Nicholas Udintsev

Holy Hieromartyr Nicholas Udintsev was a priest in the village of Koptelovskoye, in the Perm province, and was killed on bayonets in the very altar on 25 July (7 August) 1918.

His life

He was born on 4 April 1862 in the family of the priest Alexander Udintsev of the village of Skorodumskoye, Irbit district. He studied at the Perm seminary, but was released from it at his own request on passing to the fifth class and became a teacher in people's schools of the Irbit district, until 1890. Then he married Antonina Mikhailovna Lasina, daughter of a deacon of the village of Nitsinskoye, and they had two sons, Alexander (1890) and Dimitri. On 15 November 1892 he was ordained deacon for the church of the Three Hierarchs in the Nizhne-⁠Tura works, Verkhoturye district; his record reads "very good conduct". In 1894 he was ordained priest for the church of Saints Peter and Paul in the village of Petropavlovskoye, then moved to the church of the Resurrection in Verkh-⁠Nitsinskoye, where he also taught at the parish school of Ignatyeva. The teaching went so well that at Pascha of 1902 he received the hip-⁠shield "for zeal in church school duties", and in 1903 and 1905 he was several times named in the reports of the diocesan inspectors among those who showed themselves diligent. About that time he entered the Brotherhood of Saint Simeon, the wonderworker of Verkhoturye, and the Orthodox Missionary Society of the Yekaterinburg committee, whose work was enlightenment and mission, above all against the schism. He then served at the church of the Ascension in Koptelovskoye.

The killing

In 1918, in the time of the civil war, the new power introduced forced mobilisation into the Red Army and plundered the peasants, which provoked uprisings throughout the Urals. The Verkhoturye district was no different: on the initiative of the inhabitants of Aromashevo, meetings were held with representatives of fifteen volosts, which resolved not to join the Red Army and not to support the Bolsheviks; those mobilised by force went over, a whole company of 180 men with arms, to the side of the Whites, and the peasants of the neighbouring village of Deyeva, armed only with pitchforks, iron shovels and homemade spears, disarmed a detachment of twenty-⁠eight Red soldiers. The inhabitants of Koptelovskoye refused likewise to go into the Red Army, and Father Nicholas was suspected of having agitated against the mobilisation.

When the first scouts of the People's Army appeared near Koptelovskoye, the Reds, feeling that they would soon have to leave the village, resolved to do away with Father Nicholas, toward whom they had been hostile even before. He received a martyr's death at the Lord's table: the frenzied Reds lifted him on bayonets in the very altar of the church of the Ascension, on 25 July (7 August) 1918. In 2002 he was glorified in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia of the Yekaterinburg diocese.

He is remembered on 7 August, on 11 February in the Synaxis of the Saints of Yekaterinburg, and on 7 February (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, in the new style.