John Borozdin

Holy Hieromartyr John Borozdin, a protopresbyter, was born in 1878 in Mstera, in the Vyazniki district of the Vladimir province, in a family of icon painters. He served in churches of Moscow, was arrested in 1937 and was shot on 27 September 1937 at the Butovo firing range. He was glorified in the year 2000.

The icon painter of Mstera

In Mstera, as early as the second half of the seventeenth century, a men's monastery of the Theophany had been founded, and from 1722 the inhabitants took up icon painting, a craft brought by a Moscow icon painter. The icon painters of Mstera became famous and worked at the restoration of churches and monasteries, even of the cathedrals of the Kremlin. After 1861 they bought out the estate together from the count and in twenty-⁠five years paid the whole sum of 167,200 roubles. The workshops were family ones: Bragin, Klykov, Kutyagin, Borozdin. The last was founded by Peter Kuzmich Borozdin, with seven sons and five daughters, and his icons were valued even by the Old Believers. In his family Ivan Borozdin was born in 1878.

From early childhood this blessed labour was the basis of his religious upbringing. By the age of six, when he entered the parish school, he could prepare his own colours, prime the boards and make outline drawings. At eleven he entered the icon painting school at Mstera, which he finished in 1894 with the title of master icon painter. Like most people of Mstera, the family belonged to the Edinoverie. In 1899 the Edinoverie brotherhood of Mstera sent him to the theological school in Moscow attached to the Edinoverie monastery of All Saints, which he finished with distinction, remaining as psalmist at the monastery. In 1905 he married Irina, daughter of Mikhail Ivanovich Otarin, a well-⁠known missionary priest and preacher from the village of Varmalei. Soon he was ordained deacon at the All Saints monastery, where he served until its closing in 1921.

Service in Moscow

In 1923 Holy Patriarch Tikhon sent Deacon John to the church of the holy unmercenary physicians Cosmas and Damian in the Potters' Quarter in Moscow. It had been known for its outstanding rectors. Until 1919 the rector had been the professor of the Theological Academy, Protopresbyter Vostokov, who preached simply and introduced the common singing of all the faithful. From 1919 the rector was Father Sergius Zakatov, an archaeologist; in 1928, when the authorities announced that the church would be torn down, he fought to defend it and, proving to the commission the historical importance of the church, fell from a beam and died the same year. Father John, by now a priest, was appointed rector. With faith and conviction he resisted the closing, writing many protests and gathering signatures, but in vain: in 1930 the church was closed and soon destroyed. Grieved, he fell ill. Then he was appointed rector of the Edinoverie church of Saint Nicholas at the Rogozhskoe Cemetery and raised to the rank of protopresbyter.

To guard the church from robbers, he moved into it, into a cold small room in the bell tower heated by an iron stove. His sons, Basil and Peter, stayed with him by turns at night. In December 1931, after the vigil, they went to sleep in the room. Around one in the night the psalmist Fyodor, who lived nearby, dreamed that Father John of Kronstadt called him: "Child Fyodor, go, help your priest, he is unwell." His wife Varvara had had the same vision. They ran to the bell tower. Basil managed to open the door and fell, saying only that he had dragged his father out onto the landing and that they had been poisoned by the fumes. The Lord guarded His shepherd. Father John served seven years at the church of Saint Nicholas, preaching at every service.

Martyrdom

In the night of 5 to 6 September 1937 he was arrested in the room in the bell tower. His sons, coming in the morning, found the things overturned and the bed and the pillow bloody. He was imprisoned in Butyrka. The charges were the usual ones. The father admitted that he had a negative attitude to the closing of churches without the consent of the faithful and to the repressions against the clergy, and further that his ideas about Soviet power were formed in the first years of the revolution, because it had worsened the conditions of life of the clergy, he himself being forced since 1928 to live apart from his family. On 14 September the last interrogation took place and the indictment was drawn up, in which he was charged with "spreading false rumours of an alleged persecution of religion in the USSR". On 26 September the NKVD troika condemned him to death, and on the following day, 27 September 1937, Protopresbyter John Borozdin was shot and buried in an unknown common grave at Butovo. He was numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia at the jubilee Council of Bishops in August 2000.

The Church commemorates him on 28 September, in the new style, and on the movable days of the synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and of the Saints of Moscow.