John Dunaev

Holy Hieromartyr John Dunaev, a priest, was born in 1885 in the village of Vasilevskoe in the Uglich district of the Yaroslavl province, in the family of the psalmist Alexander Dunaev. He finished four classes of the town school and, in times of persecution, was psalmist at the Annunciation church in the village of Blagoveshchenye, in the Tutaev district. Those who knew him remembered that he was a kind and helpful man: when, in 1927, the deacon of the church was arrested and only women were left in his family, who could not manage the work of the fields, Ivan Alexandrovich ploughed their field himself with his own horse. In 1930 he was ordained priest for the same church, where he served until his arrest.

On 3 December 1937 he was arrested and accused of spreading false and insulting inventions against members of the Soviet government. The charge was supported by three false witnesses, who said that the priest had asserted that the members of the government, Stalin in particular, belonged to a Trotskyite gang of saboteurs together with the enemy of the people Voikov. Father John categorically rejected all the charges, both at the interrogations and at the confrontations with the false witnesses. At the last interrogation, on 10 December, the investigator asked him to name the persons with whom he had good relations. He answered that he had no acquaintances with whom he shared his impressions of life in the country: he lived in seclusion and went nowhere.

On 26 February 1938 the NKVD troika sentenced him to death. The priest John Dunaev was shot on 11 March 1938 and buried in an unknown grave. The Church commemorates him on 11 March, in the new style, on 5 June, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl, and on the movable day of the synaxis of the new martyrs.