Stephen Mityushkin

Holy Martyr Stephen Mityushkin was a peasant of the village of Pokrov in Nizhny Novgorod province and was shot on 17 September 1937, with four priests and three other peasants.

On 8 September 1937 ten Orthodox clergy and laymen of the Gagino district of the Nizhny Novgorod region were arrested. None admitted guilt. They were accused of having held on 6 July a solemn service in which four priests and many believers took part. Though no political sermon was given after the service, the service itself was given the meaning of an anti-⁠state act, because it drew peasants away from work on the collective farm. On 17 September eight of them were sentenced to death and shot. Their names are preserved in the investigation files: the priest John Dimitrievich Romashkin (born 1891, first arrested in 1928), the priest Peter Ivanovich Lebedinsky of Soroki (born 1881), the priest Nicholas Alexandrovich Khvoshchev of Yusupovo (born 1883), the priest Alexander Semyonovich Nikolsky of Panova-⁠Osanova (born 1883), and the peasants of the village of Pokrov Alexander Ivanovich Blokhin (1879), Peter Vasilievich Lonskov (1881), Stephen Semyonovich Mityushin (1874) and Basil Kireevich Yezhov (1867, arrested in 1930 for non-⁠payment of taxes and sentenced to five years in a camp).

Stephen is commemorated on 17 September and, in the new style, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and on 12 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Nizhny Novgorod.