Nicholas Vinogradov

Holy Hieromartyr Nicholas Vinogradov was an archpriest of the Russian Church. He was born at Dmitrov, in Moscow province (in 1876, according to one source), and died on 24 December 1937 in the camps of Komi. He was numbered among the New Martyrs of Russia by decision of the Holy Synod of 17 July 2001. He is commemorated on the day of his martyrdom and in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.

He was born into the family of a church servant. In 1891 he graduated from the Dmitrov clerical school, and in 1897 from the Bethany seminary. After the seminary he taught the Law of God. He then lived in the house of the Ascension Monastery, where Priest John Mitropolsky served, whose daughter, Antonina Ivanovna, he married on 1 July 1898, in the church of the Protection on Varvarka, and soon he was ordained deacon at this monastery.

About 1917 he was ordained priest and appointed to the church of the Holy Great Martyr George on the Pskov hill, after whose closing, in 1918, he was moved to the church of the Holy Great Martyr Nikita on Shivaya Gorka. After the closing of the Ascension Monastery he continued to give spiritual care to the sisters of the monastery and, for his labour, at the petition of the abbess of the monastery, Abbess Eugenia, he received a cross in 1923. After the closing of the church of Saint George he began to serve at the church of the Nativity of Christ in Izmailovo, but soon he was appointed priest of the church of the Resurrection in the village of Vasilyevskoye, Ruza district, Moscow region. In 1936 his wife died. At Vasilyevskoye his spiritual children from Moscow visited him, among them nuns of the closed Ascension convent.

He was arrested in the night of 24 to 25 August 1937 on a charge of counter-⁠revolutionary agitation; the indictment explained that he gathers collective farmers near the church and reads the Bible to them. He was held in the Butyrka prison in Moscow. At the interrogation he did not admit guilt, and on 15 October 1937 the special three-⁠man tribunal of the political police for the Moscow region sentenced him to ten years in a labour camp. He was sent to Ustvymlag (Ukhtpechlag, in the territory of the Komi ASSR), where he soon died, on 24 December 1937, and was buried in an unknown grave.