Basil Protopopov

Holy Hieromartyr Basil Protopopov, a priest, was born in 1886 in the village of Izvolskoe, Yukhnov district, Smolensk province, in the family of the psalm-⁠reader Sergei Protopopov. After the Smolensk seminary he was a teacher at the school in the village of Torbeevo. In 1915 he was ordained priest for the church of the Protection of the Mother of God in Novopokrov, Gzhatsk district.

In the 1920s he was brought to court for asking parishioners to help him pay the taxes on the church and was sentenced to a fine of two hundred rubles. In 1931 he was arrested for non-⁠payment of taxes and sentenced to eight months of corrective labour; he lodged a complaint against the sentence, the court acquitted him and he returned to his service. In 1937 the head of the reading hut in the neighbouring village of Ostritsy sent the NKVD a statement writing that the priest of Novopokrov, in conversations in September 1937, had voiced counter-⁠revolutionary views about the closing of the church at Ostritsy, and that schoolchildren and young people said that the priest stops them and urges them to go to church to pray, while he calls the reading hut a "gathering of the Antichrist". At the interrogation the next day the Komsomol member repeated that, the church at Ostritsy being closed, the father had taken that village council into his own parish and went round the villages asking people to go to church.

He was arrested and sentenced to ten years in a camp. The priest Basil Protopopov died on 8 July 1940 in the Temnikov camp in Mordovia.

He is commemorated on 8 July, 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.