Nicholas Shirogorov

Holy Hieromartyr Nicholas Shirogorov was a deacon in the village of Yamkino, in the Moscow region, and died in a camp near Samara on 24 September 1942.

He was born on 9 November 1904 in the village of Zdekhovo in the Bogorodsk district of the Moscow province, in the family of the priest Dimitri Shirogorov. He attended four classes at the village school and two classes at the theological school. He did not manage to receive a full theological education, because the unbelievers came to power and first of all closed all Orthodox schools. In the civil war he was for a time called into the rear militia of the Red Army. After demobilisation he was ordained deacon and sent to the church of the Nativity of Christ in the village of Yamkino, Noginsk district.

In the summer of 1937 the authorities began a large-⁠scale persecution of the Church. The Noginsk NKVD decided to arrest Father Nicholas, charged that, after the arrest of some churchmen, he had said: "Believing citizens, Soviet power persecutes the Christian faith, imprisons innocent priests, and you pass over everything; we must demand in an organised way the end of this persecution; they write that there is freedom of faith, but in fact they arrest believers and priests daily; if we protest in an organised way, we shall save our Christian faith from the antichrists." He was arrested on 26 November 1937 and imprisoned at Noginsk, together with the rector of the church, the archpriest Nicholas Pokrovsky, and the reader Michael Amelyushkin. The next day he was interrogated, denied any counter-⁠revolutionary activity and said that he had ties with them, but not anti-⁠Soviet activity, nor disruption of the electoral meetings. On 28 November the inquiry ended, and on 1 December 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced him to ten years in a labour camp. He was sent to the Bezymyanlag camp, near Samara. The deacon Nicholas Shirogorov died in the camp on 24 September 1942 and was buried in an unknown grave.

He is remembered on 24 September, on 5 September (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, and on 7 February (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, in the new style.