John Rumyantsev

Holy Hieromartyr John Rumyantsev, a priest, in the world John Ivanovich Rumyantsev, was born on 5 January 1889 in the old style (18 January in the new style) in the village of Ponurovo in the Makaryev district of the Kostroma province. He was baptized on the third day, 7 January in the old style, with the name John, in honour of the Prophet Forerunner. His parents were of the clerical class: the father, the deacon of the Dormition church, John Anempodistovich, and the mother, Evdokia Vasilievna. He was the eighth and youngest of the children. In 1905 he finished the fourth class of the theological school at Makaryev, and on 1 June 1907 was appointed psalmist at the church of the Holy Trinity in the village of Troitskoe, Buy district. He married Zinaida Alexandrovna (Kallistova), and the Lord gave them five children: Olga, Nicholas, Zoya, Aleftina and Dimitri.

On 16 September 1912 he was ordained deacon at the Makaryev-⁠Reshma convent, in Reshma, Kineshma district, where he served until 1923. In 1913, for diligent service, he received a cross and a bronze medal for the three-⁠hundredth anniversary of the house of Romanov. In 1923 he was ordained priest and appointed rector of the Resurrection (Saint Demetrius) church in the village of Voskresenskoe, Kineshma district. On 8 September 1929, aged forty, he was arrested by the Kineshma branch of the OGPU, in the village of Voskresenskoe, on a charge of anti-⁠Soviet agitation, in the group case "of the clergy of the Ivanovo industrial region", no. 9974-P of 1929. To the investigator's questions he answered: "I do not admit guilt of the charge brought against me." From 1930 to 1933 he was held in a concentration camp in the Northern Region.

Between 1934 and 1937 he served as a priest at the church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in the village of Vozdvizhenskoe, Navoloki district, Ivanovo region. On 19 February 1937, aged forty-⁠eight, he was arrested again, on a charge of taking part in the "counterrevolutionary church-⁠monarchist group 'True Orthodox Church'". The Special Council of the NKVD in Moscow, in file no. 4733 of 15 June 1937, decided on five years in a camp. In the NKVD prison in Kineshma he was tortured; the medical record of 1 July 1937 notes that "the thumb of the right hand does not bend toward the second finger". On 22 June 1937 an order was given to send him to Nagaev Bay (today Magadan), and he reached the Sevvostlag camp of the NKVD on 25 August 1937. From September 1937 to October 1941 he worked at various places of the camps, in the settlement of Debin, Magadan region, as an unskilled labourer, a miner, an orderly and an apprentice mason.

An archive certificate of 2023 shows that he died on 10 October 1941, with the diagnosis decompensated myocarditis, exhaustion, debility, and the cause of death heart paralysis. He was buried on 11 October 1941 in the cemetery of the 7th section of the road-⁠building administration, near the settlement of Adygalakh, Susuman district. He was fifty-⁠two. He was rehabilitated in 1989 and 1991. At the Council of Bishops on 20 August 2000 he was canonized.

The Church commemorates him on 13 August, on 20 June in the Synaxis of the Saints of Ivanovo and on the movable day of the synaxis of the new martyrs.