John Sofronov

Holy Hieromartyr John Sofronov, a priest, was born on 1 January 1875 in the village of Pavlovskoe in the Tver province, in the family of the peasant Basil Sofronov. He was called into the army and served as a clerk in the regimental office. He completed a one-⁠year course attached to the Theological Seminary. Until the revolution he worked the land, and when the persecutions began he showed a wish to serve the Church and was ordained priest. Like almost all the clergy, he was arrested in 1931 for failing to meet the economic obligations laid on him by the state and sentenced to a year in a corrective labour camp.

From 1936 he served at the church in the village of Voloskovo. On 26 July 1937 an NKVD worker interrogated representatives of the local authorities, hoping to learn things that would incriminate him. The chairman of the village soviet said that on feasts, especially in the busy working days, the priest served longer, that at the feast of the Kazan Icon he urged the faithful to collect money for repairing the church and that, called to pay a tax of 1,220 rubles, he refused and said: "Ah, Russia, what have you come to." The chairman of the collective farm said that the former churchwarden had collected money and grain for the church roof and that on Sundays the service is drawn out to two o'clock, so that some collective farmers go out to work only around four in the evening.

These testimonies were enough, and on 29 July Father John was arrested and imprisoned at Bezhetsk. He was sixty-⁠two. At the investigation he said, in spite of all the accusations, that he did not admit guilt: that he had done no subversive work against the measures of the party and Soviet power and had carried on no counterrevolutionary agitation. The investigator attributed to him words about the collective farm, saying that in June 1937 he told the faithful it was pointless to work in the collective farm, since the state would take everything. The priest answered: "There was never such a case of agitation on my part. I do not admit guilt in this." The interrogation was interrupted, it is not known whether because of his state of health or torture, and resumed later the same day, with the same answers.

On 20 September the NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and Father John Sofronov was shot on 23 September 1937. He was numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia at the Council of Bishops in August 2000, for veneration throughout the Church.

The Church commemorates him on 23 September, the day of his death, in the new style, on 18 July in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver, and on the movable day of the synaxis of the new martyrs.