Basil Vinogradov

Holy Hieromartyr Basil Vinogradov was a priest in the Tver region. He was shot on 28 December 1937, after he had already passed through the camp and forced labor because of his ministry.

He was born on 24 June 1891 in the village of Dubnikha, Bezhetsk district, Tver province, into a devout peasant family. He lived with his parents until the age of fifteen and studied at the zemstvo school. In 1907 he entered the Solovki monastery and lived there until 1913. Then he fell gravely ill and went home to see his parents, with little hope of recovery. He did recover, returned to Solovki in 1914 and lived in the monastery until 1919, when the Bolsheviks began raiding the community and it was clear that its days were numbered. He went back to his native village.

In 1923 he became a psalm-⁠reader at the church of the Protection of the Mother of God in the village of Novy Stan; in 1927 he was ordained deacon and then priest. In 1929 he was arrested because he had been unable to deliver the grain the state demanded, and he was sentenced to six months of forced labor and a fine. After his release he served in the village of Tolmachi, until his arrest in 1931.

The first arrest

A militiaman in Tolmachi reported to the OGPU that on the evening of 11 May 1931 a nun, the priest's sister, his nieces and a few peasants had been in his house. The report was enough to arrest people guilty of nothing but belonging to the Church. On 29 May Father Basil, the nun Anna Kuznetsova and the novice Praskovia Sokolova, who had lived in the women's monastery at Torzhok until it was closed, were put in prison at Tver. False witnesses claimed that they had agitated against the collective farms, spread rumors that Soviet power would soon collapse and urged peasants not to hand over grain, and that the priest's church-⁠singing gatherings at home were only a cover. They also spoke of leaflets that no one had seen.

At the interrogation of 2 July the priest briefly told who he was and answered firmly that he did not admit guilt of anti-⁠Soviet agitation; the two women answered in the same way. On 11 July an OGPU troika sentenced him to three years in a camp, and the two women to three years of exile in Kazakhstan.

Return and death

In 1934 Father Basil came home from the camp, after prison, exhausting transports and heavy labor, in which the surroundings of thieves and murderers made the conditions harder still. He did not give up his ministry. He became priest in the village of Selezenikha, in the Likhoslavl district, and served and visited the homes of the faithful with prayers as though there were no persecution.

In 1937, when the arrest of clergy and laity was ordered, the NKVD demanded character reports from the village councils. The chairman of the Selezenikha council wrote that the priest surrounded himself with suspicious persons and former kulaks, that he made rounds of the households without permission, for which he had been fined 200 rubles in 1935, that he urged people, especially women, to demand permits, and that he twisted the constitution. On the night of 21 to 22 December he was arrested. Within two days the chairman of the council, the chairman of the collective farm, the head of the parish council and the council secretary were questioned; some repeated the accusations, others said they had heard no agitation from him. On 23 December the priest declared that he did not admit guilt and gave a short account of his path, from Solovki to the priesthood, and of his two sentences.

On 26 December the NKVD troika sentenced him to death. Priest Basil Vinogradov was shot on 28 December 1937.

The saint is commemorated on 28 December and, in the new style, on 7 February (movable) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 18 July (movable) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver and on 23 August in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Solovki.