John Kolesnikov

Holy Martyr John Kolesnikov, a layman, in the world Ivan Mikhailovich Kolesnikov, was born in 1877 in the village of Krylatka, Glazovo volost, Mozhaisk district, Moscow province, in the family of the peasant Mikhail Kolesnikov. In 1910 he opened a wheel workshop, in which he worked with his sons, with no hired workers; the workshop lasted until 1930.

From his youth he had been raised in piety and sang in the choir at the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God in the village of Porechye. In 1934 he was elected a member of the church council and chairman of the audit commission. In 1937 the priest of Porechye was arrested and the parishioners were left without services. The parish decided to send Ivan Mikhailovich to Moscow, to the Patriarchate, to ask for a priest. He returned with a new priest and the services began again, to the satisfaction of all the faithful. But not for long.

On 5 February 1938 the priest and the deacon were arrested, and on 1 April Ivan Mikhailovich and the nuns who helped at the church. He was imprisoned at Mozhaisk and interrogated the same day. Two false witnesses denounced him: one was always used as a false witness, the other had been persuaded by the investigator. The investigator told him that the witnesses had established that he belonged to a church group and spread slander against the party and the government. He answered: "I was not in a church group and I spread no counterrevolutionary slander." At the confrontation with the false witnesses he said that one of them he had not met in order to talk with him, and that the other charged him unjustly, and he rejected all that he said.

On 7 June 1938 the NKVD troika sentenced him to ten years in a camp and he was sent to Magadan. On 4 April 1939 he was moved to a camp in the Kemerovo region. Not agreeing with the sentence, he sent the authorities a complaint in which he wrote that he had been wrongly condemned on slander. The case was reviewed, and in January 1940 the prosecutor proposed closing it for insufficient proof. On 8 May 1940 the NKVD Directorate of the Moscow region asked the Special Council to reduce the sentence from ten to three years, but nothing came of the request.

Ivan Mikhailovich Kolesnikov died on 17 April 1943 at camp point no. 2 of the Taiga section of Siblag, in the Kemerovo region, and was buried in the camp cemetery, in grave number E-31. The Church commemorates him on 17 April, the day of his death, in the new style, on 29 August (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kuzbass, and on the movable days of the synaxis of the new martyrs and of the Saints of Moscow.