John Uspensky

Holy Hieromartyr John Uspensky, a priest, was born on 30 August 1870 in the village of Bolshie Soli in the Yaroslavl province, in the family of the priest Alexander Uspensky. Ivan Alexandrovich finished the theological school and in 1890 was ordained deacon, and in the years of persecution after the Bolshevik revolution was ordained priest and served at the church of the Entry into the Temple in the village of Vvedenskoe, Kineshma district, Ivanovo region.

After the beginning of the merciless persecution in 1937, the authorities arrested almost all the priests, many churchwardens, members of church councils and active laymen. On 1 November 1937 there were arrested and imprisoned at Kineshma the priest John Uspensky, three laymen and a priest from the village of Peshkovo, and their files, since they knew one another, were joined into one. The same day the interrogations began, which went on for countless days. The investigator told him that he was arrested as a member of a counterrevolutionary priestly and kulak group; he answered that he was not a member and had done no counterrevolutionary activity. About the priest Nicholas Lebedev of the Dormition church at Peshkovo and the former kulak Peter Piskunov, who had been warden of the church at Vvedenskoe until August, he said that he knew them well, that they had close ties, met and visited one another, but that they held no anti-⁠Soviet gatherings and did not draw in the collective farmers. He denied that in August he had organized in the church porch a gathering of church people or spread provocative rumours about poverty and hunger in the USSR, and each time repeated: "I tell only the truth, I can give no other testimony, because I did no counterrevolutionary activity."

On 8 November 1937 the investigation closed, and on 15 November the NKVD troika sentenced all the accused to death, but Father John to ten years in a corrective labour camp. The NKVD workers were not satisfied with this result, and in prison a new investigation was begun against the priest, on a charge of having carried on anti-⁠Soviet agitation among the prisoners; as false witnesses they used informers from the cell. Interrogated, Father John did not admit guilt. On 3 February 1938 the NKVD troika sentenced him to death. The priest John Uspensky was shot the next day, 4 February 1938, and buried in an unknown common grave.

The Church commemorates him on 4 February, the day of his death, in the new style, on 20 June in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Ivanovo Metropolia, and on the movable day of the synaxis of the new martyrs.