Victor Matveev

Holy Martyr Victor Matveev was a wanderer and hermit in the mountains near Verny (today Almaty, in Kazakhstan) and was shot on 31 December 1937.

He was born on 11 October 1871 in the town of Borovichi, Novgorod province, in the family of a career soldier. In his youth he was paralyzed and was healed by the righteous John of Kronstadt, who blessed him to be a wanderer and commanded him to live on bread, sugar and tea. For years he wandered through Russia, Siberia and Ukraine, and reached Kiev. In 1906 he settled thirty kilometers from Verny, on the mountain Mokhnataya Sopka, where he built a small cell; after one winter, because of the snow, he came down to the mountain Gorelnik. In 1923 the hieromonk Pachomius Rusin came there, and Victor labored for a time together with him.

He had the gift of unceasing prayer of the mind and of foresight. He came to the church of Saint Nicholas in Verny at every feast and every fast to confess and receive communion. People loved him and gave him sugar, rusks and tea; money he would not take. He was short, lean, with a thin beard and long hair, and wore a canvas cloak all year round. On Gorelnik there lived a great bear, which sometimes came near his cell but never touched him and went away as soon as the ascetic said "Go, Misha". The nun Mariamna and a believer, Nagibina, remembered later that they had once seen him praying standing in the air, a meter above the ground, with raised hands. When in the 1930s mass arrests of the monks of the mountains began, he stayed on Gorelnik, then moved to the Aksai gorge.

On 2 September 1935 he was arrested at night, in the mountains, in the group case of the hieromonks Macarius Ermolenko, Pachomius Rusin and others. The charge named him leader of a group of monks, who were supposed to have used the reputation of a "foreseeing elder" to gather pilgrims, hold services in secret and agitate against the collective farms. On 28 January 1936 he was sentenced to five years of exile and sent, by way of Karaganda and Kyzyl-⁠Orda, to the village of Orlovka in the South Kazakhstan region. In December 1937 he was arrested again with the priests exiled there, on the charge of belonging to a counter-⁠revolutionary organization of clergy. He did not admit guilt. He was shot on 31 December 1937, by the decision of the regional NKVD troika of 30 December.

He was glorified by the Jubilee Council of Bishops in the year 2000. He is commemorated on 31 December and, in the new style, on 7 February (movable) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and on 11 July (movable) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Novgorod.