Nikita Almazov

Holy Hieromartyr Nikita Almazov was a protodeacon in Saint Petersburg, condemned to exile in Kazakhstan and shot at Atbasar on 28 November 1937.

He was born on 3 April 1874 in the village of Sushchevo, in the Smolensk province, in a clerical family. From 1894 he was a novice at the bishop's house in Smolensk, and in 1897 he was ordained deacon. From 1903 he served as a supernumerary deacon of the Pavlovsky Regiment of the Imperial Guard. In the Russo-⁠Japanese War of 1904-1905 he served as a deacon at the headquarters of General Kuropatkin. From 1909 he served at the Transfiguration Cathedral of the Guards, then from 1912 at the Saint Sergius Cathedral of the artillery, in Saint Petersburg (Petrograd from 1914). He received the orders of Saint Anne, third class (1904), and Saint Vladimir, second class (1906). After 1918 he moved to the Greek church of Saint Demetrius in Leningrad, and in 1934 he was raised to protodeacon and served at the church of the Entry into Jerusalem in the same city.

In 1935 he was arrested with the clergy of his church and, as a "socially dangerous element", was sentenced by a special NKVD panel to five years of exile in Kazakhstan. He lived in the town of Atbasar. On 22 November 1937 he was arrested again, as a close acquaintance of the exiled Leningrad priests, among them the Holy Hieromartyr Basil Sokolsky, killed earlier, and the Holy Hieromartyr Nicholas Kovalev, arrested with him. He was accused of systematic counter-⁠revolutionary agitation and at the interrogation did not admit guilt. On 28 November a special troika sentenced him to death with Nicholas Kovalev, and the sentence was carried out the same day. He was buried in an unknown place. In the year 2000 the Jubilee Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints.

He is remembered on 28 November, on 7 February (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs, on 11 July (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Saint Petersburg, and on 8 December in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Smolensk land, in the new style.