Vasily Konstantinov-⁠Grishin

Priest Vasily Konstantinov-⁠Grishin (1874-1943) was a priest in Chuvashia and died in the Temnikov camp in Mordovia on 14 March 1943. He was glorified in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church; he is commemorated on 1 March (14 March by the new calendar).

He was born on 23 December 1874 in the village of Vypolzovo, Kurmysh district, Simbirsk province (today in the Poretskoye district of Chuvashia), to the peasant Matvei Grishin. His double surname comes from a story of his childhood: he cared for a well-⁠off but childless villager who loved him so much that he proposed that he take his name and be his heir. Officially the documents say Konstantinov, but the people of the village called him Grishin, after his father.

From 1908 he was psalm-⁠reader in the village of Chaadaevka, Ardatov district, in 1911 he was moved to Mariopol, Karsun district, in 1916 to Syresi, Alatyr district. He took pastoral courses. He was ordained deacon in 1919 and priest in 1923. In 1926 he was deprived of the vote as a servant of religion. Until 1933 he served in his native village.

On 2 January 1933 the chairman of the village soviet testified that in the village there was a group of kulaks aiming to undermine the collective farms and that the priest Grishin led it through the women close to him. On 16 January he was arrested and held at Alatyr. At the interrogation he answered: "I do not recognise myself guilty of the charge brought against me; I have not engaged in anti-⁠Soviet agitation; as a man of the Church I have always kept away from politics." The prison doctor noted a weakness of the heart, sclerosis, swelling and chronic rheumatism, classing him as a third-⁠degree invalid. The indictment, based on false testimony, ascribed to him words such as "soon the power will be overturned" and "you must not join the collective farm." On 25 March 1933 the case was closed "for lack of evidence" and he was released.

He then served at Napolnoye, where he stayed twenty-⁠two days, leaving after paying a tax of nearly a thousand rubles from his own money, and then in the village of Kudeikha. On 22 October 1937 he was searched and arrested and held first at Poretskoye, then in prison no. 3 at Alatyr. At the interrogation he was charged with ties to kulaks and to the priests Khramtsov, Voskresensky and Pokrovsky, with a sermon on Saints Boris and Gleb, in which he was said to have declared "we must remember them and stand for religion, not for the godless," and with visits to the bishop of Alatyr; he rejected all of it. He was tried in the same case as Holy Martyr Dimitry (Voskresensky) and Priest Mikhail Khramtsov, who were bound to him by spiritual kinship and nearness.

On 30 December 1937 the NKVD troika of the Chuvash Republic sentenced him to ten years in a camp. He served the sentence at the labour colony of Alatyr until 1941, when he was moved by order of the GULAG to the Temnikov camp in Mordovia, where he died on 14 March 1943 and was buried in the unmarked grave of the camp cemetery.