Nicholas Vinogradov

Holy Confessor Nicholas Vinogradov was a priest in the village of Danilovo, near Moscow, for thirty-⁠two years, and died in exile, in the North, on 17 November 1931.

His life

He was born on 4 November 1873 in the town of Klin, in the Moscow province, of a clerical line. He entered the Moscow seminary, finishing in 1896, in the second category, and until 1898 taught at the parish school of Prokhorovo, Podolsk district. He married. On 17 April 1898 he was named priest at the church in the village of Danilovo, Podolsk district, dedicated to the Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God. The village was one of the old ones of the Domodedovo volost, and the stone church in which he served had been built in 1755. Here Father Nicholas lived thirty-⁠two years; here were born his daughter Nadezhda (1900), his son Nicholas (1902) and his daughter Lyudmila (1904); here he bore the heavy cross of widowhood.

He laboured much for church enlightenment. In November 1898, soon after ordination, he opened a literacy school in Danilovo, in which he himself taught without pay; in 1901 the school became a parish school, and he was its head and teacher of religion until 1918. Between 1908 and 1911 he led the Resurrection parish school near Rastunovo, and between 1909 and 1917 he taught religion at the zemstvo school at Rastunovo. In 1915 he was assistant dean of the sixth district, and in 1916 dean, until 1917; in 1919-1920 he temporarily led the deanery, and in 1920 he was elected to the deanery council, where he stayed until 1923, when he was named confessor of the sixth district. He received many church awards, among them in 1921 the pectoral cross.

Persecution

Like all clergy of that time, he was deprived of electoral rights, and in February 1930 he was declared a kulak, though he no longer had any property. In the campaign to close the church he gave a sermon in which he said: "...hard times have come, our churches are being closed without our consent." The parishioners resolved to fight for their church; on 10 March a general meeting was held in which the faithful tried to protest, but on 17 March the village soviet resolved to ask for the removal of the clergy (that is, of Father Nicholas) from the locality. The OGPU took up the matter, questioning the chairman of the soviet, the deputy chairman of the collective farm and other false witnesses, who gave the required testimonies about the priest's anti-⁠Soviet activity.

In the middle of March 1930 Father Nicholas too was questioned. The investigator was interested in the church's silver vessels found on the priest at the inventory at the end of January 1930. He said that in August 1926 a priest he knew, Father Nicholas Kalugin, when moving, had left with him a small bundle of things, without his knowing what it contained, and the bundle had lain on the icon shelf "until they came to me with the inventory". On 22 March 1930 he was arrested at the administrative department of the Mikhnevo district executive committee, and on 24 March he was interrogated again, when he confirmed his statements and added: "I carried on no anti-⁠Soviet agitation." On 25 April 1930 an OGPU troika sentenced him to three years of exile in the Northern Territory. The priest, not yet old, did not withstand the harsh conditions of northern exile. On 17 November 1931 he died in the Yemetsk district of the Arkhangelsk region and was buried in an unknown grave.

After his arrest the services in the church ceased, the "twenty" needed to register the parish fell apart, and in 1934, by a decision of the presidium of the district executive committee of 14 March, the church was closed. Services resumed in it only in the year 2000.

He is remembered on 17 November, 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.