Nine New Hieromartyr Priests of 1937

The Nine New Hieromartyr Priests of 1937 are commemorated together as a group of priests put to death during the Soviet persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1937. Their shared commemoration falls on September 2, and they are numbered among the Synaxis of New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, the broad company of hierarchs, clergy, monastics, and laypeople who suffered for the faith under the Soviet regime.

The September 2 commemoration names them as the Hieromartyrs Ephemius Goryachev, John Melnichenko, John Smolichev, Vladimir Morinsky, Victor Basov, Basil Zelensky, Theodotus Shatokhin, Peter Novoselsky, and Stephen Yaroshevich, all of whom served as priests. The title hieromartyr marks them as ordained clergy who died as martyrs.

The year 1937 marked the deadliest phase of the persecution for the Russian clergy. During the Great Purge of 1937 and 1938, tens of thousands of priests were arrested, frequently on fabricated charges, and executed by firing squad; church and scholarly estimates place the number of clergy repressed in 1937 alone well into the tens of thousands, with a large proportion of them put to death. Many of those killed were shot in groups and buried anonymously, their names recovered only later from opened archives. These nine priests are remembered as one such group.

The Russian Orthodox Church established the collective commemoration of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia through glorifications that began in the 1990s and culminated in the great general canonization at the Jubilee Bishops' Council of 2000. The Synaxis names more than seventeen hundred saints, while acknowledging many others who are 'known to God' but not recorded by name. Groups of clergy martyred together, such as these nine priests, are commemorated on the dates associated with their suffering.