John Demidov

Holy Martyr John Demidov, a peasant, in the world Ivan Pankratievich Demidov, was born on 18 April 1869 in the village of Andreevo in the Bogorodsk district of the Moscow province, in a family of manufacturers. He is the father of Holy Martyr John Ivanovich Demidov. At the end of the 1900s, in the division of the inheritance, the silk factory went to his brother, and John worked at home at winding silk. He was a deeply believing man, and his son and daughter became, in Soviet times, church wardens. In 1918 he was a member of the board of the Novinskaya volost. At that time a peasant anti-⁠Bolshevik uprising broke out in the village of Novozagarye, suppressed by a Cheka detachment, and he was arrested as a member of the board, and for protesting the removal of an icon from the board's building he spent 18 days in prison.

In 1933 he was arrested "for speculation in silk". In August 1937 his son Ivan, his daughter and his son-⁠in-⁠law were arrested. On 9 September he was arrested too, on the charge of being "against the organization of the collective farms", and imprisoned at Noginsk. At the interrogation he said that he regarded collectivization as godlessness and joining a collective farm as a sin. On 11 November 1937 the special troika of the UNKVD of the Moscow region sentenced him to eight years in a camp. He served the sentence in the Taishet camp, where he fell asleep on 20 December 1937 from the hardships of imprisonment, and was buried in an unknown grave. His name was entered into the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia by decision of the Holy Synod of 11 April 2006.

The Church commemorates him on 20 December, in the new style, and on the movable days of the synaxis of the new martyrs and of the Saints of Moscow.