Priest Mikhail Nakariakov was born in 1866 and served at the Transfiguration Church in the village of Usolye, near Solikamsk. Father Mikhail was the third priest in the church; the parishioners loved him more than the others, especially for his compassion and modesty. If they needed anything, they always asked Father Mikhail. In addition to church services, he taught the Law of God at the parish school, teaching with love and reverence for the subject. When donations were collected at the church for gifts for children from poor families, the collectors approached Father Mikhail first, knowing he would give the most, and that after him, others would be embarrassed to donate less. The stingy rector of the church, although displeased with Father Mikhail's generosity, gave just as much himself. At Easter, Father Mikhail visited the homes of the poor and distributed money, sometimes saying, "This is for shoes," or "This is for gifts for the children."
In June 1918, after the arrest of Archbishop Andronik, the priests of the Perm Diocese ceased serving. This was the bishop's order, issued before the arrest: if the authorities arrested any of the clergy, all were to cease serving until released; and the people were to be told to demand the priest's release. The priests ceased serving. Father Mikhail, along with everyone else, ceased serving. The authorities, fearing public outrage, began summoning the priests to the Cheka to force them to perform religious rites. Father Mikhail was also summoned. In response to the threats, he said:
"I swore an oath before the cross at my ordination to obey my bishop. And until he gives the order—to marry or perform the funeral—I will not serve. You release him, and then I will perform the rites."
A few days later, Father Mikhail was arrested and sent to the Solikamsk prison.
On the eve of St. Elijah's Day, Bishop Theophan (Ilmensky) asked the parishioners during the all-night vigil to pray fervently for Father Mikhail, as he was facing execution. The entire congregation prayed for him, many wept, and after the vigil, the parishioners elected representatives to negotiate with the authorities. They offered to release Father Mikhail on bail; they refused: "He is too popular, he has gathered a crowd around him, and too many obey him." Meanwhile, the decision was made to kill him, but to avoid public outrage, it was announced that Priest Mikhail Nakariakov would be sent to forced labor in Cherdyn. Some of the guards were local peasants; they knew Father Mikhail well and uncovered the deception. At that time, the priest was in prison in Usolka.
On August 3rd, three prisoners were taken from here to be shot – a doctor, an officer, and Father Mikhail. Two guards were assigned to each prisoner; helping the priest onto the cart, they spoke to him in a low voice:
"Father, we're taking you to be shot, and we feel sorry for you. We all remember you, you taught us, you helped our families. We can't kill you. We'll shoot in the air, and you fall, or we'll shoot you, and we don't want that."
“No, do what your superiors ordered you to do with me,” said the priest.
They arrived at the execution site in the forest. The doctor and the officer were immediately shot: the guards led Father Mikhail deeper into the forest and began shooting over his head. The priest stood facing the Red Army soldiers, once his parishioners, and remained silent. Then one of the guards approached Father Mikhail and hit him with the butt of his rifle so hard that the priest lost consciousness. When he came to, he saw that it was getting dark and shadows were flickering ahead. He walked straight toward them and came upon the corpses of the doctor and the officer, and nearby, the Red Army soldiers were getting into a cart. The priest began to read the prayer for the dying.
“The priest is still alive,” said one of them, and fired several shots at random in the darkness.
The bullets hit the priest in the right arm, left leg, and chest. The next day, Red Army soldiers were sent to bury the bodies. They arrived and saw Father Mikhail sitting on a tree stump.
"Father, are you really alive? How are we supposed to bury you alive? Oh well, maybe it'll be alright, we'll take you away from here."
They dug a grave, covered the bodies of the executed with earth, loaded Father Mikhail onto a cart, and drove away. But transporting a priest, sentenced to death but not executed, bleeding profusely, through villages was dangerous, and, wanting to get rid of him quickly, the Red Army soldiers asked:
- Father, tell me where to hide you?
“Don’t hide me,” he answered calmly.
Meanwhile, they entered the village and began asking the villagers who would shelter the priest. But the horror of the Bolshevik punitive detachments was so great that none of the villagers would dare to provide shelter for the wounded man. They drove to the parish priest's house, but he, seeing the Red Army soldiers and the wounded priest from afar, waved his arms, motioning for them to pass quickly. The guards begged for one of the villagers to at least bandage the wounds. But whether the people they encountered were hard-hearted, unable to shake off the terror the Bolsheviks were spreading everywhere, or unbelieving, or perhaps they didn't believe in the sincerity of the Red Army soldiers, no one agreed to provide the priest with shelter or bandage his wounds. They continued on. In a neighboring village, a woman gave Father Mikhail some fresh milk to drink but refused to give him shelter, so the guards drove him on, and thus they brought him back to prison. He was placed in a cell with the white officer Ponomarev, and the priest told him everything that had happened to him, and added:
– Know that if they take me away and say I’m going to work, it means they’ll take me to be shot.
Indeed, the next day, the prison guards told Father Mikhail and the officer to get ready for work. Remembering the priest's words, Ponomarev braced himself for the worst. They were led out into the yard. One of the guards struck the priest lightly on the head with a rifle butt, the second hit him on the other side, and so they took turns beating him until he died.
Preoccupied with the murder of Father Mikhail, the executioners forgot about the officer. Meanwhile, he climbed over the fence, jumped into the river, and hid behind a bridge pile. Upon discovering his absence, the guards rushed to search for him, but their search was fruitless. Ponomarev saw the Red Army soldiers drag the priest's body to the riverbank, tie a large stone to it, swing it, and throw it into the water.
The next day, women came to the riverbank to rinse laundry. In the middle of the river, his arms outstretched, a cross on his chest, lay the priest, tortured the day before. The women raised a cry, people came running from all directions, and news quickly reached the Cheka. A horse was brought to the river, and Red Army soldiers fished the priest's body out of the water, placed it on a cart, and drove it out of the city. The miracle was obvious, and a crowd of people followed the slowly moving cart. The Red Army soldiers tried to drive the crowd away, sometimes with curses, sometimes with threats, but it was no use, and they began firing over their heads, but the people continued to march. They fired into the crowd, wounding some, and only then did they stop the crowd.
Father Mikhail's wife arrived home in Usolye in mourning; parishioners began visiting her and asking:
– Dear mother, where is our father? Where is our breadwinner? What happened to him?
She told them everything in detail. A few days later, authorities warned her: if you talk about your husband, you'll end up there too.
Bishop Feofan served the all-night vigil for Father Mikhail, commemorating him at the service as a holy martyr, "for whom not only do we pray," the bishop said, "but he also prays for us before God." After the vigil, he called Father Mikhail's son, Nikolai, who served as a deacon at Trinity Church in Perm, and said:
"In memory of your martyred father, you will be ordained a priest. Follow in your father's footsteps."
After his ordination, Father Nikolai served in the village of Koltsovo. He often traveled to Perm on church business, where his mother and sisters had moved. During one of these trips, the village of Koltsovo was captured by the Red Army.
"Where's the priest? Did he run off with the Whites?" they asked the parishioners.
“No, he went to Perm on church business,” the parishioners tried to convince them.
"No, he ran away!" the Red Army soldiers insisted.
Seeing that the Bolsheviks were determined to arrest the priest, the parishioners sent a trusted confidant to Perm to warn Father Nikolai not to return to the village, as the Reds were planning to shoot him and his house had already been looted.
For Father Nikolai, this news was a great shock. In the morning, he went to church and, standing among the people, prayed for a long time, tearfully. After the service, a nun approached him and asked:
- Father, why are you crying?
He was twenty-four years old then, he looked younger than his years, and she found it strange what the young priest could cry about so bitterly.
"How can I not cry? I came to Perm on church business and then I found out that my house in the village had been taken away, my property had been plundered, and they were going to shoot me."
The nun invited Father Nikolai to accompany her to the Bakharevsky Monastery, which was without a priest at the time. He agreed. The monastery's abbess, Mother Glafira, found an apartment for him and his family, gathered necessary clothing, and found furnishings. Father Nikolai liked the place, and he began serving.
During the Dormition Fast of 1919, a priest was traveling from Perm to a monastery, passing through a forest. There, two Red Army soldiers came out to meet him.
"Ah, priest, get out of the cart," they stopped him. "We're going to shoot you now."
Father Nikolai walked out silently, they stood opposite each other, raised their rifles to shoot, and one of the Red Army soldiers said:
- No, get on the cart, go, we don’t need you.
Father Nikolai silently climbed into the cart and set off. The shock was so severe, however, that upon arriving at the monastery, he fell gravely ill. The illness progressed rapidly, accompanied by severe headaches. He died on the third day after his arrival.
After Father Mikhail's martyrdom, the authorities persecuted his family for a long time, depriving them of food stamps and preventing the children from attending school. But through the martyr's prayers, the family lived comfortably. The Lord never abandoned them. Sometimes one of the children or their mother would leave the house in the morning, and on the doorstep would be a bag of food, dusted with snow, with a note.
Some parishioners remembered Father Mikhail as a martyr and turned to him in their prayers. One of the students at the parish school where Father Mikhail taught became a priest. He was arrested during the persecutions, and while imprisoned, seeing death approaching, he began to fervently pray to the martyr that the Lord would grant him the grace to survive his imprisonment and be released. And through the prayers of the holy martyr Mikhail, the Lord granted his request: he lived to the end of his sentence and served in the church for many years afterward.
Father Mikhail's wife's brother, Priest Pavel Konyukhov, served at Trinity Church after the death of his father, Archpriest Vasily. He founded a school at the church for children from poor families who could not send their children to school. Among other teachers, Father Pavel himself and his wife, Elizaveta, taught the children needlework and church singing. Local residents called it Father Pavel's School. Its education was such that graduates could work as teachers. After the Revolution, the school was closed, but the church continued to serve.
Father Pavel was arrested in 1935. The formal pretext for his arrest was a denunciation that the priest had commemorated the murdered Emperor Nicholas II and his wife during the Liturgy. Arrested along with Father Pavel were the priests Alexei Drozdov, Pyotr Kozelsky, and Feodor Dolgikh, as well as the laymen Pankratov and Laptev. All died in custody. One of Father Pavel's sisters was married to the priest Sergei Bazhenov, who served near Yekaterinburg and was tortured to death by the Bolsheviks there.