New Hieromartyr Stephen Ermolin

Stephen Ermolin (Russian: Stefan Vasilievich Ermolin) was a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church in the region of Komi who was shot in 1937 during the Soviet persecution of the Church. He is numbered among the Synaxis of New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and is commemorated on September 2 (old calendar; September 15 on the new calendar).

By the accounts preserved in his life, he was born on May 22, 1891, in the village of Chasovo in the Yarensk district of Vologda province — a territory now within the Syktyvdinsky district of the Republic of Komi — into a peasant family. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1926. In the mid-1930s he served at the Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in Nizhny Konets, in Syktyvkar, having earlier been attached to the Holy Trinity Cathedral in the town formerly called Ust-Sysolsk.

In 1936, on the basis of an anonymous denunciation, he was charged by the NKVD with 'speculation in church valuables,' but he was acquitted of the accusation. He is recorded as having kept up warm relations with clergy exiled to the region, among them Bishop German (Herman) Ryashentsev of Vyazniki. In 1937 he was arrested again at Syktyvkar and included in a fabricated case known as the 'Sacred Brotherhood,' which implicated a group of thirteen people on charges of 'counter-revolutionary activity.' Sentenced to death, he was shot on September 15, 1937, at Syktyvkar.

He was rehabilitated in 1989 by the authorities of the Komi ASSR as a victim of the repressions of 1937, and was glorified for general veneration in 2001 by decree of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. He is also commemorated among the Synaxis of Komi Saints.