John Rotnov

Holy Venerable Martyr John Rotnov, a monk, was one of those killed in August 1918 at the monastery of Belaya Gora in the Perm province, together with their abbot, Archimandrite Barlaam. The Azbyka page calls him a monk and says nothing else of him, and in the list of those killed John appears among the hieromonks and among the novices.

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). Raised in a family of priestless Old Believers, he read much and sought the truth; in the 1890s he joined the Orthodox Church by chrismation, together with his father, his brothers and his sister, nineteen people. He was tonsured a monk in 1894, as Barlaam, and made hierodeacon, then hieromonk, and set in the monastery the services by 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, in the presence of Bishop Andronicus of Perm.

In August 1918 the Bolsheviks seized the monastery, profaned 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 torments. On 12 (25) August Archimandrite Barlaam was arrested and shot on the road to Osa. The page gives the names of the monastery's martyrs: 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 are unknown. They were glorified in 1998 as saints of the Perm diocese and in 2000 among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.

The Church commemorates him 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.