John Lebedev

Holy Hieromartyr John Lebedev, a protopresbyter, was born on 9 October 1869 in the village of Vorontsovo, Yegoryevsk district, Ryazan province, in the family of the psalmist Fyodor Lebedev. After graduating from the Ryazan Seminary in 1892, he was appointed catechist at the church school in Pazhino. In 1896 he married Nadezhda, daughter of the former rector of the church of the Nativity in the village of Popovichi (later Pronyukhlovo), the priest Martin Sampsonovich Lipyagov, and soon Bishop Polyeuct of Mikhailov ordained him priest for that church.

The church in the village had existed since the sixteenth century. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the building was very old. According to tradition, the peasants found a cross in a wonderful way, which was taken as a command to renew the church. In 1839 a large stone church of the Nativity was consecrated, with a side chapel of Saint Nicholas. The cross that had been found, a wonderworking one, was kept on the holy table, and among the peasants a pious custom took root of serving molebens to the Life-⁠giving Cross. Father John taught the Law of God at the parish school in Pronyukhlovo and at the zemstvo schools at Sekirino and Mendyukino. In 1910 the clergy of Zaraysk elected him a member of the board of the Zaraysk theological school. For his long and worthy service he was raised to the rank of protopresbyter. When the Bolsheviks came to power and the persecution began, foreseeing the hardships, he often told his spiritual children: "Only do not renounce."

The godless authorities laid a heavy tax on him, and the community had no money. So that the church should not be closed, the father went round the village himself to collect gifts from the faithful to pay it. On 31 December 1929 the assistant prosecutor of the Kolomna district proposed opening a criminal case "for collecting money from citizens". Witnesses confirmed the collection, and false witnesses appeared who charged him with anti-⁠Soviet agitation. The priest Seleznev, called as a witness, said: "Among the reactionary monarchist clergy I count my colleague, the priest Lebedev, arrested in my case, a man with a strong household, close to Bishop Boris of Ryazan, who long and obstinately fought Soviet power, and Lebedev was his follower." Protopresbyter John Lebedev was arrested with other priests of the Zaraysk district and imprisoned at Kolomna. At the interrogation of 4 January 1930 he said that he was on friendly terms with the dean, Protopresbyter Peter Uspensky, as a neighbour, that he had sent him no reports on his parish since the day of the revolution, and that he had read in his house the circulars of the late Bishop Boris (Sokolov), in which he found nothing anti-⁠Soviet. On 3 February 1930 the OGPU troika sentenced him to three years of exile in the Northern Region.

After the exile he served again in Pronyukhlovo. On 30 November 1933 he was appointed to fulfil the priestly duties also at the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God in the village of Radushino, where his friend Protopresbyter Peter Uspensky had served earlier. So he shepherded two churches. On the eve of Christmas in December 1936 he asked the chairman of the village council for permission to serve molebens in the houses of the collective farmers, at the request of the faithful. The chairman refused, citing cases of epidemic illness in the area. In August 1937 the chairman testified to the NKVD investigator that the priest had said to him: "Soviet laws are issued to darken the minds of the people; the law speaks of freedom of faith, but in reality it is not so. The people demand that I go with molebens to the houses of the Orthodox. I will go with molebens as before. Against the people you are powerless, the people goes and will go after us. You hold only by violence, which will have an end." The priest did go with molebens round the houses and said: "I, as a pastor, do my duty to you honestly, in spite of any opposition and punishment of the authorities; we are sure that this power of the antichrist will come to an end."

In the midst of the persecution, on 20 August 1937, Protopresbyter John Lebedev was arrested and imprisoned at Kolomna. The investigator asked him whether he had carried on counterrevolutionary agitation on his visits. He answered that he had told the collective farmers that work on the farm is hard, since they work without a break, and he denied that he had called them to organize against the authorities. On 29 August he was interrogated in a Moscow prison. He said that he had returned from exile in 1933, after serving the whole sentence, that he did not admit guilt, and that he had gone to the chairman for permission to serve molebens at Christmas, and when the chairman refused, he had answered nothing. On 8 September 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced him to death. Protopresbyter John Lebedev was shot on 9 September 1937 at the Butovo firing range and buried in an unknown common grave.

After his arrest, the church in the village was closed. When people learned of it, they took home the icons they could. The parishioner Pelagia Kostyukhina kept carefully in her house the church icon of the Mother of God "The Seeking of the Lost" and the wonderworking cross from the holy table, and in the 1960s she gave them to the Annunciation church in Zaraysk. The Church commemorates him on 9 September, 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.