Nicholas Safonov

Holy Hieromartyr Nicholas Safonov was an archpriest at Mozhaisk, near Moscow, and was shot at Butovo on 15 December 1937.

His life

He was born on 13 April 1900 in Saratov, in the family of pious laymen, Alexander and Evdokia Safonov, two of whose sons chose the service of the Lord, becoming priests. Nicholas finished four classes at the Saratov seminary when the revolution came and the theological institutions were closed. Between 1918 and 1924 he was a teacher, then a singer in the choir. On 8 November 1926 Bishop Seraphim (Silichev) of Podolsk ordained him priest for the church of the Transfiguration at Spas-⁠Kupla. In 1927 he was moved to the church of the Holy Trinity at Aristov Pogost and in the same year named rector of the church of the Protection at Goliki, on Malaya Ordynka Street in Moscow. In 1929 the church was closed, and the clergy were transferred to the church of the Annunciation on Bolshaya Ordynka, also called that of Saint Nicholas in Pyzhi. In 1930 he received the pectoral cross.

Persecution

On 21 November 1932 he was arrested and imprisoned at Butyrka. The next day the investigator Baibus interrogated him. Father Nicholas said that he corresponded with his brother, the archimandrite Stephen, sent into exile in the Ural region "for the counter-⁠revolution which Soviet power attributes to the whole clergy", but that he had never written that in Moscow the clergy were being arrested wholesale and the churches closed; that they never gathered in homes to discuss politics and that he had not spread rumours of famine and the collapse of collective farms; that he had told no one the Bolsheviks would close all the churches or that the end of the power of the antichrist was coming. A witness said that Father Safonov corresponded with exiled priests and showed his brother's letters, where it was said that exile was full of clergy and people died of hunger, and that he tried to convince the parishioners that his brother and all the exiled clergy were martyrs for the faith of Christ. On 10 January 1933 the Special Council sentenced him to three years in a camp, and he was sent to the Svir camps.

He was released early, in 1934, and named first to the church of Saint Nicholas in Pyzhi, then to that of the Deposition of the Robe. As a former prisoner he was not allowed to live in Moscow, so he was sent as rector to the church of All Saints in the town of Kashira and raised to archpriest. In 1937 Kashira became a regime zone, closed to those condemned on political charges, so in February 1937 he was named rector of the church of the Holy Righteous Joachim and Anna in Mozhaisk. He was arrested on 5 December 1937. On 6 and 7 December the deacon of the church and a worker were questioned as witnesses. The deacon said that the priests, gathered in the altar, had discussed whether to go with services of supplication through the parish, and Father Safonov had said that it could not be done now, because of the election campaign for the Supreme Soviet and the suspicion of disrupting it. The worker said that the archpriest, arrived at Mozhaisk, had surrounded himself with clergy who had served sentences for counter-⁠revolutionary activity and that the parish had grown greatly with nuns, clergy and believers. On 7 December Father Nicholas was interrogated: he said that he had not carried on anti-⁠Soviet agitation, that in the altar they had talked about going round the parish, but because of the harvest campaign they did not go, though it was the patronal feast. On 9 December an NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and on 15 December 1937 the archpriest Nicholas Safonov was shot and buried in an unknown common grave at Butovo.

He is remembered on 15 December, on 29 May (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo, and on 5 September (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, in the new style.