John Chernov

Holy Martyr John Chernov, a psalmist, was born in 1880 in the village of Alekseevka in the Rozhdestvenskaya volost, Borovsk district, Kaluga province (now the Naro-⁠Fominsk district), in the family of the peasant Alexei Chernov. After the village school he worked the land like his father. When the unbelievers came to power and the farms were collectivized, Ivan Alexeevich left the village and took a job at a factory in Naro-⁠Fominsk, but when the management learned that he was psalmist at the church of Saints Peter and Paul, he was dismissed and returned to the village.

In 1938 the chairman of the village council wrote for the NKVD an arrest certificate, charging him that his daughter had been in a monastery and that he himself had been removed from work on the collective farm as a religious element. All the inhabitants of Alekseevka were parishioners of the church of the Entry into the Temple in the neighbouring village of Kotovo, but toward the end of the 1930s the priests who served there were arrested, and Ivan Alexeevich pressed for the church to receive a priest and for the services to be resumed. He wrote a letter and went from house to house to gather signatures for the opening of the church: the villagers want a priest, so that rites and services can be held, and ask the authorities to give the church keys to a group of believers and their representative, Ivan Alexeevich Chernov.

On the day of the elections to the Supreme Soviet, 12 December 1937, he put into the ballot box, together with his ballot, a letter to the candidate of the district. He wrote that the citizens considered themselves free under Stalin's constitution and could voice their needs as people who believe in God and the Holy Church; they asked him to help them, the old men and women, to pray to God for the whole world and for him, and to go to church, where they feel the joy of the soul. They rejoiced in the constitution which, in article 124, speaks of the freedom of religious services, dearer to them than anything. "The young should make merry and sing, but we, the old, should go to the house of God, receive communion and bury the departed. Every power is from God. The voice of the people is the voice of God."

The letter reached the NKVD at once, which found it easy to learn who wrote it. Some inhabitants of Alekseevka were questioned, and said that in March 1938 he had gone through the village gathering signatures for the opening of the church at Kotovo and had spoken of the need of faith in God. He was said to have told the collective farmers: "See, this year is a year of drought, we should pray to God, otherwise nothing will grow and we will die of hunger. Before, we were our own masters, now whatever we want to do we must ask leave. See what the accursed Communists have done, they torment us, they have closed the churches, but their end will come and then we shall live well." On 21 June 1938 an NKVD officer wrote the arrest certificate, charging him with gathering signatures for the opening of the church. On 28 June he was arrested and imprisoned in Butyrka in Moscow.

The investigator asked him whether on election day he had written a letter to the deputy. He answered that he had, of religious content, and that he had put it in the urn in an envelope together with the ballot. He did not admit guilt of counterrevolutionary activity and rejected the testimony of the false witnesses. The investigation ended on 13 August, and on 19 September 1938 the Special Council of the NKVD sentenced him to five years in a camp. He was sent to a White Sea and Baltic camp, where he arrived on 8 November. Ivan Alexeevich Chernov died of hunger in the infirmary of camp point no. 14 at Semenovo, in the Pudozh district of Karelia, on 10 April 1939, and was buried in the cemetery a kilometre from the camp, in an unknown grave.

The Church commemorates him on 10 April, in the new style, on 3 June in the Synaxis of the Saints of Karelia, on 31 July in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kaluga, and on the movable days of the synaxis of the new martyrs, of the Saints of Moscow and of the New Martyrs of Karelia.