John Tarasov

Holy Hieromartyr John Tarasov, a protopresbyter, was born on 18 February 1867 in the village of Borodino in the Klin district of the Moscow province, in the family of the peasant Jacob Ivanovich Tarasov. Ivan finished the city primary school, and from the age of ten worked for well-⁠off merchants in Klin, then in the office of the prosecutor Schmidt. From 1895 until the revolution of 1917 he worked for many big merchants, and after the revolution entered as clerk the People's Commissariat for Railways, from which he left in 1921 because of illness and age. From then on he devoted his life to the service of the Church: he entered as psalmist the church of the Life-⁠giving Trinity in Listy, in Moscow, and in 1923 was ordained deacon for the same church.

In 1924 Deacon John was ordained priest for the church of Saint Demetrius in the village of Shevyreva Sloboda. In 1925 he received the leg-⁠guard and skufia and was moved to the church of the Dormition in the village of Obukhovo, Klin district. In 1928 he received the kamilavka, in 1930 was named to the church of Saints Constantine and Helen in Maidanovo, in 1931 received the pectoral cross, and in 1934 was raised to the rank of protopresbyter and moved to the church of Saint Nicholas in Golenishchevo. In 1935 he was named to the church of the Mother of God the Guide in Voronino, in 1936 to the Kazan Icon church in Frolovskoe, and in August 1937 to the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God in Vyrki, Orekhovo-⁠Zuevo district. The frequent moves spared him several arrests to which he would have been subject had he stayed in one place, but times of such merciless persecution came that, in the minds of the persecutors, no one was to escape.

On 22 October 1937 the chairman of the Nesterovo collective farm testified that Tarasov was hostile to Soviet power and that in a talk in September he had said that the collective farmers were no longer people but shadows, worn out by overwork, and that they would not live long. On 26 October 1937 the protopresbyter was arrested, imprisoned at Orekhovo-⁠Zuevo and interrogated, and the false testimonies, among them that of the chairman of the farm, he rejected categorically. The investigation lasted about a month, and on 16 November the investigator called him again, hoping that the prison conditions and the measures applied would change his resolve. The father confirmed fully the testimony of 26 October and answered: "I did no counterrevolutionary activity, I do not admit guilt."

On 29 November 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced him to death. Protopresbyter John Tarasov was shot on 8 December 1937 and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo firing range near Moscow. The Church commemorates him on 8 December, the day of his death, in the new style, and on the movable days of the synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo (29 May) and of the Saints of Moscow (5 September).