John Nikolsky

Holy Hieromartyr John Nikolsky (Ivan Mikhailovich Nikolsky) was a priest of the diocese of Tver, born on 4 January 1878 in the village of Lyatskovo, in the Tver province, into the family of a psalm-⁠reader, and shot on 25 August 1937. He was numbered among the new martyrs and confessors of Russia in August 2000, at the Jubilee Council of Bishops. He is remembered on 12 August (25 August on the new calendar).

The beginning of his service

He was born in the family of the psalm-⁠reader Mikhail Nikolsky. He studied at the theological seminary in Tver, and after finishing he was ordained priest and sent to serve in a village of the Kimry district. In 1929, in time of persecution, Father John received an order to deliver by 10 November twenty-⁠five poods of rye (about four hundred and ten kilograms) to the state grain collection point. He received the summons only on 12 November, being away. When he brought the grain the next day, he was arrested for being three days late. The court sentenced him to confiscation of all his property and exile beyond the Kimry district. He decided to move with his family to Tver, where his cousin, Archpriest Vasily Vladimirsky, lived. Archbishop Thaddeus (Uspensky) assigned him to the church of the Nativity of Christ. Soon Father Vasily was arrested, together with many other priests of Tver, by the OGPU, tried and sent into exile. The priests who remained free began to visit their exiled colleagues' families more often, since they had been left without support. Father John often went to the wife of Father Vasily, Nadezhda Nikolaevna, who was already seventy-⁠two and had no one of her own left.

The second arrest and exile

These visits to the home of an imprisoned man did not escape the OGPU, and on 29 January 1933 Father John was arrested and put in the Tver prison. Since the OGPU had no proof of his guilt, the investigator tried to obtain it from the neighbours of the Vladimirsky family, but in vain. Only on 14 March, a month and a half after the arrest, was Father John called to the first interrogation. The investigator asked how he regarded Soviet power, then for what purposes he went to Father Vasily's apartment, whether he read newspapers there, how he commented on what he read and whether other people were there. The next day, in prison, Father John wrote a petition to the prosecutor. The petition was not taken into account. On 26 April the OGPU troika sentenced him to three years of exile in Kazakhstan. Three days later the priest was sent by transport to Alma-⁠Ata. He returned to his homeland, the Kalinin region, in 1936. Soon new persecutions against the Church began. Despite prisons and exile, Father John continued to serve God and the Church and was appointed by Archbishop Thaddeus to the church of the village of Kunganovo, in the Vysokovo district, in the diocese of Tver. There he served, trying to preach zealously at the services, but did not enter into political talk, knowing how closely the OGPU watched him.

The third arrest and the shooting

Nevertheless, on 4 August 1937 he was arrested again. The very fact that, though twice condemned, he had not given up priestly service, either at the investigation, or in exile, or after returning, was sufficient reason for arrest. The "duty witnesses", called right after the arrest, said, on the investigator's direction, that the priest said that Soviet power would end and people would go to God's church with bowed head, that people came to the priest's house, that when asked why his wife did not come to him he answered that she was afraid of demons and he went to her at Tver, and that in his sermon he said that in Russia there was now persecution of believers. On 8 August Father John was interrogated. There the investigation ended. On 22 August the troika of the UNKVD for the Kalinin region sentenced him to death by shooting for "anti-⁠Soviet activity". On 25 August 1937 the priest John Nikolsky was shot. He was rehabilitated on 24 May 1989 by the regional prosecutor's office at Tver.