Nicholas Lebedev

Holy Confessor Nicholas Lebedev was a priest in the village of Vlasyevo, near Tver, a counsellor of the people and founder of a temperance society, and he died in exile, in the Komi land, on 1 September 1933.

The priest of Vlasyevo

He was born in 1869 in the village of Berezhai in the Bezhetsk district of the Tver province, in the family of the sexton Basil Lebedev. The family was poor, so he took the whole course of the Tver seminary at the state's expense. In 1893 he finished it with distinction and was offered to continue his studies at the Academy, but he refused and became a reader in the village where he had been born and where his father had served. After half a year, in 1894, he was ordained priest for the church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God in the village of Vlasyevo, a few versts from Tver.

Vlasyevo was an old village, with a history of churches pulled down and raised again, until in 1799 the stone church of the Kazan Icon was consecrated, with a side chapel of Saint Nicholas. Father Nicholas at once began to educate his parishioners in the spirit of Orthodox morality and to root out vices. On 22 October 1897 he opened the Temperance Society of the Kazan Icon, officially approved by the minister of the interior on 28 January 1899. Its purpose was to restrain drink and foul language, to draw people to the services, to adorn the church and to develop Christian virtues. Later, at the inquiry, he wrote: "When I came in 1894 to Vlasyevo, in the parish there were two taverns, two beer houses and a kulak's shop, and not one school; the children remained illiterate." In the first year he succeeded, with great effort, in building a zemstvo school and in getting the taverns and beer houses closed, through a decision of the peasants that they would have no more taverns. In 1901 he founded a shelter for alcoholics, with workshops of carpentry, harness making, shoemaking, bookbinding, tailoring, smithing and with farm work for those without a trade, with his own property and cattle. In 1907 he opened a shelter for children without parents, children of alcoholics and street children; there were up to thirty-⁠seven, from five to twelve years old, with a school of their own and workshops.

Confession

After the revolution he was arrested in 1929 on a false charge, despite the petition of the parishioners of Vlasyevo and the neighbouring villages, who wrote to the OGPU that he had never been an enemy of the people but a friend, a useful and valued member of society. The authorities did not listen, and on 3 November 1929 he was sentenced to three years in the Solovki camp, where he stayed until 9 August 1931. He was then sent into exile at Mezen, in July 1932 moved to Arkhangelsk, then to the village of Kerchemya in the Ust-⁠Kulom district, in Komi. The term of exile expired on 19 August 1932, but the local OGPU did not give its consent for him to leave, so he stayed another year at Kerchemya. His daughter obtained a meeting with Aaron Soltz, member of the Supreme Court, who put on her petition a resolution for release and said to her: "Your father will come to you, then you will know." In the summer of 1933 his condition worsened greatly, the parcels arriving irregularly, and his health failed. The daughter wrote to Soltz again, but Father Nicholas never returned home. He died in exile, at Kerchemya, on 1 September 1933, and was buried in the village cemetery, in a grave now unknown.

After his arrest the church at Vlasyevo was closed and was reopened only in 1989, as the first church in the Tver diocese where services resumed after decades of persecution. He was numbered among the saints in 2000.

He is remembered on 1 September, on 7 February (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, on 11 February in the Synaxis of the Komi Saints, on 18 July (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver, on 23 August in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Solovki, and on 1 November in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Archangelsk Metropolis, in the new style.