Nicholas Kandaurov (Nikolai Andreyevich Kandaurov, 1880–1938) was a Russian Orthodox archpriest who was executed during the Soviet persecution of the Church and is numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. He is commemorated on February 17, the date of his death, together with a group of clergy who suffered in 1938.
By the surviving accounts, he was born on January 21, 1880 in the Cossack settlement of Barsukovskaya in the Kuban region, into the family of a military officer named Andrei Kandaurov. Sources relate that his father's relations were chiefly soldiers and officers, while many of his mother's ancestors had been priests. He was ordained to the priesthood and, after an earlier period of imprisonment, was appointed rector of the Church of Saint George in the village of Vysochert in the Smolensk region and was raised to the rank of archpriest (protopriest).
In the renewed wave of repression of the late 1930s he was arrested in Moscow. According to the accounts, on January 18, 1938 he served the all-night vigil for the feast of the Theophany, and was arrested that same night and confined in the Taganka prison. He was accused of anti-Soviet agitation and of spreading counter-revolutionary rumors, charges to which he did not confess. On February 2, 1938 an NKVD troika sentenced him to death.
Nicholas Kandaurov was shot on February 17, 1938 and buried in a common grave at the Butovo firing range near Moscow, a site where large numbers of clergy and laity were executed in those years. He was later glorified by the Russian Orthodox Church and is counted among the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo, and the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.
