Saint Nicholas was born on April 5, 1884, in the village of Oselok, Nizhny Novgorod province, in the family of priest Vladimir Ryurikov. In 1905, he graduated from the Nizhny Novgorod Theological Seminary and became a law teacher at a church-parish school. In 1910, he was ordained as a priest, served in the Trinity Cathedral in the city of Gorbatov, and became the head of the church-parish school. Since 1927, due to the godless persecutions, he was arrested based on the denunciations of colleagues and sentenced for 'spreading counter-revolutionary rumors.' After three years of exile in Siberia, he settled in the city of Kozmodemyansk, where he served in the church of the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God. In 1937, he was arrested again and sentenced to ten years of imprisonment in a corrective labor camp. He died on June 18, 1943, in the Pezmog camp hospital and was buried in an unmarked grave.
