John Preobrazhensky

Holy Hieromartyr John Preobrazhensky, a protodeacon, was born on 21 March 1880 in the village of Vasilevskoe in the Vologda province, in the family of the psalmist Alexander Preobrazhensky. In 1897 he graduated from the theological school in Vologda and the same year was appointed psalmist at the church of Saint Basil in Toshnya, Vologda district, where in 1904 he was ordained deacon. In 1906 he was moved to the church of Saint Blaise in Vologda. In the 1920s this church was closed, and Deacon John was sent to the church of the Holy Martyr Paraskeva. In 1929 the deacon, with his wife and three small children, was put out of his house as a family of a servant of the cult, and the authorities demanded of his wife that she divorce. To avert the danger of persecution from the children, she complied, with her husband's consent, and from then on the family lived apart, on money that Father John sent secretly. In 1930 this church too was closed, and the deacon was assigned to the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God, whose rector was Protopresbyter Constantine Bogoslovsky.

In May 1937 the news appeared in the local newspapers that, by decision of the city council of Vologda of 4 May 1937, the Bogorodskoe cemetery, where the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God stood, was being closed because of the building of a second railway line; burials were to cease from 15 May, the remains were to be moved, and in the summer of 1939 the cemetery was to be done away with. The news disturbed the parishioners and the priests of the church, who saw in it a mere pretext for closing first the cemetery, then the church. More than a hundred inhabitants of Vologda, whose relatives were buried at Bogorodskoe, signed a letter to the Central Executive Committee, pointing out that the plan of construction did not justify the closing and proposing that the cemetery fence be moved. They wrote that in the cemetery their relatives lay buried, whose graves were dear to them, that the moving would mean great expense and that it would be very unpleasant to gather into boxes and sacks the bones of those buried ten or twelve years before.

On 26 June 1937 there came to the vigil, on the eve of the feast of All Saints, at the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God, Bishop John (Sokolov), appointed administrator of the Vologda diocese. The clergy of Vologda were convinced that Bishop John was a secret collaborator of the NKVD. The rector, Protopresbyter Constantine Bogoslovsky, approaching the bishop, said to him: "According to the canonical rules, we do not regard you as a bishop", and moved away. No one in the altar came to take a blessing. The bishop stood quietly in the altar through the service, then discreetly left Vologda and went to his new destination, Arkhangelsk. Soon after that, in the night of 29 to 30 June, the priests, deacons and some parishioners were arrested, among them Deacon John Preobrazhensky. He was interrogated only once, on 2 July. The investigator asked him which of the priests in Vologda he knew. He answered that he knew all who served with him at the church in the Bogorodskoe cemetery. Then the investigator told him that he had carried on counterrevolutionary agitation in the city of Vologda. He answered: "I carried on no counterrevolutionary agitation."

In August, when Stalin's order on mass repression came into force, witnesses on duty were hurriedly interrogated, of whom one said that Deacon Preobrazhensky had taken part in "gathering signatures for the 'protest' against the closing of the cemetery in 1937; among the clergy and inhabitants he slandered the leaders of the party and government; he agitated: 'Of church vestments they make slippers and upholster the furniture in theatres, while we, the clergy, go about in rags.'" In the end he was accused of being "a participant in a counterrevolutionary church-⁠monarchist group in the city of Vologda, carrying on an irreconcilable struggle against Soviet power and its measures, spreading slanderous inventions". On 19 September 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced him to ten years in a camp. The deacon John Preobrazhensky died in the Kargopol camp on 11 June 1938 and was buried in an unknown grave.

The Church commemorates him on 11 June, the day of his death, in the new style, on 11 July (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vologda, on 1 November in the Synaxis of the Saints of Arkhangelsk, and on the movable day of the synaxis of the new martyrs.