Paul Nikolsky

Holy Hieromartyr Paul Nikolsky, a priest, was born on 8 September 1896 at Zaraisk, in Ryazan province, in the family of the psalmist Dmitry Pavlovich Nikolsky and Anastasia. He finished the Ryazan seminary just as the First World War began, was taken to the front in 1916 as an ensign, and in 1918 returned to his father, a deacon at the Epiphany church in the village of Plakhino. A peasant uprising then broke out, in which he took no part, but he was arrested and held a month and a half; proved innocent, he was mobilized into the Red Army, as a teacher and secretary of the commissar.

In 1922 he was ordained priest for the church of Saint Elijah in the village of Lobkovo, and from 1928 he served at the church of the Great Martyr Demetrius in the village of Trasna, Zaraisk district. In June 1929 he asked the local plenipotentiary to lease him land, and the peasants' assembly voted in his favour. This angered the atheists of the village, who accused him of bribing the peasants and putting moral pressure on them. On 5 January 1930 he was arrested and held at Kolomna. He did not admit guilt. The investigator had no evidence, but in the indictment he described him as a former tsarist officer who had allegedly taken part in the kulak uprising in the Mikhailov district, and accused him of making counter-⁠revolutionary agitation against the taxation of the clergy, using the religious feelings of believers. On 3 February 1930 he was sentenced to three years in a camp and sent to the northern camps. He returned in 1932, lived at Serebryanye Prudy, then from 1938 at Zaraisk, and in 1940 he was told to leave the town and moved to Ryazan. He no longer served, but prayed at the church of the Sorrowful Mother of God. Another priest wrote a denunciation that he had said he would not take civil employment because he did not want to work for Soviet power.

He was arrested on 30 June 1941, a week after the beginning of the war, and held at Ryazan. At the interrogations he said that he had carried on no anti-⁠Soviet agitation, that false testimony was being brought against him and that he had no personal quarrels with the witnesses. The investigation closed on 6 July, and on 22 September 1941 the Special Board of the NKVD sentenced him to five years in a camp. On 17 October 1941 he was sent by transport to Vyatlag, arriving on 9 May 1942 and placed in camp point no. 4. The hard conditions of life and work were unbearable for the sick priest, exhausted by imprisonment. The priest Paul Nikolsky died of hunger on 22 January 1943 and was buried in the cemetery of the 4th point of Vyatlag.

He is commemorated on 22 January, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 23 June in the Synaxis of the Saints of Ryazan, on 5 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow and on 21 October in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vyatka, in the new style.