Nicholas Zabolotsky

Holy Hieromartyr Nicholas Zabolotsky was an archpriest and dean in the village of Nekrasovo, in the Moscow region, and was shot at Butovo on 15 December 1937.

His life

He was born on 24 April 1876 in the town of Vyazma, in the Smolensk province, in the family of the archpriest Nicholas Zabolotsky, who served at the church of the Resurrection in the town. In 1895 he finished the theological school at Vyazma and entered the Moscow seminary, and in 1899 moved to the Bethany one, finishing in 1902. After the seminary he entered the University of Yuryev, but it seems God did not wish the young man to choose the worldly path: he fell gravely ill and had to leave his studies. In 1905 he became a teacher at the boys' gymnasium in Vyazma. In 1910 he was ordained priest for the church in the village of Budayevo, Gzhatsk district, in 1913 moved to the church in Fedotkovo, Yukhnov district. Between 1917 and 1926 he served at the church in the village of Marinskoye, Roslavl district, then at that in Korobkino, Gzhatsk district, and from 1931 in the village of Nekrasovo, Uvarovo district, Moscow region. He was raised to archpriest and named dean.

Persecution

In the spring of 1937, with the intensifying of the persecution, representatives of the local authorities began to write complaints to the NKVD that Father Nicholas performed the Mysteries and services in the parishioners' homes without asking the village soviet's permission and that, asked why, he gave no answer, holding that it was not the authorities' business to ask what concerned the church and his ministry. On 28 June 1937 an official of the district Komsomol committee sent the chief of the Uvarovo NKVD a note in which he wrote that the priest agitated that the faithful should not work on the first day of Pascha and on holidays and that he healed people and animals: "He has no right at all to heal people and animals, for this he must be held responsible." A worker of the district party committee wrote that in 1935, at the spring sowing, on which Pascha fell, people "stayed at church on the first and second day of Pascha, did not work and did not fulfil the plan, saying: 'The father said that the harvest does not depend on working on the holy days of Pascha; formerly they did not work a whole week at Pascha and gathered a good harvest.'"

On 19 November 1937 the archpriest Nicholas was arrested and imprisoned at Mozhaisk. After a few days the chairman of the village soviet was called to the interrogation and spoke of a conversation with the priest at a baptism, when he allegedly asked to be told whether baptism can be performed in unsuitable vessels, in which children can catch diseases, and the priest allegedly answered: "It is not your business, we are not bound to you." A collective farm woman said that in May 1937 the priest came to the village of Zhikharevo without the soviet's knowledge and went round the collective farmers' houses proposing services of supplication, and when the chairman told him that he was carrying contagion, for there were people sick with typhus, the priest showed his dissatisfaction with the communist party. On 2 December the priest was interrogated about May: he admitted that he had been called to Zhikharevo to baptise a child. Of slanders and agitation he said: "It is a lie... I live in isolation, in the church cemetery, in the church guardhouse. I go to the villages only by invitation." With this the interrogations ended. On 5 December 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and on 15 December the archpriest Nicholas Zabolotsky was shot and buried in an unknown common grave on the Butovo range.

He is remembered on 15 December, on 29 May (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo, on 8 August (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Smolensk, on 8 December in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of the Smolensk land, and on 5 September (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, in the new style.