Basil Malinin

Holy Hieromartyr Basil Malinin, a priest, was born on 26 March 1898 in the village of Vasyanskoe, Tver province, in the family of the priest Basil Malinin. The family name, according to tradition, comes from an incident: his grandfather, aged six, at school, red from the frost, said that his name was Sorokin, and the teacher said that "the magpie is white, you are raspberry-⁠coloured" and wrote him down as Malinin. He studied at the theological school in Kashin and finished the Tver seminary in 1918. In 1921 he was ordained priest for the church at Konakovo. He had no land and no farm, all the property of the family being the house, two kids and seven hens.

In 1932 he was arrested under the decree of 7 August 1932, accused of stealing collective-⁠farm straw and sentenced to ten years in a camp, leaving his wife Antonina Alexandrovna and three children of seven, six and two at home. He worked two years in the camp, and in 1934 was released early. He returned to the same church at Konakovo, where services were resumed to the joy of the parishioners. In May 1934 Metropolitan Sergius awarded him the pectoral cross, and Bishop Gregory (Kozyrev) appointed him dean. But in those years priests were being arrested everywhere, churches were left without pastors, and in April 1936 the father asked to be relieved of his duties as dean, which was granted.

The authorities did not cease to persecute him. In March 1937 they demanded a tax of five hundred rubles, or he would be arrested and the church closed. In church the priest told the parishioners, asked them to collect the money, and the sum was gathered and services went on. At each service he gave sermons and visited his parishioners at their homes, with prayer services, memorial services, Holy Unction and Holy Communion, especially those in distant villages who could not come to church. In the summer of 1937, as since 1922, the authorities called the renovationist priest of the neighbourhood and his psalm-⁠reader to testify against him.

On 5 August 1937 he was arrested. The secretary of the village council said that the priest gathered anti-⁠Soviet elements around him, among them the former priest's wife Maria Arkhangelskaya and the church warden Alexandra Parkhaeva, and that because of their influence thirty of the seventy collective farmers did not come out for the hay harvest. The renovationist priest added that Malinin formed a circle alien socially and went from house to house. At the interrogation Father Basil denied any word against the new constitution and any anti-⁠Soviet group: "Let the witnesses prove it." The investigators tried in vain to make him incriminate himself. On 20 September an NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and on 23 September 1937 the priest Basil Malinin was shot. He was numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia by the Jubilee Council in August 2000.

He is commemorated on 23 September, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, and on 18 July (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver, all in the new style.