Paul Felitsyn

Holy Hieromartyr Paul Felitsyn, a priest, was born in 1894 in the village of Karpovo in the Dmitrov district of Moscow province, in the family of the priest John Felitsyn. He finished the spiritual school in Dmitrov in 1910 and the Shelaputin school in Moscow in 1914, then became a psalmist at the Resurrection church in Karpovo. In 1915 he was mobilized and in 1916 was taken prisoner; he returned home in 1918. On 15 November 1920 Bishop Seraphim Zvezdinsky of Dmitrov ordained him deacon, and in 1923 priest, for the church of Saint Nicholas in the village of Gorki. On 4 April 1931 he was moved to Moscow, to the church of the Deposition of the Robe at Leonovo, and lodged with Alexandra Ivanovna Smirnova, the widow of the priest Vladimir Smirnov.

He was arrested on 15 November 1937 and held in Taganka. After ten days NKVD agents came also to his landlady, searched, and after amusing themselves for a time took her too to interrogation, charging her with counter-⁠revolutionary gatherings. She denied it and ended in a camp, from which she returned only after eight years. Another priest, Alexander Kedrov, who served at the Renovationist church, testified that Felitsyn was a convinced Tikhonite and full of hatred for Soviet power. At his interrogation on 23 November, Father Paul said that he belonged to the Tikhonite Church but that he had carried on no counter-⁠revolutionary agitation.

On 5 December 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced him to ten years in a camp. The priest Paul Felitsyn died in captivity on 17 January 1941 and was buried in an unknown place. He is commemorated on 17 January, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and on 5 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, in the new style.