Presbyter
Hieromartyr Nikolai Konstantinovich Krasovsky was born in 1876 in the village of Voinova Gora of the Moscow Governorate, into the family of a priest. He graduated from the Vladimir Theological Seminary. Until 1914, he worked as a teacher at the Gorodishchevo school near the Usad railway station, several kilometers from his native village. During the years of the First World War, he served as a medical orderly in a Moscow hospital. After the war, he returned to teaching.
In 1922, the church in the village of Gorodishchi was closed and converted into a club. The authorities forced teachers to bring pupils there. For refusing to take children to the club set up in the former church, Nikolai Konstantinovich was dismissed from his teaching position.
In 1924, he was ordained to the rank of deacon (as a celibate) and assigned to the Dormition church in the village of Voinova Gora. In 1931, when the church was seized by the Renovationists, Deacon Nikolai, despite threats that he would be sent to the Solovki concentration camp, refused to serve with them and was transferred to the church of the Great Martyr Nikita in the village of Kabanovo. In 1932, Father Nikolai was ordained to the priesthood at the same church, and in 1936 he was appointed to the church of the Great Martyr Nikita in the village of Drovoseki in the Orekhovo-Zuyevo District.
From his youth, Priest Nikolai Krasovsky lived a chaste life. Without taking monastic vows, he observed monastic rules without external tonsure. With particular zeal, Father Nikolai devoted himself to prayer, fasting, and vigil. He was distinguished by love for people, compassion for the suffering and the needy, and promptness in works of charity. At that time, many people were deprived by the authorities of their means of livelihood, and Father Nikolai provided assistance to many of them.
On January 18, 1938, Father Nikolai was arrested and imprisoned in the Taganka Prison in Moscow. During interrogations, he was accused of "anti-Soviet agitation" and pressured to confess that he had allegedly spread slander about poor living conditions in collective farms. Father Nikolai firmly and unequivocally rejected all these fabricated accusations. On January 26, by a troika of the NKVD of the Moscow Region, Priest Nikolai Krasovsky was sentenced to death. He was executed on January 31, 1938, and buried in an unknown mass grave at the Butovo firing range near Moscow.
He was numbered among the saints of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia on July 17, 2001, by decision of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church.
