John Malyshev

Holy Martyr John Malyshev, a layman, in the world Ivan Vasilievich Malyshev, was born in 1891 in the village of Ostrovo in the Bogorodsk district of the Moscow province (now the Pavlovsky Posad district), in the family of the peasant Vasily Malyshev. He learned at the village school. At the beginning of the First World War he was mobilized and served until 1917 as a private. In 1918 he was mobilized into the Red Army and until 1921 was a forager.

In the 1920s he moved with his family to Moscow, to Nikolo-⁠Yamskaya Street, near the church of Saint Sergius of Radonezh in the Rogozhskaya Sloboda, of which he became a parishioner, taking an ever more active part in the life of the parish. He worked as an electrician at the plant "Hammer and Sickle", near the church. He did in the church all the work concerning electricity, at feasts cleaned the church with the parishioners, made garlands of electric bulbs around the icons and went during the service with the plate for offerings. In December 1937 he became a member of the "twenty", and if even before he had given much time to the church, now he spent here all his free time.

In the spring of 1938 the NKVD was carrying out the last operations of mass arrests of clergy and faithful, according to the order of Stalin. Gathering data on the most active church people in the district, they decided to arrest him, and on 26 April 1938 he was imprisoned in Butyrka. The interrogations lasted a month, but the investigators did not succeed in persuading him to bear false witness. By then many NKVD officers had themselves been arrested for illegal conduct of investigations, and the arrest of a simple electrician had to be better justified. At the search a gramophone and twenty pre-⁠revolutionary records were found, with church chants and the state anthem "God Save the Tsar", which was thought sufficient for the charge. On 27 May 1938 the investigator interrogated him; learning that he had taken a very active part in the life of the parish and did not mean to renounce it, he asked where he got the records. He answered that he got them from a chance passer-⁠by on Kuznetsky Most, together with the gramophone. Asked whether he admitted guilt of counterrevolutionary fascist agitation, he said no, and that he admitted guilt only of keeping and playing counterrevolutionary church-⁠monarchist records.

The same day the investigation was closed. On 27 July 1938 the Special Council of the NKVD sentenced him to five years in a camp, and he was sent to Kolyma, to the camp point of the Frolych mine. Because of the work beyond his strength and the inhuman conditions, in the winter of 1940 he fell gravely ill. The doctor in the camp hospital found acute kidney inflammation, a heart defect, dropsy and pulmonary edema. Ivan Vasilievich Malyshev died on the feast of the Theophany of the Lord, at dawn, on 19 January 1940, and was buried in an unknown grave.

The Church commemorates him on 21 January, in the new style, and on the movable days of the synaxis of the new martyrs and of the Saints of Moscow.