John Streltsov

Holy Hieromartyr John Streltsov, a priest, was born on 21 May 1872 in the village of Gridino in the Bronnitsy district of the Moscow province, in the family of the psalmist Laurence Ivanovich Streltsov. In 1888 he finished the theological school at Kolomna, and in 1894 the Moscow Theological Seminary. On 24 August 1898 he was ordained priest for the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God in the village of Kuzovlevo. In 1922 he was named rector of the church of the Ascension in the village of Ryblovo, in the same district, and served here until his arrest in 1937.

In the years of persecution at the end of the 1920s the authorities demanded an individual tax from the priest, then entered him among the kulaks and plundered his property. In 1931, reckoning that without property he would have nothing to pay taxes with and would stop serving, they demanded 1,200 rubles from him. The church council collected money from the faithful for the tax, and the priest was arrested and sentenced to three years of exile, on the charge that he had gathered the money by deceit. After the end of the exile he returned to the village and went on serving.

On 28 November 1937 NKVD workers arrested him and imprisoned him at Taganka in Moscow. After the hearing of witnesses, among them the chairman of the village soviet of Ryblovo, he too was interrogated. He was told that he held secret gatherings at his home; he answered that there had been no gatherings of any kind. About the talk in August 1937 with the chairman of the soviet, when he had asked permission for a procession, he said that he had spoken only about permission to serve for a deacon from Bronnitsy and not about the constitution. He admitted that he had spoken about the state loan with a member of the commission, who had proposed that he subscribe, but not as the witness said, and that he had subscribed at once. Asked in what he admitted guilt, he answered: "In nothing do I admit guilt, I was not hostile to Soviet power and carried on no agitation against it."

On 3 December 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced him to ten years in a corrective labour camp. Father John Streltsov died in the camp, in the Amur region, on 14 March 1938, and was buried in an unknown grave. The Church commemorates him on 14 March, the day of his death, in the new style, and on the movable days of the synaxis of the new martyrs and of the Saints of Moscow (5 September).