Nicholas Kopninsky

Holy Martyr Nicholas Kopninsky was a layman of Ivanteevka, near Moscow, a member of the church council, arrested in 1937 together with the archpriest Alexander Vershinsky and the warden Paul Kuzovkov, and he died in a camp on 15 March 1938.

The Azbyka page holds the life of the three: of the Holy Hieromartyr Alexander Vershinsky, of Paul Kuzovkov and of Nicholas Kopninsky.

Nicholas Kopninsky

He was born in a worker's family, that of Ivan Kopninsky. In 1888 he finished the village school and took a job in the office of a manufacturer, Lyzhin, where he worked until 1899, when he was called into the army; he served four years, first as a private, then as a clerk in the 13th Belozersk Infantry Regiment, quartered in the Polish town of Lomza. In 1903 he returned to the factory as a clerk, and between 1908 and 1914 was a clerk at the United Exchange Artel in Moscow. In 1914 he was called up again, served until 1918 in the engineering quartermaster's office in Moscow, and then farmed at Ivanteevka. Between 1921 and 1930 he was a clerk at various factories. In 1930 he suffered a railway accident and was left disabled. From 1935 he was secretary of the audit commission attached to the church council, and for this he was arrested in 1937. At the interrogation he said that he visited Kuzovkov because the latter was chairman of the council and he secretary of the commission, that he had no ties with the priest Vershinsky, and that at the meeting of February 1937 he had said nothing counter-⁠revolutionary.

The three

The archpriest Alexander Vershinsky was born on 6 March 1873 in the village of Kunganovo, in the Staritsa district of the Tver province, in the family of the deacon Andrei Vershinsky, a great venerator of Saint John of Kronstadt. He finished the Tver seminary in 1897 and was deacon and priest at Staritsa, then at Torzhok, at the church of Saint Elijah, until its closing in 1927; then at the Transfiguration Cathedral until 1931, and at the Nikolo-⁠Pustynskaya church. In March 1937, when the Renovationists seized the church at Torzhok, he was invited to the Smolensk church at Ivanteevka, where he served until his arrest. On 21 November 1937 he was arrested, and two days later Kuzovkov and Kopninsky, all imprisoned at the Taganka in Moscow. A deacon of the church, Alexander Yakimansky, and a priest, Nicholas Uspensky, gave testimony against them in the inquiry.

On 1 December 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced Vershinsky and Kuzovkov to death and Kopninsky to eight years in a camp. The first two were shot on 8 December 1937 and buried in the common grave at Butovo. Nicholas Kopninsky was sent to the Mariinsk camps in the Kemerovo region and died there on 15 March 1938.

He is remembered on 8 December, on 29 August (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kuzbass, on 5 September (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, and on 7 February (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, in the new style.