John Demidov

Holy Martyr John Demidov, a church warden, in the world Ivan Ivanovich Demidov, was born on 27 September 1907 in the village of Andreevo, Zaponorye volost, Bogorodsk district, Moscow province (now the Orekhovo-⁠Zuevo district), in the family of the rich peasant Ivan Pankratievich Demidov. His uncle, Matvei, owned a small silk-⁠twisting factory with some fifty workers. The family was uncommonly pious: the son and the daughter became, in the hardest time for the Russian Church, wardens of churches, the daughter of the church of the Holy Trinity in Averkievo, and the son Ivan of the church of the Protection in Zaponorye. He finished the village school and helped his father on the farm.

In 1929 he was called into the army, to an artillery regiment in Morshansk. He did not hide his faith, and the political officers tried to make him give it up. He wrote to his father: "Dear father, every day the political officer sits with me and persuades me to take off my cross. But I will not abandon your blessing. I will bear everything. The holy fathers bore all kinds of torments, and I will bear them too, and I will not betray the Orthodox faith." After the army he worked with his father on the farm. In 1933, at the request of the peasants, he agreed to be warden of the church of the Protection in Zaponorye. The same year he was arrested and sentenced to four months of corrective labour for failing, as an individual farmer, the agricultural obligations to the state. In 1935 he received another six months, for unpaid taxes. Then he worked on the building of a school in Pavlovsky Posad, and in 1937 at a sawmill in Dresna. Wherever he worked, he did not forget that he was Orthodox and a church warden and was always concerned that services should be held in the church of Zaponorye. After the church was left without a permanent priest, he began to bring a priest from the town, who performed rites in the homes of the parishioners. This was the cause of the arrest.

In the arrest certificate the NKVD called him the initiator of religious propaganda in the village, who organized services in the courtyards of the collective farmers, and charged him with saying: "The collective farms are against God, I will never enter them, because I am a believer and I will not sell the Orthodox faith." Witnesses said that at Pascha of 1937 he had brought a priest to the villages of Andreevo and Sumino, with forged documents of the village council. He was arrested in his sister's house in Dresna on 22 August 1937 and imprisoned at Noginsk. He admitted that he had been church warden since 1933, at the request of the faithful. He did not admit guilt of counterrevolutionary songs with the accordion nor of assignments received from his sister. On 11 October 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced him to ten years in a camp, and he was sent to the settlement of Kuldur in the Khabarovsk Krai, to the Bureya railway camp of the NKVD. In 1939 he asked for a review, but on 20 September received a negative answer.

In the camp he hid from no one that he was a believer and had been a church warden, and when asked about his faith and hope, he answered without embarrassment, relying on the words of Holy Scripture. The camp's operative officers began to look for a reason for a new case. In April 1942 they questioned the prisoners who worked with him, seeking false testimony, and they said that he had held anti-⁠Soviet conversations, that he said he was condemned for religious convictions and that he had been a church warden. All the prisoners of the brigade knew that he was a believer, and in their presence he sang church hymns and prayed. On 1 May 1942 he was arrested and put in the camp isolation cell. He did not admit guilt, rejected the false testimony and refused to sign the records of the confrontations. On 2 November 1942, in a closed session, the regional court of the Jewish Autonomous Region sentenced him to ten years in a camp and five years of loss of rights after serving it.

The church warden Ivan Ivanovich Demidov died on 13 July 1944 in the central hospital of the camp at the station of Izvestkovaya and was buried the next day in an unknown grave in the camp cemetery. The Church commemorates him on 13 July, in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Birobidzhan diocese, and on the movable day of the synaxis of the new martyrs and of the Saints of Moscow, in the new style.