Nikolay Krylov

Nikolay Krylov (also spelled Nikolai or Nicholas Krylov) is a name borne by a number of distinct men in Russian and Soviet history, and Wikidata item Q4242786 cannot be matched from the information given here to one source-verified life. The combination of given name and surname is common in the Russian Empire and the USSR. Documented bearers include a Marshal of the Soviet Union, more than one research mathematician, and several Orthodox clergymen who appear in lists of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the twentieth century. Because this record forbids conjecture and forbids substituting an office-taking year or another man’s dates for a birth year, chronological and geographical fields are left blank rather than filled by analogy.

In Russian Orthodox hagiography, priests named Nikolai Krylov are commemorated among those arrested in the anti-religious campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s, often executed during the Great Terror, sometimes at the Butovo firing range near Moscow or in a provincial prison. Published synaxaria and diocesan notices, however, attach different patronymics, different birth years (typically in the later nineteenth century), different parishes, and different days of commemoration to different men of this name. None of those particulars can be assigned to Q4242786 without risk of conflating two people. No reliable source tied to this identifier confirms a religious order, a monastic name in religion, a spouse, children, a place of burial, or an act of canonization or beatification.

Secular homonyms are equally well attested in encyclopedias and must not be merged with a clerical namesake. Nikolai Ivanovich Krylov (1903–1972) served as a Red Army commander in the Civil War and the Second World War and later headed the Strategic Rocket Forces. Nikolai Mitrofanovich Krylov (1879–1955) worked in nonlinear mechanics and mathematical physics at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Nikolai Sergeevich Krylov (1917–1947) contributed to the foundations of statistical physics. These careers are a matter of public record, yet there is no warrant for identifying any one of them with the Wikidata item supplied for this entry.

The subject was not Bishop of Rome and did not occupy a patriarchal or catholicosal see of the Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Coptic, or Church of the East communions. Patronages, a feast day, and a burial place remain unlisted. The only facts that can be stated with certainty from the name and identifier alone are that the person is male and that a unique, source-verified biography cannot be reconstructed without violating the requirement to prefer an empty field over an unverified claim.