Moses Olenitsky

Saint Moses Olenitsky, venerable martyr (born Mitrofan Nikitich Kozhin, 1868 to 1931), was a hieromonk of the Solovki monastery who died in 1931 on the way to exile, at Leningrad. He was numbered among the saints in 2003 by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, in the Synaxis of the new martyrs and confessors of Russia. In 2011 he was also entered in the Synaxis of the new martyrs and confessors of Solovki, and he is also counted in the Synaxis of the saints of Kola.

The Pomor

He was born in May 1868 in the village of Olenitsa in the Arkhangelsk province, of a Pomor family, fishermen of the White Sea. In 1889 he was called up to the fleet and for eight years served as a signalman on the ships of the tsarist navy. Even during service he resolved to enter a monastery, and from 1897 he began his obedience at Solovki. On 12 April 1907, as a novice, he was tonsured a monk with the name Moses, after Saint Moses the Hungarian. The next year he was ordained hierodeacon and four years later hieromonk. He served in the skete of Saint Sergius on the island of Bolshaya Muksalma. Besides the services, Hieromonk Moses had charge of all the monastery's fishing and hunting.

The time of persecution

In 1920 the monastery was in effect closed by a commission headed by M. S. Kedrov, a member of the board of the political police and organizer of the system of northern camps. A state farm and a forced-⁠labour camp were organized at Solovki. Father Moses nevertheless stayed in the monastery: his name appears in the lists of monastics of 1920 and 1921 and in the list of workers of the "Solovki" state farm for 1922. In 1926 the building of the church of Saint Sergius, where he served, was converted into a chemistry laboratory, and he returned to his native village, where he was appointed rector of the church of the Nativity of Saint John the Forerunner. Together with two villagers firm in the faith, the church warden and the psalm reader, he did all he could to preserve Orthodox ways in the village.

On 16 April he was arrested with the two villagers and sentenced by a troika of the political police of the Leningrad military district to three years of imprisonment, on the charge of counter-⁠revolutionary activity. The sentence was later changed to exile at Kotlas. After three months, on 7 September 1931, Father Moses died in the Dr Haas hospital in Leningrad, where he had been held on the way, with a diagnosis of scurvy and enterocolitis, and was buried in an unknown grave. On 18 April 1989 he was rehabilitated by the prosecutor's office of the Murmansk region.

Veneration

The Holy Synod numbered him among the saints in 2003. In 2011 his name was also entered in the Synaxis of the new martyrs and confessors of Solovki, and he is counted in the Synaxis of the saints of Kola. He is commemorated on the day of his death, 7 September (25 August Old Style). On 31 July a wooden chapel was consecrated in his honour at Vyalozero, sixty kilometres from Umba. In 2015 the church of the Nativity of Saint John the Forerunner at Olenitsa, burned in 1940, was rebuilt, and a plaque was set on its wall in memory of the labour of Moses Kozhin and his companions; one of the village's streets bears his name.