Basil Mazurenko

Holy Venerable Martyr Basil Mazurenko, a hieromonk, was born on 5 April 1882 in the village of Kulyga, Litin district, Podolia province, in the family of the peasant Kirill Mazurenko, and was named Vladimir at baptism. In 1894 he finished the village school and until the age of twenty-⁠eight lived with his parents, helping on the farm. In 1910 he went to Kiev and entered as a novice the Feofania skete of the Saint Michael Golden-⁠Domed Monastery, eighteen kilometres from Kiev, where he struggled until 1916. Then he lived at the bishop's house in Ekaterinoslav, where he was tonsured a monk with the name Basil and in 1922 ordained hierodeacon. Bishop Ambrose (Polyansky) of Vinnitsa sent him in the same year to the Nicholas Monastery in Nemirov, where he served until 1924. In 1925 he was ordained hieromonk for the church of Saint John the Theologian in his native village. In 1927 he stayed a month at the Transfiguration Monastery in Granov, then was appointed to the church of Saint Michael in Antonovka until 1928. In 1929 he was moved to the church of the Great Martyr Demetrius in Ladyzhinskie Khutora, Vinnitsa region.

There he came under the close watch of the political police at Tulchin, who pressed him to collaborate. Thinking that if he refused he would be arrested at once, he agreed in June 1929, under the nickname "Basil", to give information about clergy and monks, but from the start he avoided collaborating, and so more than a year passed. On 22 April 1931 he was arrested and held in the militia lock-⁠up in Gaisin. He said that peasants came to him, but only for church matters, that to people who complained that everything was being taken from them he answered that such was the time and one must submit, and that he knew only the dean and a priest of the neighbouring village. Witnesses, among them a man once convicted of murder and formerly in Petliura's army, said that the priest had made the "sisterhood" around the church agitate against the collective farm, that he said the collective farm was a yoke for the peasants and that believers could not and must not join it. On 14 August 1931 he was sentenced to three years of exile in the Northern Region and taken to Arkhangelsk.

After exile he served at the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God in the village of Klemovo, Serebryanye Prudy district, Tula region (now Moscow). On 24 November 1937 the NKVD of Tula region decided on his arrest, and on 12 December he was arrested and held at Serebryanye Prudy. He was accused of hostility to Soviet power and of agitation against the elections to the Supreme Soviet, "under the pretext of performing religious rites". He denied it, saying that he had never carried on agitation and that he kept to himself and was cautious. On 30 December 1937 the NKVD troika of Tula region sentenced him to death. He was shot on 8 January 1938, the day after Christmas, and buried in an unknown common grave. On 17 July 2006 the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the venerable martyrs.

He is commemorated on 8 January, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, and on 5 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, all in the new style.