John Romashkin

Holy Hieromartyr John Romashkin, a priest, in the world John Dmitrievich Romashkin, was born in 1891 in the village of Abramovo in the Arzamas district of the Nizhny Novgorod province, in a peasant family. Between 1922 and 1927 he was psalmist at the church in the village of Alexandrovo, then was ordained priest for the church in the village of Subbotino (today the Gagino district). In 1928 he was arrested on a charge of "counterrevolutionary agitation" and sentenced to three years of exile, which he spent in the town of Nizhneudinsk. Returned, he went on serving in the same village. In 1934 he was arrested for resisting the taking of the bells, but was freed after two and a half months. In 1935 he was accused of "shaking the discipline of the collective farm and of applying to leave the collective farm"; he did not admit guilt, and the case was closed.

In 1937 the confessor of Christ was arrested again, on a charge that he "organized a solemn service which drew the peasants away from work on the collective farm". This was regarded as "anti-⁠Soviet agitation among churchmen and the backward part of the collective farmers". He was imprisoned in Arzamas and soon sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out on 17 September 1937. He was buried in an unknown common grave at the Bugrovskoe cemetery in Gorky. At the Council of Bishops of the Russian Church in August 2000 he was numbered among the saints of the New Martyrs and Confessors.

The page tells the case in which he suffered together with others. On 8 September 1937 ten clergy and faithful of the Gagino district were arrested. None admitted guilt. They were accused that on 6 July they had organized a solemn service, in which four priests and many faithful took part. Although after the service no sermon on political themes was given, the church service itself was regarded as an act directed against the state, since it drew the peasants away from work on the collective farm. On 17 September 1937 eight of them were sentenced to death and shot: the priest John Dmitrievich Romashkin; the priest of the village of Sorochki, Peter Ivanovich Lebedinsky, born in 1881, who in 1935 had been sentenced to two years of exile for sermons; the priest of Yusupovo, Nicholas Alexandrovich Khvoshchev, born in 1883, who had served thirty years; the priest of Panova-⁠Osanova, Alexander Semyonovich Nikolsky, born in 1883; and the peasants of the village of Pokrov Alexander Ivanovich Blokhin (born in 1879), Peter Vasilievich Lonskov (born in 1881), Stephen Semyonovich Mityushkin (born in 1874) and Basil Kireevich Yezhov (born in 1867, arrested in 1930 for non-⁠payment of taxes and sentenced to five years in a camp).

The Church commemorates him on 17 September, the day of his death, in the new style, and on the movable day of the synaxis of the new martyrs.