John Bogoyavlensky

Holy Hieromartyr John Bogoyavlensky, a priest, was born on 12 February 1892 in the village of Vetrino in the Mologa district of the Yaroslavl province, in the family of the priest Dmitri Bogoyavlensky and Lyudmila. He died of hunger in a camp, on 24 December 1941, aged forty-⁠nine.

Youth

In 1914 he finished the Yaroslavl Seminary, but he did not want to follow his father's path, and wanted to work in the zemstvo institutions. Since he had finished the seminary in the second category, he was not taken, and he worked as a teacher at a parish school. In the autumn of 1916 he entered the law faculty of the Demidov Lyceum in Yaroslavl, where he studied two years, until the lyceum was made a state university. In 1918 famine began, and in 1919 he went to Vesyegonsk, where he taught in a Soviet school history, geography, the history of socialism and political economy. Though he had taken the secular path, he remained a man of deep faith, which he did not hide, and he often went to church. His faith was mocked by colleagues and pupils, so he left the post.

In January 1922 he returned to Vetrino and lived in his parents' house. In April his father died, and the parish was left without a priest, so John decided to take his place. At the beginning of May he married Nina Nikolaevna Semenovskaya, the daughter of a priest from Mologa, and on 9 May he was ordained priest for the village church.

Persecutions

At the end of the 1920s he was set a logging plan beyond his strength, and in March 1930 he was sentenced to a year of corrective labour. His parishioners came to the NKVD building and demanded his release; frightened, the authorities let him go, only driving him out of the region. He went to Bishop Seraphim (Protopopov) of Rybinsk for counsel, who sent him to Bishop Gregory (Kozyrev) of Bezhetsk, who blessed him to take the parish in the village of Ramenye, Tver region. There the faithful loved him as in his own village. In April 1931 he was arrested and sent to forest cutting in the Sonkovo district, where the faithful brought him food. On 27 March 1932 he returned to Ramenye.

On 10 August 1934 an NKVD officer asked the prosecutor's leave to arrest him, and on 15 August Father John was arrested. At the interrogation he said that he was loyal toward all the measures of the authorities and had not shown discontent, though he understood that they lead to the gradual dying out of religion. The investigators questioned a choir director, the church warden Natalia Tomilina, aged ninety-⁠four, and the chairman of the village soviet, but found nothing to catch hold of. On 2 October the NKVD plenipotentiary concluded that the acts did not constitute a crime and ordered his release. At the beginning of 1935 the dean ordered him to keep the register of births, deaths and marriages, which the peasants needed. He kept it until September 1935, when he was arrested again and accused of assuming administrative functions. The faithful found a lawyer, and the court sentenced him to a fine. The lawyer warned him that he would be arrested anyway, since his chief guilt was that he was a priest, and that he could escape only by giving up the service, but the father firmly rejected it and went back to the church. In March 1936 he was interrogated again, and that year the church was taxed with an impossible sum. On 5 February the church "twenty" gathered in the priest's house and decided to collect the money from house to house. The sum was gathered and the tax paid, which brought denunciations.

Martyrdom

More and more merciless persecutions came. On 12 November 1937 Father John was arrested. At the interrogation of 20 November he was charged with systematic counterrevolutionary agitation to disrupt the campaigns on the collective farms, which he denied one by one. He remained firm and refused to slander himself or others. On 25 November the NKVD troika sentenced him to ten years in a camp. He was sent to the Komi Republic, to Sevzheldorlag, to the settlement of Knyazh-⁠Pogost, where he worked from 1938 to 1941. With the war the work remained just as heavy, but food almost stopped. The priest John Bogoyavlensky died of hunger on 24 December 1941.

The Church commemorates him on 24 December, the day of his death, in the new style, and also on 11 February in the Synaxis of the Saints of Komi, and on the movable days of the synaxis of the new martyrs and of the Saints of Tver.