John Tsvetkov

Holy Hieromartyr John Tsvetkov, a priest, was born on 17 March 1878 in the city of Torzhok in the Tver province, in the family of the gardener Stepan Tsvetkov. At Torzhok he finished the two-⁠class model school attached to the gymnasium. He married, but his wife soon left him, and they had no children. At the beginning of the 1920s he was ordained priest. He was one of the pastors whom the bishops ordained from among pious laymen, when fewer and fewer priests ordained before the revolution remained alive, so that the flock should not be without guidance and the Mysteries.

In 1929 he was arrested, accused of not delivering the agricultural produce required by the state, and sentenced to three years of exile. After his return he was appointed to the church of the village of Perkhovo, in the Udomlya district of the Tver region, and here he met the bloody persecution of 1937. On 17 November 1937 the chairman and secretary of the village council and the chairman of the collective farm wrote, at the NKVD's request, a characterization-⁠complaint on the priest: that he prolonged the services and preached at length, that he urged the faithful to behave becomingly in church, not to walk about and not to talk during the service, that he asked parents to bring their children to church, so that all, old and young, wear crosses and come to church on great feasts and on Sundays. The conclusion said that all these acts were aimed at tearing down the collective farms and overthrowing Soviet power, and that Tsvetkov must be isolated as an enemy of the people.

After a few days he was arrested and imprisoned at Bezhetsk, and the same day he was interrogated. The investigator told him that he carried on anti-⁠Soviet agitation among the inhabitants. The father answered that he never had, either in church or elsewhere, and that he had not said that Soviet power would last a short time. About urging collective farmers to go to church at haymaking, he said that he had invited only those without work, not the main force of the farm. Asked whether he admitted guilt of counterrevolutionary agitation, he answered: "I do not admit it." On 27 November the NKVD troika sentenced him to death, and the priest John Tsvetkov was shot on 29 November 1937.

The Church commemorates him on 29 November, 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 Tver.