuzov as an outstanding preacher, and that of Korystin he knew only that he had tricked him and left him with the parish. Called again to say what the priests Theodore Yakovlev and Peter Korystin said in the cell, he answered that they spoke so quietly that it could not be heard. In 1930 he was sentenced to ten years in a camp and sent to the Khabarovsk territory.

On 17 March 1938 an NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and on 1 June 1938 he was shot at Blagoveshchensk, together with Archbishop Onuphrius (Gagalyuk) of Kursk, Bishop Anthony (Pankeev) and several priests. They were buried in an unknown common grave.

He is commemorated on 1 June, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, and on 1 August in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kursk, all in the new style.