Vincent Nikolsky

Holy Venerable Martyr Vincent Nikolsky was a monk of Optina and died in the camp of Lokchimlag in the Arkhangelsk region on 11 December 1937.

His calling

He was born in 1888 in Saint Petersburg and was baptized Victor. His grandfather was a priest in a poor parish, and his father, Alexander Nikolsky, left the clerical estate, studied law at the university and worked at the Ministry of Finance. Well settled, the father did not want his third son to go to a monastery. After the revolution he lost everything and moved to Kashira; he wrote to his son: "Father Vincent, how right you were." He died in 1921 and his wife in 1922. From childhood Victor had been sickly and, rejected for military service, stayed at home. Drawn to the spiritual life, in May 1913, at twenty-⁠five, he entered the Optina monastery in Kaluga province. As an educated man, he worked in the monastery's office. After 1918 he was tonsured a monk with the name Vincent. The abbot proposed that he accept the priesthood, but he answered that he would rather remain a monk.

The years after the closing of Optina

When the monastery was closed, Father Nectarius, the spiritual father of the community, was driven out, and the monk Vincent was entrusted to the parish priest of Kozelsk. This priest wrote of him that in two and a half years he never once left the church grounds of his own will, never sat at table, never spoke for the sake of conversation and never pressed his teaching on anyone, yet all felt in him the power of God. The nun Ambrosia Oberucheva remembered that he led a very strict life, like a true monk, and bore poverty with humility. When she was gravely ill, he brought her a manuscript of short lives of the monks buried in the cemetery of the skete.

In 1923 the monastery was abolished and he worked for a year at the Optina museum, then moved to Romny in Ukraine, where he was a church watchman until it was closed. In 1927 the OGPU sent him back to Kozelsk. On 18 August 1930 forty monks and laymen were arrested, among them Vincent, accused of keeping a monastic organization. Held first at Sukhinichi, he said at the interrogation that he did not admit guilt and had known of no counter-⁠revolutionary group; he admitted only that in 1929, at the request of the dean of Kozelsk, he had made a list of the monks of the place. On 27 November 1930 an OGPU troika sentenced him to five years in a camp.

Camp and exile

He was sent to the Vishera camps at Solikamsk, spending five months in the prison at Perm on the way. He was gravely ill with pulmonary tuberculosis and unable to work. On 26 April 1931 he was released by the commission for the sick and the old and exiled to the Urals, to Kudymkar and then to the village of Dubrovka in the Perm region. There he lived with the hieromonk Aifal Panaev, also of Optina (died 1936). In a letter to an acquaintance in Kozelsk he said he was content with the desolate place, the birches and firs, and that though hungry, always eating nettle soup, he gave thanks to God for all things, after the "Glory to God for all things" of Saint John Chrysostom.

On 5 September 1935 he was allowed to return to Kozelsk. He lived as a lodger, and after his landlady died, in another house with the monk Theodulus Slepukhin, aged seventy-⁠five. The landlady later testified that he read all the time, sat for whole days in the cellar and came out only at night or in bad weather, and that the nuns of the town helped him with food.

The last arrest

On 24 July 1937 he was arrested again and held at Kozelsk. At the first interrogation, confused, he admitted having said in private talk that there was no bread, but on 8 August he refused to admit any guilt. He had said only, in conversation with Slepukhin, that in the tsar's time there were more goods and paper, and that he could no longer buy a pen or notebook. He also denied having gathered nuns. On 8 September an NKVD troika sentenced him to ten years in a camp, and on 29 September he was sent by transport to Kotlas and then to Lokchimlag in the Arkhangelsk region. He died there on 11 December 1937 and was buried in an unknown place.

The saint is commemorated on 11 December and, in the new style, on 7 February (movable) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 31 July in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kaluga, on 24 October in the Synaxis of All the Saints Who Shone Forth at Optina, and on 1 November in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Arkhangelsk Metropolis.