Nicholas Khvoshchev

Holy Hieromartyr Nicholas Khvoshchev was a priest in the village of Isupovo, in the Nizhny Novgorod province, and was shot on 1 November 1937 for defending his church from closure.

The priest of Isupovo

Nicholas Alexandrovich Khvoshchev was born on 3 December 1883 in the village of Kalapino in the Lukoyanov district, in the large family of the priest Alexander Khvoshchev. He studied at the Nizhny Novgorod seminary, but left it after the fourth year. On 25 August 1905 he was named reader at the Epiphany Cathedral in Knyaginin, where he met Alexandra Yakovlevna Smorchkova, adopted daughter of a townsman, whom he married. In the autumn of 1907 he passed the examination for the priesthood and was sent to the church of the Protection in the village of Isupovo, in the Sergach district. On 24 October 1907 Bishop Nazarius ordained him deacon, and on 26 October Bishop Euthymius ordained him priest. Until the revolution he was catechist at the parish school and at the zemstvo school.

Arrest

When in 1937 mass arrests began, the chairman of the village soviet wrote of him that he had served more than twenty years, that at the end of 1936 he had opposed the radio installation in the village and that in April 1937 he had organised a group of church people that locked in the belfry some Komsomol members who were attaching an antenna, to prevent the radio being installed, and that he had worked with church people of the neighbouring village of Pokrov to break up the collective farm. On 8 September 1937 he was arrested, charged with counter-⁠revolutionary activity. At the interrogation he said that he had carried out no counter-⁠revolutionary agitation, that the incident was spontaneous, without him, and that the technician had been locked in the belfry by women who opposed putting up the antenna. Of the gatherings to oppose the village decision to use the church as a school, he said he knew nothing. On 17 September 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced him to death. He was shot on 1 November 1937 and buried in an unknown common grave on the Gorky NKVD range.

With seven others

On 8 September 1937 ten priests and laymen of the Gagino district were arrested. None admitted guilt. They were charged with having organised on 6 July a solemn service with four priests and many believers; without a political sermon, the service was treated as an anti-⁠state event because it drew the peasants away from work on the collective farm. On 17 September eight men were sentenced to death and shot: the priests John Dmitrievich Romashkin (born in 1891 in a peasant family, first arrested in 1928 and sentenced to three years of exile; he served in Subbotino), Peter Ivanovich Lebedinsky (born in 1881 in a priest's family, in 1935 sentenced for sermons to two years of exile; from the village of Sorochki), Nicholas Khvoshchev and Alexander Semyonovich Nikolsky (born in 1883, in a priest's family; from Panova-⁠Osanova), and the peasants of Pokrov Alexander Blokhin (born in 1879), Peter Lonskov (1881), Stephen Mityushin (1874) and Basil Yezhov (1867, arrested in 1930 for unpaid taxes and sentenced to five years in a camp). In August 2000 the Council of Bishops numbered them among the new martyrs and confessors.

Nicholas Khvoshchev is remembered on 17 September, on 12 September (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Nizhny Novgorod, and on 7 February (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, in the new style.