Nicholas Shcherbakov

Holy Hieromartyr Nicholas Shcherbakov was a priest in the Samara region and was shot in Kazakhstan on 28 November 1937.

He was born on 24 July 1876 in the village of Labazy in the Buzuluk district of the Samara province, in a priest's family. He finished the Samara seminary, married Serafima Dmitrievna (born in 1880), was ordained priest and sent to serve in the town of Chapayevsk. In 1932 he was arrested; to keep an appearance of legality a charge had to be brought, so the priest was declared a speculator, but even the OGPU had to admit the absurdity of the accusation, and after eight days it released him. For three more years he was rector of his church in Chapayevsk. A new arrest followed on 29 March 1935; he was held at Syzran, in the group case "Priests N. P. Shcherbakov, P. P. Konakov and others", charged with leading a counter-⁠revolutionary group, propaganda for the overthrow of Soviet power and talk of the need to kill Stalin. No one cared any more that the charge should seem plausible. On 7 June 1935 the Special Council of the NKVD sentenced him to five years of exile in Kazakhstan, where he lived at Semipalatinsk, working as an accountant at the pharmacy school.

On 23 November 1937 he was arrested in exile, on the charge of "counter-⁠revolutionary activity", and was accused of having slandered the leaders of the party, the government and Soviet power, spread rumours about the constitution of the USSR, praised the bourgeois order and shown his dissatisfaction with the policy of prices on industrial goods. At the interrogation he said: "No, this I do not admit. Living at Semipalatinsk as an exile, I never carried on anti-⁠Soviet agitation. I have nothing else to show." On 25 November 1937 the troika of the East Kazakhstan region sentenced him to death, and on 28 November, at two in the night, the sentence was carried out. He was rehabilitated on 29 April and 19 May 1989. In August 2000 the Council of Bishops canonised him.

His memory is kept on 28 November (15 November in the old style) and, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, on 7 February, as well as in the synaxis of the New Martyrs of Kazakhstan.