Nicholas Pisarevsky

Holy Confessor Nicholas Pisarevsky was a priest in the village of Yagorba, in the Yaroslavl province, and died in exile, at Kholmogory, on 4 May 1933.

He was born in 1868 in the village of Yagorba in the Mologa district of the Yaroslavl province, in the family of the priest Paul Pisarevsky. After the Ryazan seminary he was ordained priest for the church of his native village. At the end of the twenties, with the forced organisation of the collective farm at Yagorba, the authorities began a merciless struggle against the faith and the Church. In 1930 Father Nicholas was arrested. The authorities succeeded in frightening the members of the church council, who by a majority voted to close the church, and the church was closed. The parishioners did not accept the decision; the warden gathered a new council and asked for the reopening and the release of the priest. The petition succeeded: Father Nicholas was released and the church reopened.

In March 1931 taxes were demanded of him: over five hundred roubles personally and one thousand three hundred for the church. Learning that the authorities were raising the levies, the deacon who served with him declared publicly that he was giving up his rank. Father Nicholas went to his house and urged him not to be afraid to serve; he himself would serve whatever happened. The urging did not succeed: the deacon and his wife began to spread rumours in the village and to denounce to the authorities that the priest received money and gave the deacon nothing, said he feared no one and called the representatives of the authorities bandits. Father Nicholas told these troubles to a friend, a priest, who answered in a warm letter, asking whether he remained faithful to the Patriarchal Church, since it was heard that the whole former Mologa district had gone over to Renovationism. Father Nicholas asked the parishioners for help in paying the taxes, so that the church would not be closed. Making use of the deacon's betrayal, who said the priest reviled the authorities, and of the false testimony of witnesses, who had allegedly heard him call Lenin a rogue, the authorities arrested him again.

On 2 April 1931 he wrote from prison: "I am alive and well; I write from the prison at Poshekhonye-⁠Volodarsk, where I was brought yesterday; they have brought the same charge as last year... They took me two hours before matins, on Palm Sunday; they told me they would question me for half an hour and let me go; I went without saying goodbye to anyone and since then I have not seen any of mine... My chief betrayer was our father deacon, who gave me up to them... Remaining with love, Nicholas Pisarevsky. Farewell." The witnesses for the prosecution were two communists, one the chairman of the collective farm "The Path of Ilyich". At the interrogation Father Nicholas said he did not admit guilt of anti-⁠Soviet agitation and admitted only that, faced with the sum of 540 roubles, he lost his temper and told the chairman that they wanted to rob him. On 10 May 1931 an OGPU troika sentenced him to two years of exile in the Northern Territory. He died a month before the end of the term, on 4 May 1933, in the town of Kholmogory in the Arkhangelsk region.

He is remembered on 4 May, on 5 June in the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl, on 1 November in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Archangelsk Metropolis, and on 7 February (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, in the new style.