Nicholas Zelenov

Holy Hieromartyr Nicholas Zelenov was a priest in the village of Starynino, in the Zaraysk district, and was shot at Butovo on 3 December 1937.

His life

He was born in 1887 in the hamlet of Bochevino in the Bronnitsy district of the Moscow province, in the family of the peasant Polycarp Zelenov. From 1897 he was a singer in the church choir. In 1907 he finished the Vladimir seminary and became a teacher at the parish school in the village of Yakovtsevo, Murom district. In 1911 he served as deacon in the village of Zagarino, in 1912 he was ordained priest for the parish of Golenishchevo, where he served until June 1917, then at Zagarino until 1926. He then passed to the village of Markovo and from 1928 until the first arrest served in the village of Sengo-⁠Ozero, Orekhovo-⁠Zuevo district. The inhabitants loved him and bought him a cow. Having no children with the matushka, they lived very modestly, almost without property.

Persecution

The cause of the arrest was an article in the local paper "The Rattle", of 24 October 1929, titled "The Priest Agitates Against the Collective Farm": an anti-⁠religious lecturer who had come to the farm did not understand why, in a village of 150 households, fewer than ten per cent were in the collective farm, and wrote that the local priest "had organised, in opposition to the cultural work of the reading hut, a church choir, and the youth learned spiritual chants". On the newspaper clipping the resolution was put: "Open a case and take into custody." The next day witnesses were questioned, among them the chairman of the collective farm, who said that the priest hindered the farm and carried on religious propaganda among the young. On 3 November 1929 Father Nicholas was arrested and imprisoned at Orekhovo-⁠Zuevo. At the interrogation he said that in the collective farm "Dawn of the Future" all the people of the village saw the mismanagement: the gathered harvest was not stored on time, the workers worked without zest; and the youth choir was not organised by him, but earlier by the wife of the priest before him. He said: "I do not admit guilt of provocation against the building of collective farms." Another charge was that he had refused to baptise an infant whose godmother was a collective farm woman; after that, attitudes toward the farm were said to have become wary: "If you are in the collective farm, the priest will not baptise the children." During the inquiry the parishioners asked the authorities to release the priest on bail, for they had no other priest and the neighbouring parishes were far; the petition was signed by nearly a hundred people, but without result. On 6 February 1930 he was moved to the jail at Pokrov, and on 23 February the Special Council sentenced him to three years in a camp. After the sentence he was named to the church of the Protection in the village of Pustoshi, Shatura district, and on 18 April 1933 he asked the bishop of Kolomna for transfer to a vacant place; he then served at the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God in Starynino, Zaraysk district, until his arrest.

He was arrested on 22 November 1937 by the Zaraysk district office of the NKVD and questioned the same day: he denied having carried on counter-⁠revolutionary activity, slander, defeatist attitudes, calling the population to vote against the communists or having terrorist dispositions. He was held in the prison at Kolomna. On 27 November 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and on 3 December 1937 Father Nicholas Zelenov was shot and buried in an unknown common grave at Butovo.

He is remembered on 3 December, on 29 May (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo, on 5 September (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, and on 12 September (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Nizhny Novgorod, in the new style.