John Spassky

Holy Hieromartyr John Spassky, a priest, was born on 3 September 1873 in the village of Vasilievskoe in the Rzhev district of the Tver province, in the family of the psalmist Nicholas Spassky. He studied at the theological school in Ostashkov and in 1898 finished the Tver Theological Seminary, then was a teacher at the folk schools of Trestna and Klyuchevskoe. In 1900 he married Lydia Vladimirovna Ispolatovskaya, a teacher, and in the same year was ordained priest. In 1915 he served at the church of the Saviour in the village of Spasskoe, Zubtsov district, until 1925, when he was moved to the church of his native village Vasilievskoe and named dean. In 1930 he was sent to the church of the Sign in the village of Kholmets, Olenino district.

The bells and the club

In 1932 the local authorities ordered a club to be built on the site of the village cemetery, near the church. The faithful were indignant, and Father John told them to ask the leadership not to make a place of entertainment for the descendants on the bones of the ancestors. In 1934 representatives of the authorities came to the church and said that it had been decided to remove the bells. The priest asked that at least the smallest be left, but they did not even listen, and the same day the bells were thrown down and smashed. The impression on the parishioners was so heavy that one of the locals, thinking that everything was being done with the priest's consent, rushed at him and almost beat him, and Father John had much trouble in explaining that for him too it had been a surprise. A parishioner who saw the impiety began to weep bitterly; the father comforted her: "Do not weep, remember that there was a time when the bells were taken and then hung up again; now they take them, and in the near future they will hang them again."

Arrest

In 1935 the authorities decided to arrest him, in order to close the church. False witnesses said that at Pascha he gave a counterrevolutionary sermon and that, during the early sowing, going to the houses with the prayer services, he supposedly said that the Bolsheviks say there is no God and force the collective farmers to sow at Pascha, but God exists and has shown it by frosts and snow. They also said that in 1932, when the club was decided, he urged the faithful to make petitions to the village soviet, writing the petitions himself for the parish council. Father John was arrested on 18 May 1935. On the way to the prison at Zubtsov he was robbed by the escorts, who took his pectoral cross and money, telling him that in prison they would take them from him anyway.

At the interrogations he rejected all the accusations and said that his arrest was a form of persecution against the clergy, whom the authorities consider nothing and the dregs of society, and with this he did not agree. About the bells he said that he had been notified a few hours before, asked that at least a small one remain and was refused, and that to those who asked why the priests did not insist that the bells remain he had answered that they were notified too late. At Pascha he had not read a sermon, but the word of Saint John Chrysostom, in which there is nothing anti-⁠Soviet: it speaks of love and brotherhood. When it snowed and froze, he went with the prayer services to the parishioners, but held no anti-⁠Soviet conversations. He admitted that he had given people medical help, without training, from his own experience. On 26 July 1935 the investigation closed; the father added that he considered the testimonies of the witnesses, with whom there had been no confrontations, to be spoken out of malice. At the session of the Special Collegium of the regional court on 13 October 1935 he repeated that the witnesses were lying, and asked whether the story of the robbery by the escorts was true, he confirmed it.

Camp and death

The same day he was sentenced to seven years of imprisonment. On 21 December 1935 he was sent to the Svir camps, near the station of Lodeynoe Pole, where he spent a little over a year, then to the Spassk section of the Karaganda camp, where he arrived on 20 February 1937. He fell gravely ill and became an invalid, but was not freed from work. On 5 May 1941 he was taken to the camp hospital. Father John Spassky died there on 10 May 1941 and was buried in the camp cemetery of the Spassk section of Karlag.

The Church commemorates him on 10 May, the day of his death, in the new style, on the movable day of 18 July in the Synaxis of the Saints of Tver, and on the movable day of the synaxis of the new martyrs.