Basil Likharev

Holy Hieromartyr Basil Likharev, a priest, was born on 25 March 1871 in the village of Teshilovo, Klin district, Moscow province, in the family of the deacon Alexei Dmitrievich Likharev. He finished the Dmitrov theological school in 1886 and the Bethany seminary in 1894 and was ordained priest for the church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God at the Golovino Monastery, where he served until its closing. The convent of Golovino had been founded in 1893, and its church built by decision of the peasants and gifts of landowners; later a hospital and a hostel were added. In the Russo-⁠Japanese War Father Basil was a regimental priest. On his return he went back to the monastery; by 1914 a cathedral, a bell tower and an almshouse had been built.

In the persecution at the end of the 1920s the authorities took the wooden church from the convent, but services went on in the cathedral. In December 1928 two envoys of the volost executive committee asked leave to inspect the bell tower, saying they meant to pull it down, and the parish council at once sent the authorities documents showing that the church buildings could not be demolished at will. The authorities said it had been a misunderstanding. On 4 May 1929, on Great Friday, an assembly of workers of the nearby factories resolved to ask Moscow to close the church, which stirred strong discontent among the faithful. On Easter night of 1929 the atheists planned in the club beside the church an antireligious film at midnight, during the procession. When the procession began, the current in the club went out and the film stopped, and it was then found that the wires had been cut. An investigation began, and the believers were accused of wanting to burn the atheists alive. Communist witnesses gave false statements, and on 1 June 1929 the church treasurer, Alexander Ivanovich Dryndin, was arrested. On 21 June Father Basil was also arrested, summoned to the OGPU on Lubyanka. He said that on 6 May, passing the pole with the cut wires, people in the crowd told him that someone had cut the wires, and he knew nothing. On 16 August 1929 Dryndin received four months in prison, and Father Basil was released with a ban of three years on living in Moscow and six other large cities. He chose Tula.

After the exile ended, on 28 July 1932, he returned home. The convent had been brought to a sorry state: the cathedral made into a club, a grain store in the crypt of the founders, and the almshouse taken, so he took the old nuns into his own house. He served at the Sign church in the village of Aksinino and was made archpriest with a mitre. Many came to him for counsel and comfort: peasants, teachers, scholars.

In 1937, in the wave of persecution, those who could testify against him were questioned. On 28 September a lodger of his said that priests visited Father Basil, among them his brother-⁠in-⁠law Archpriest Artobolevsky, that two women teachers came and that Father Basil preached especially to the young and enjoyed great popularity. Another witness said that in the summer of 1936 the father compared the project of the Palace of Soviets with the tower of Babel, which collapsed, so the building of Soviet power would collapse. On 15 November 1937 Father Basil was arrested and held in Taganka, and his decorations from the Russo-⁠Japanese War, his pectoral cross and mitre were taken. On 19 November he denied all the testimony. On 25 November an NKVD troika sentenced him to death. Archpriest Basil Likharev was shot on 27 November 1937 and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo firing range.

He is commemorated on 27 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.