Nicholas Kovalev

Holy Hieromartyr Nicholas Kovalev was a priest in exile in Kazakhstan and was shot on 27 December 1937.

He was born in 1884 at Novocherkassk, in the family of a chancery clerk. In 1919, at Anapa, he was ordained priest. Little is known of his ministry, from the criminal case drawn up in Leningrad in the early thirties. The file shows that, when General Wrangel was at Anapa, the priest Nicholas Kovalev was elected by the town duma to a commission for the defence of the population against the Reds. In 1934 he was arrested in Leningrad, where he had come to live and where he celebrated services at home. As a "socially dangerous element", he was sentenced to be sent away from Leningrad. Between 1935 and 1937 he was in exile in Kazakhstan, where on 22 November 1937 he was arrested again and charged with "counter-⁠revolutionary agitation among the people, aimed at compromising the measures of the party and the government". At the interrogation he did not admit guilt. On 28 November the NKVD troika of the North Kazakhstan region sentenced him to death, and on 27 December 1937 he was shot.

He is remembered on 27 December and on 7 February (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, in the new style.