Basil Kolokolov

Holy Hieromartyr Basil Kolokolov, a priest, was born on 19 January 1873 in the village of Varvarino, Moscow province, in the family of the psalm-⁠reader John Kolokolov. After the seminary, which he finished in 1898, he worked as a teacher. In 1900 he was ordained a priest and spent his whole life serving at the church of Saint John the Baptist in the village of Gribanovo, Volokolamsk district.

In 1922 he was first arrested in connection with the confiscation of church valuables and sentenced to eight months, suspended. In 1929, for failing to deliver grain, he was sentenced to three years of exile, but after four months the regional court annulled the sentence. On 17 October 1937 he was arrested again. Two false witnesses said that in April 1936, in church, he spoke to the faithful about the tax on the church and on himself, saying that he could not pay it and would be jailed, and they would be left without a church, and that he asked them to help him. The second, the chairman of the collective farm, told how he spoke about Stalin's constitution. The investigator reproached him with slandering the constitution in October 1936, and he denied it; of April 1936 he admitted that he spoke about the taxes. The same day he was interrogated again and admitted his words on the constitution, that freedom of speech would be only on paper, as in the constitution of 1905, and that in February 1937, in the village cooperative, he told collective farmers that people were dying of hunger and must demand bread from Soviet power.

On 22 October he was moved to the prison in Volokolamsk, then to Taganka. On 11 November 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced him to death. The priest Basil Kolokolov was shot on 13 November 1937 at the Butovo firing range near Moscow.

He is commemorated on 13 November, on 29 May (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo, and on 5 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, all in the new style.