Gregory Dolinin

Holy Martyr Gregory Dolinin, a psalmist, was born in 1875 in the village of Khokhlovo in Nizhny Novgorod province, to a peasant family, and was educated at the village school. Before the revolution he worked as an office clerk. From 1926 he served as psalmist at a church in a village of the Nizhny Novgorod region (the exact place has not yet been established), for which in 1930 he was dekulakised and sentenced to three years in a labour camp. Such was the persecution of any service to the Church in those years.

In 1932 he was released early and returned to the work of psalmist, but he did not serve long in his village. On 31 December 1934 he was arrested on a charge of anti-⁠Soviet agitation and sentenced to five years of exile in Kazakhstan. He was sent first to Alma-⁠Ata, then moved to Shcherbakty.

On 21 November 1937 he was arrested in exile, charged with counter-⁠revolutionary propaganda, membership of a church-⁠sectarian counter-⁠revolutionary group led by Borzakovsky, made up mostly of clergy and sectarians of every kind, and taking part in illegal services. At the investigation he said that he had belonged to no counter-⁠revolutionary group. He was, he said, a religious man by conviction; arriving in exile, he had associated with clergy, but apart from religious rites he had done nothing with them.

The troika of the UNKVD pronounced the death sentence, and the martyr Gregory Dolinin was shot on 28 November 1937. He is commemorated on 28 November and on 7 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church (new style, a movable day). By the blessing of Patriarch Kirill of 7 March 2015, his rank of sanctity was specified by the Synodal Commission for Canonisation, which is why he is called martyr.