New Martyr Basil Shikalov

Basil Shikalov (Russian: Vasily Yakovlevich Shikalov) was a Russian layman martyred during the Soviet persecution of the Church in 1937. By tradition he was born on April 12, 1875, in the village of Bolshaya Dubrovna, in the Valdai district of Novgorod province, and he served as the church warden (starosta) of the Church of the Ascension in the village of Voznesenye, in the Bologoye district of the Kalinin (Tver) region.

Like many faithful of his generation, Shikalov suffered repeated pressure from the Soviet state. In the late 1920s he was arrested for failing to meet a state agricultural-procurement quota and was sentenced to five years in a corrective-labor camp. He returned to his native region in early 1937, and his earlier case was reviewed and dismissed, but the reprieve was brief.

On September 2, 1937, officers of the NKVD arrested Shikalov together with the priest Alexius (Uspensky), accusing the two of joint counter-revolutionary activity — a charge that, in substance, amounted to their continued practice of the Orthodox faith. According to the synaxarion, he was put to death later that month. He is numbered among the Synaxis of New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, glorified at the Jubilee Bishops' Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in August 2000, and is commemorated on September 9.