Nikolaĭ Li︠u︡bomudrov

Nikolai Ivanovich Lyubomudrov was a parish priest of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Yaroslavl region who was killed during the Red Terror and is venerated as a hieromartyr among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. He was born on 31 January 1862 in the village of Pokrovskoye, Poshekhonsky Uyezd, Yaroslavl Governorate, in the Russian Empire, the son of the priest Ioann Lyubomudrov. Like many sons of the clerical estate in imperial Russia, he was educated for church service, attending the theological school in Poshekhonye and then the Yaroslavl Theological Seminary, from which he graduated in 1885.

In the years immediately after seminary he served as a psalm-reader and was ordained to the diaconate in 1886. In 1891 he was ordained to the priesthood and assigned to parish ministry in the Yaroslavl diocese. He served in rural churches of the Poshekhonsky district and later, from the mid-1890s, as priest of the church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in the village of Vozdvizhenskoye in Uglich Uyezd. As a member of the secular (white) clergy he lived the ordinary life of a Russian village priest, combining liturgical duties with teaching in the parish school and pastoral care of peasants. During the First World War he was noted for assisting the families of men who had been called to the army.

The revolutions of 1917 and the ensuing Civil War brought violent anti-religious policy into the provinces. In 1918 the Bolshevik authorities implemented the Red Terror. Father Nikolai continued to celebrate the services and to remain with his parish. In the autumn of that year he was arrested. He was shot in Uglich in November 1918. Contemporary investigation records of the period, insofar as they have been studied by church historians, give only sparse details of the charges and of the place of burial, which was not marked and has not been identified with certainty.

The Moscow Patriarchate included Priest Nikolai Lyubomudrov in the glorification of the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia at the Jubilee Bishops’ Council in August 2000. He is commemorated on 5 November according to the civil calendar, together with the movable feast of the New Martyrs (the Sunday nearest 7 February) and among the saints of the Rostov-Yaroslavl land. Surviving information about his life is limited to seminary lists, diocesan service records, and fragmentary files from 1918; no extensive personal correspondence or detailed contemporary vita is known to have been published. His veneration rests on the witness of a rural priest who remained at his post and was killed for his faith and office in the first wave of Soviet persecution.