John Khrustalev

Holy Hieromartyr John Khrustalev, a protopresbyter, was in the world Ivan Vasilievich Khrustalev. He was born in 1875 in the village of Bogorodskoe or Pochinki in the Serpukhov district of the Moscow province, in the family of the deacon Vasily Khrustalev. One source notes 20 January 1878 as the day of birth. He graduated from the theological school at Perervino and from the Moscow Seminary in 1898. He married Yulia Andreevna Rumyantseva, a priest's daughter, and they had eight children.

In 1900 he was ordained deacon at the Golovino convent, where he served two years, and then was moved to the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God in the village of Vladykino, near Moscow. In 1915 he was widowed. In 1917, after the death of Protopresbyter John Protopopov, at the request of the parishioners he was ordained priest and appointed rector of the church of Vladykino, and later raised to the rank of protopresbyter. Though the new authorities urged him to give up the ministry and close the church, he continued the services and broke the ban on going to the villagers' houses for rites. When the pressure grew, so as not to put his family in danger, he left home for a small watchman's lodge in the church yard and went on serving. On Sundays the church was full. His family took care of him: his little granddaughter Lida brought him food, his daughters washed his clothes.

One of his daughters had married the house manager Grigory Rumyantsev, a fickle man and a drinker, who boasted that he was a secret collaborator of the NKVD and could put anyone in prison. An enemy of the Church, he had long pressed the authorities to close the church of Vladykino and make a club of it. In 1937 the district NKVD chief summoned him and asked him to sign false testimony against certain people. Grigory agreed to sign against the clergy of the church: his father-⁠in-⁠law the priest, the deacon and the psalmist. But he was asked to sign also against other people, which he refused, proposing other names, to settle scores with them, but the chief said that if he did not sign what was demanded, he would himself be arrested.

On 19 November 1937 Protopresbyter John Khrustalev was arrested on a charge of "counterrevolutionary agitation of a terrorist character against the leadership of the country". The investigator told him that together with Rumyantsev, Stanislavlev and Nekrasov he had carried on agitation among workers and spread counterrevolutionary rumours among believers. The priest answered: "No, I do not admit guilt, I held no counterrevolutionary talk among the faithful." On 5 December 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and the protodeacon Sergius Stanislavlev, the psalmist Nikolai Nekrasov and Grigory Rumyantsev, who had denounced them, to ten years in a camp. He was shot on 10 December 1937 at the Butovo firing range. He was rehabilitated on 2 December 1957. He was numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia by decision of the Holy Synod of 27 March 2007.

The Church commemorates him on 10 December, 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.