Jacob Blatov

Holy Martyr Jacob Blatov (1880-1937) was a peasant of the village of Staroe, Moscow province, who before the revolution had a tailoring workshop in Moscow. After 1917 he returned to the village and took an active part in the life of the church: he was treasurer, then chairman of the parish council of the church. He was arrested in September 1937 for counter-⁠revolutionary activity and shot on 13 November 1937 at the Butovo firing range.

He was born in 1880 in the village of Staroe in the Kolomna district of Moscow province, in the family of the peasant Stepan Blatov. He finished the parish school and served in the army as a private. Until 1914 he kept with his father a tailoring workshop in Moscow, which served the cadet corps in Lefortovo; in the workshop there worked from 7 to 15 masters and from 5 to 8 apprentice boys. In the village the Blatovs had a farm worked by seasonal and hired workers, and Jacob Stepanovich came from time to time from Moscow to pay them and to settle hirings for the winter season. After the revolution he went on working for a time in the workshop, but in 1925 and 1926, giving the workshop to his children, he moved to the village.

As an active parishioner, he helped in arranging the feasts, the moliebens and processions, in buying candles and in baking prosphora. He was a member of the parish council and treasurer of the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God, and from 1934 until his arrest chairman of the council.

He was arrested on 15 September 1937 and imprisoned in the jail at Kashira. At the interrogation he said: I did no counter-⁠revolutionary activity among the collective farmers. True, I am a free-⁠thinking man and, considering that there is freedom of speech, I sometimes expressed my thoughts on some measures of Soviet power. He recounted that when at a meeting the question of labour discipline arose, he said: In the old days people worked for the landlord only three days, and now they make us work all year round. And since the order to build grain driers comes from the leaders of the state and the party, Comrades Stalin and Molotov, and the collective farm has no iron, we must turn to them to recommend where to get it; they lead the country and know where. And when the district representative looked at him in surprise, he added: What is surprising? People used to go to the tsar, why should we not go to them? He did not admit guilt. The indictment was drawn up on the testimony of false witnesses, and on 11 November 1937 he was condemned to death.

Jacob Stepanovich Blatov was shot on 13 November 1937 and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo firing range near Moscow. He is commemorated on 13 November, on 29 May, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo, and on 5 September, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow (new style, the last two being movable days).