John Novoselov

Holy Venerable Martyr John Novoselov, a hieromonk, was one of the monks of the monastery of Belaya Gora in the Perm province who were killed in August 1918 together with their abbot, Archimandrite Barlaam. The Azbyka page names him only in the list of those killed, with no further detail about him.

The missionary monastery of Belaya Gora, in time called the Athos of the Urals, was led by Barlaam, in the world Vasily Yefimovich Konoplev, born in 1858 in a family of Old Believers of the Perm Urals. Seeking the truth, he joined the Orthodox Church by chrismation in the 1890s, together with his father, his brothers and his sister, nineteen people in all. In November 1893 he was tonsured a rassophore and settled at Belaya Gora. In 1894 he received the name Barlaam, was ordained hierodeacon and then hieromonk, and led the monastery as a missionary house, with services according to the typikon and preaching morning and evening. People from the whole province came to him for counsel. In June 1917 the monastery cathedral was consecrated, with Bishop Andronicus of Perm, a hieromartyr.

In August 1918 the Bolsheviks seized the monastery: they overturned and defiled the altar of the cathedral, made a latrine of the archimandrite's cell and a theatre of the icon workshop. Many monks were killed after cruel torture. On 12 (25) August Archimandrite Barlaam was arrested and shot on the road to Osa. Among the martyrs who then received the crown are numbered the hieromonks Sergius, Elias, Vyacheslav, Joasaph, John and Anthony, the hierodeacons Michaeas, Bessarion, Matthew and Euthymius, the monks Barnabas, Demetrius, Sabbas, Hermogenes, Arcadius, Euthymius and Marcellus, and the novices John, Jacob, Peter, Jacob, Alexander, Theodore, Peter, Sergius and Alexis. Their graves were hidden by the authorities. They were glorified in 1998 as saints venerated in the Perm diocese, and in 2000 they were numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.

The Church commemorates Venerable John on 25 August, in the new style, and on the movable days of the synaxis of the new martyrs and of the Saints of Perm.