Paul Vasilievsky

Holy Hieromartyr Paul Vasilievsky, a priest, was born on 22 June 1881 in the village of Karabuzino in the Kesovogorsk district of Tver province, in the family of the church servant John Vasilievsky. The family had nine children, his father died when Paul was five, and an uncle took him in. He finished the spiritual school. In 1916 he was called into the army and served until 1918 in the 177th reserve infantry regiment in Novgorod. After demobilization he returned home, was a psalmist, married Anna Mikheevna Mikheeva, the daughter of pious peasants, and was ordained priest for the church in the village of Khobotskoe. Their five children died young, and only the daughter Tamara survived. Later he served at the church of Saint Nicholas in the village of Dobrynino, Maksatikha district; his ministry there was short, but the parishioners had time to love him.

In 1937 he was arrested on 6 August at six in the evening, when he had just returned with his wife and daughter from the forest, where they had gathered mushrooms and berries for winter. Three NKVD agents came, turned the house upside down but took nothing. His wife and daughter were not allowed to accompany him even to the edge of the village. They went on foot and arrested other people on the way; at Dymtsevo they arrested the priest Mikhail Kosukhin, a very old man who could no longer walk, and all were put in a lorry and taken to prison.

The investigation lasted only four days. For two days the people of the Dobrynino parish were questioned, among them people already arrested. On 9 August the priest was interrogated. Asked about anti-⁠Soviet activity, he denied it. Asked about gathering signatures and going about with the icon during spring sowing, he said he denied disrupting the sowing, that in the village of Dubishchi he had been allowed to go in the morning and that in some houses adults had stayed, though he had not asked them to. Asked about talk of war, he said that he had never spoken of war in church and believed that war would not come soon. The next day a lieutenant of the NKVD troops ended the investigation, regarding his guilt as proven even though the priest did not admit it, and sent the file to the NKVD troika, which on 13 September decided that he be shot. Father Paul Vasilievsky was shot a few days later, on 17 September 1937.

He was numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia at the Jubilee Council of Bishops in August 2000. He is commemorated on 17 September, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and on 18 July (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver, in the new style.