Vladimir Chekalov

Holy Hieromartyr Vladimir Chekalov was a priest in the diocese of Tver and was shot on 1 October 1937, after three years in a camp.

He was born on 10 July 1880 in the village of Pukhlino in the Kimry district, Tver province, in the family of the priest Dimitry Chekalov. He finished the seminary, was called to the army, served as an ensign and was moved to the reserve in 1904. In 1908 he was ordained deacon and then priest, and served until the end of his life in the churches of the Tver diocese. In the early thirties he served in the village of Vasyunino, Krasny Kholm district. When the persecution began, an excessive tax was demanded of him, arbitrarily set by the chairman of the council, and for non-⁠payment all his property was taken. In June 1932 he moved to the village of Nikitskoe in the Kalyazin district, hoping that nothing more would be taken from a poor priest, but there too he was asked to subscribe to a loan of a hundred rubles. On 3 January 1933 he was arrested and held at Kalyazin. A few witnesses said that in sermons he had spoken against the collective farms and the canal that was to swallow the villages by the Volga. At the interrogation he admitted that he had shown his dissatisfaction with the tax, because everything had been taken from him, but he rejected the other charges. On 28 February an OGPU troika sentenced him to three years in a camp.

He returned in 1936 and served in the village of Volkovo. The church was in danger of closing over debts and repairs. The priest resolved to serve to the end, helped by his wife, Nadezhda Pavlovna, who was a psalm-⁠reader. On 23 July 1937 the chairman of the village council and the secretary, who was also the organizer of the communist youth, sent the NKVD a note saying that the priest and the church warden Ivan Mikheev were carrying on anti-⁠Soviet propaganda: they were said to have announced in church a great thunderstorm on 20 June, to be repairing the church although it owed the state 1,679 rubles, and to be holding meetings without permission. On 27 July he was searched and arrested, then taken to the prison at Tver. Witnesses accused him of having held gatherings in church in May and July 1937, of saying that religion must rise again and of collecting money for repairs. At the interrogation the priest rejected again and again the charge of agitation. On 27 September an NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and Priest Vladimir Chekalov was shot on 1 October 1937.

He was numbered among the saints by the Jubilee Council of Bishops in August 2000. He is commemorated on 1 October 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.