Venerable Nikon the Confessor of Optina (born Nicholas Belyaev, September 26, 1888) was a hieromonk of the Optina hermitage and the last of its elders to continue the tradition of eldership as the monastery was suppressed under Soviet rule. He is numbered among the Optina Elders and is commemorated as a confessor of the faith, having died in northern exile in 1931. His feast is kept on June 25.
Nicholas was born into a Moscow merchant family. With their mother's blessing, he and his brother John traveled to Optina on February 24, 1907 to seek entrance to the monastery, and were received into the skete on December 9 of that year. In October 1908 Nicholas was assigned as secretary to the superior of the skete, Elder Barsanuphius, an obedience that placed him in close daily contact with his spiritual father and shaped his formation as a monk.
He was tonsured into the Lesser Schema on May 24, 1915, receiving the name Nikon, and was ordained deacon on April 30, 1916 and priest on November 3, 1917. As the persecution of the Church intensified, he was arrested on September 18, 1919 simply for being a monk, and later released. After Optina was closed, he continued to serve and to receive those who came to him for counsel, until he was arrested again in 1927 and sent to a labor camp, and afterward exiled to the far north.
In exile in the Archangelsk region he contracted tuberculosis. Worn down by poverty and sickness, which he bore with patient trust in God, he reposed on June 25, 1931. The Russian Orthodox Church authorized local veneration of the Optina Elders in 1996 and glorified them for general veneration on August 7, 2000.
