Basil Smirnov

Saint Basil Smirnov, hieromartyr (1870 to 1 July 1938), was an archpriest in Moscow, shot at the Butovo firing range in 1938. He was numbered among the new martyrs and confessors of Russia by the Jubilee Council of Bishops, in August 2000. He is commemorated (Old Style) on 22 August.

Life

He was born in the village of Kazanskoye, in the Bogoroditsk district, Moscow province, in the family of the deacon of the Kazan church, Pavel Dimitrievich, and of Maria Vasilievna Smirnov; he was baptized by the church's priest, Michael Voskresensky. In 1882 his father died of consumption. In 1890 he finished the seminary at Moscow and was sent to teach at the Spassky church school of Count Orlov-⁠Davydov. From 1892 he was psalm reader at the church of Saint Nicholas in Zayaitsky, in Moscow, where in 1898 he married Elizaveta Vasilievna Markova, daughter of a priest; they had four children. After the parish school was founded in 1901 he taught religion in it. In 1903, at Sarov, he took part in the celebrations of the glorification of Saint Seraphim of Sarov. On 11 March 1907 he was ordained deacon and appointed clerk of the relief fund of the clergy of the diocese of Moscow. In 1911 he was rewarded for ten years of work for popular education with a silver medal. On 28 December 1914 he was ordained priest, at the Kremlin, "with retention in the deacon's place", since by the staff there was only one priest at Nicholas Zayaitsky. In 1927 he was raised to archpriest and was left a widower. In 1929 he was appointed rector of the Zayaitsky church, where he served until its closing, in 1933 (the building was given to Mosenergo). In 1933 he was moved to the church of Saint Gregory of Neocaesarea on the Polyanka, then served at the church of the "Sign" icon of the Mother of God in the village of Znamenskoye, Kuntsevo district, near Moscow.

Arrest and martyrdom

On 16 March 1938 a denunciation was written against Father Basil; on 22 March he was arrested and imprisoned at Lefortovo. At the interrogations he did not admit guilt, and on 10 May, at the confrontation with the witness for the prosecution, he said: "I completely reject the written facts of counter-⁠revolutionary agitation and the testimonies at the confrontation, and do not admit guilt". On 7 June the NKVD troika for the Moscow region sentenced him to death, on the basis of a charge that in a conversation in June 1937 he had said, about the state loan, that the Bolsheviks do not want war but are arming themselves, that the workers are discontented and that the newspapers lie. He was shot on 1 July 1938 at Butovo and buried in a common grave. He was rehabilitated on 23 August 1989. His eldest son, Nicholas (1900 to 1966), was a mathematician, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.