New Martyr Paul Elkyn

Paul Elkyn (Pavel Nikolaevich Yelkin) was a layman of the Komi region in northern Russia, numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church who suffered in the Soviet persecutions. Sources record that he was born on June 23, 1876 in the village of Shoshka and later lived in the settlement of Kochpon, near Syktyvkar, where he worked at the local lumber mill. He was canonized by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2002.

His path to martyrdom was unusual. In his earlier life he had been an active participant in the establishment of Soviet power in the Komi region and a member of the Communist Party. According to the accounts of his life, he came to Christian faith only in the 1930s, through contact with clergy exiled to the region and, in particular, through the exiled bishop German (Ryashentsev). His wife, who had served as elder of the church at Kochpon, is said to have been instrumental in his conversion, introducing her husband to the exiled bishop.

He was arrested on February 24, 1937 and tried in connection with the same case as Bishop German, which centered on an alleged counter-revolutionary church group that the authorities labeled the 'Sacred Brotherhood.' Convicted under the standard political article of the Soviet criminal code and sentenced to death, he was executed on September 15, 1937. He is commemorated on September 2 among the assembled New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia and within the Synaxis of the Saints of Komi.