John Plekhanov

Saint John Plekhanov, hieromartyr, was a priest of the Russian Church, born in a village of the Vladimir governorate in 1879 and shot at the Butovo firing range on 25 March 1938. He is commemorated on 12 March by the old calendar, which is 25 March by the new, and in the Synaxis of the new martyrs and confessors of Russia.

He was born in the village of Filipkovo, Pereslavl district, in a peasant family. He finished the parish school. In 1892 he moved to Moscow. Before the revolution he worked in the restaurant of I. Ya. Testov. From 1919 to 1925 he was deacon of the church of the Holy Trinity in Troitskaya Sloboda and cook to Patriarch Tikhon. In 1923, when the patriarch was arrested, he was held in Butyrka. From 1925 to 1936 he served as priest at the church of Saint Pimen the Great at Novye Vorotniki in Moscow.

In 1936 he was sent into exile at Volokolamsk, then served as priest at the church of Saint Demetrius of Thessalonica in the village of Dmitrievskoe, Pereslavl district, Yaroslavl region. In 1938 Father John was arrested in Moscow, where he had come to see his spiritual children, was accused of being a "participant in a counter-⁠revolutionary monarchist group" and was held in Taganka. On 25 March 1938 he was shot, under article 58, at the Butovo firing range. In 1989 he was rehabilitated after death. He was numbered among the saints by the Russian Orthodox Church in the year 2000.