John Fryazinov

Holy Hieromartyr John Fryazinov, a priest, was born on 23 April 1882 in the village of Silvachevo in the Bronnitsy district of the Moscow province, in the family of the priest Vasily Fryazinov. After the first year at the Bethany Seminary, he became a teacher. In 1913 he was ordained deacon at the Dormition church in the village of Shubino, in 1919 he was moved to the church of Saint George in Silvachevo, and in 1924 he was ordained priest for the same church. The parishioners loved him for his honest service, because he answered readily to any request and never asked payment from the poor who came to have their children baptized.

At the end of the 1930s the church in the village was closed and the services ceased, but Father John went on shepherding his parishioners and performed all the Mysteries and rites: he baptized, confessed, gave communion, performed Holy Unction and buried the dead. When in the second half of 1937 the wave of arrests came, his brother, also a priest, begged him to give up his ministry and hide, at least for the sake of the children, but the father refused. In 1937 he received the pectoral cross.

On 21 January 1938 the priest Vasily Krestov, questioned by the NKVD, said that Fryazinov systematically carried on counterrevolutionary agitation and that at the beginning of January he had said that under the tsar the people lived much better, that now, though there is money, there is nothing, and that the time is coming when they will go to strangle all the Communist rulers. On this basis the arrest certificate was drawn up on 25 January. The father was arrested in the night of 26 January and imprisoned in Taganka, in Moscow. At the interrogation of 31 January he denied having spread rumours about war and the defeat of the USSR, having praised fascism, having spoken against the loan (if he spoke, it was only against the sum asked being too large, and he asked for a smaller one), and having spoken of repressions against Communists or praised the old order. He did not admit guilt.

On 8 February the investigation ended, on 11 February the NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and the priest John Fryazinov was shot on 22 February 1938 and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo firing range. After his execution the church in the village was ravaged and began to fall into ruin; it was turned into a cowshed, which soon burned.

The Church commemorates him on 22 February, the day of his death, in the new style, and on the movable days of the synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and of the Saints of Moscow.