Victor Evropeytsev

Holy Hieromartyr Victor Evropeytsev was a priest in the village of Khlystovka in Penza province and was shot on 30 January 1931 in the prison of Saransk.

He was born in 1885 in the village of Maly Azyas in the Krasnaya Sloboda district, Penza province, in the family of the priest Andrew Evropeytsev. After the seminary he was ordained priest and from 1906 served at the church of the Holy Unmercenary Physicians Cosmas and Damian in Khlystovka, until the end of 1929. He enjoyed great authority among the parishioners, which later decided his fate.

In November 1929 representatives of the village council and of the OGPU came to the priest's house and ordered the family to leave the village, although his wife was ill in bed with a fever. They took what they thought valuable and broke the rest, with threats and abuse. In the same year a collective farm was founded in the village; at first its leadership was freely elected, but the authorities were not pleased, the collective farm was dissolved at the beginning of 1930, and the better-⁠off peasants were declared disenfranchised. In December 1929, a month after the patronal feast of Saints Cosmas and Damian, the village church was closed, and Father Victor moved to Krasnaya Sloboda.

The villagers' discontent grew when they were left without services in Great Lent and at Pascha. In April 1930 about a hundred people, mostly women, gathered and decided to ask the authorities for a priest for the church. They went to the village council and asked the chairwoman to join the request; she flatly refused, and from the crowd cries were heard that if she did not give them the priest, they would tear her apart. The request had no result at that moment, but the authorities allowed Father Victor to serve, and at Pascha, 20 April 1930, the service was held and he went from house to house with prayer services.

On 21 November 1930 the OGPU plenipotentiary, on the basis of information from local activists, asked permission for arrests. The priest, six peasants and two nuns were arrested the next day and held at Saransk. At the interrogation the priest said that he had carried on no anti-⁠Soviet agitation, that all his attention had gone to spiritual matters, and that he had not even known of the gatherings in the village. On 5 December, faced with the accusation, he said again that he did not admit guilt, because all his life he had lived for the faith and had taken part in no campaigns. On 10 January 1931 an OGPU troika sentenced him to death, and Priest Victor Evropeytsev was shot on 30 January 1931 and buried in an unknown common grave.

The saint is commemorated on 30 January and, in the new style, on 7 February (movable) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church.