John Rybin

Holy Martyr John Rybin, a layman, in the world Ivan Nikolaevich Rybin, was born on 1 April 1898 in the village of Chernaya Gryaz in the Bogorodsk district of the Moscow province, in the family of the peasant Nikolai Rybin. In 1917 he was a soldier in the tsarist army, and in 1920 he was for four months a soldier in the Red Army. Before his arrest he lived in the watchman's house of the church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul in Lefortovo, where he worked as a caretaker and stoker. He was arrested on 21 August 1937 and imprisoned in Butyrka in Moscow.

At the interrogation he said that, from religious conviction and at the insistence of his confessor, the priest Dimitri Tsvetkov of the church of Saints Peter and Paul in Lefortovo, he did various work in the church: he wiped and moved icons and candlesticks and cleaned after the services. His spiritual father had been the priest Andrei Ivanovich Kunitsyn, now exiled for counterrevolutionary activity, who read him spiritual counsels and prepared him for the monastic life. With Kunitsyn Ivan Rybin kept contact by letter and with material help: after his exile he had written him letters and received answers, and the last letter he had written him before his arrest, asking guidance how to behave, with whom to keep contact, how to be of the most use to the faith and how to give himself as a sacrifice for the deliverance of the faith. He had sent him money and parcels, the last time in July 1937. He admitted that, at the arrest of the priest Andrei Kunitsyn, he had abused Soviet power among his spiritual brothers and sisters for arresting their spiritual father, old and powerless.

Ivan Rybin was arrested in the file of the group of Protopresbyter Peter Nikotin of the church of Saint Sergius of Radonezh at the Rogozhskaya Zastava in Moscow, together with the laymen Victor Frolov, Elizabeth Kuranova and Nicholas Kuzmin. Protopresbyter Peter Nikotin, born in 1889 in Astrakhan, had graduated from the Kazan Theological Academy with the title of candidate of theology, had served at Tsaritsyn, Astrakhan and Moscow and from the end of 1935 at the church of Saint Sergius, where he was loved above all by the young. On 17 October 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced them all to death. Protopresbyter Peter Nikotin and the laymen Victor Frolov, John Rybin and Elizabeth Kuranova were shot on 21 October 1937 at the Butovo firing range near Moscow, and Nicholas Kuzmin on 31 October 1937. All were buried in an unknown common grave.

The Church commemorates him on 21 October, the day of his death, in the new style, and on the movable days of the synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and of the Saints of Moscow.