Victor Ilinsky

Holy Hieromartyr Victor Ilinsky was a priest in the village of Koy in Tver province and was shot on 27 November 1937, after years of arrests and imprisonment.

He was born on 31 October 1872 in the village of Koy in the Kashin district, in the family of the deacon Nicholas Ilinsky. He took teachers' courses and was for ten years a teacher at the parish school; from 1906 he served as psalm-⁠reader, and in 1912 he was ordained deacon at the same church. He was first arrested in 1920, accused of hiding grain, and sentenced to three months in a camp. In 1927, when the local authorities began a campaign to close the church at Koy, Deacon Victor and the parishioners resisted vigorously: about sixty women went to the village council and demanded an end to the campaign, and the authorities yielded, for the moment.

In 1930 he was ordained priest for the same church and at once arrested for failure to meet the grain procurement plan; he received eight months in a camp. In the same year he was declared a kulak, his property was handed to the commune, and he moved to the village of Yarugino. In 1934 he was arrested again, accused of hiding church valuables and small coin, and received two years in a camp. The arrests and hard labor so weakened his health that he was released in 1935 and returned to his native village.

In March 1936 the NKVD searched the church and took the registers of baptisms, marriages and deaths, kept since 1918 and 1923. The priest answered at the interrogation that he had kept them out of duty, by the order of Archpriest Nicholas Troitsky and of Archbishop Thaddeus, and that nobody had asked him for certificates. He was not arrested then. He went on serving and giving all his time to the parish. The chairman of the village council accused him in various ways, for instance that, since the bells had been taken, he served as long as he liked, no longer limited by the ringing of the bell, and that he ceaselessly urged people to come to church, with the result that the number of parishioners grew greatly by 1937.

On 12 November 1937 he was arrested and held at Bezhetsk. At the interrogation of 20 November, with "duty witnesses" who had signed records written in advance, the priest stood firm and denied all the charges: an anti-⁠Soviet sermon on 30 August, attacks on the candidates for the Supreme Soviet, rumors about war. On 25 November an NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and Father Victor Ilinsky was shot on 27 November 1937.

The saint is commemorated on 27 November and, in the new style, on 7 February (movable) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and on 18 July (movable) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver.