Basil Vinogradov

Holy Martyr Basil Vinogradov was a peasant of the Ploskosh district, Tver province, and was shot on 7 October 1937 together with the priest Andrew Bystrov and the peasants Sergius Mikhailov and Spiridon Savelyev.

He was born in 1891 in the village of Ivantsevo, in the family of the peasant Cornelius Vinogradov, and finished the parish school. He spent his life in his native village until in 1931 he was arrested and stripped of his property. With no house left in the village, he moved with his family to the farmstead of Bor, a few kilometers away, to a place where a mill had once stood. In winter he cut timber in the forest, and in summer his wife and daughter gathered berries.

In the summer of 1937, when Stalin ordered that those regarded as enemies be arrested and shot through troikas, the head of the Ploskosh NKVD drew up on 22 July a note for the arrest of Basil and the priest Andrew Bystrov. They were charged with having been deprived of the vote, with knowing and visiting each other, and with the fact that Andrew was a priest. The Zhidulino village council wrote of the priest that he had held secret meetings with kulaks at Nikandrov's house. Basil was arrested on 23 July and the priest the next day, and both were held in Toropets.

At his interrogations Basil answered briefly and plainly: he carried on no agitation and did not admit guilt. Of Spiridon Savelyev he said that he knew him and that relations between them were good, and of Semyon Nikandrov, that he had met him only to greet him, without conversation. In September, when he was questioned again, he said that his farm had been taken, that since his removal he had visited no one, and that he had never been tried. He denied having gathered with the priest, with Lozgachev, with Mikhailov and with Nikandrov.

On 20 September the indictment was drawn up, though there was no evidence, and on 3 October an NKVD troika sentenced to death Basil, the priest Andrew and the peasants Sergius and Spiridon. They were shot on 7 October 1937, while Semyon Nikandrov, aged sixty-⁠seven, received ten years in a camp. Father Andrew Bystrov had been born in 1873 at Zalesye near Pskov in a priest's family, had worked as a teacher, was ordained deacon (1897) and then priest, was arrested in 1930 and came back from exile in 1935.

They were canonized in August 2000 at the Jubilee Council of Bishops, for veneration throughout the Church. The saint is commemorated on 7 October and, in the new style, on 7 February (movable) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and on 18 July (movable) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver.