John Vishnevsky

Holy Hieromartyr John Vishnevsky was a priest in the diocese of Yekaterinburg, born in 1888 in the village of Vilgort in the Cherdyn district of Perm province, and put to death in 1920, in the time of Bolshevik persecution. The Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints on 17 July 2002, in the synaxis of the new martyrs and confessors of Russia. He is commemorated on 19 November (2 December on the new calendar).

Youth and service

He was born at Vilgort and baptized in the Church of the Holy Trinity of his village, built in 1779. In 1905 he finished the theological school at Yekaterinburg and entered the seminary at Perm, but remained there only a year. From February 1907 he served as a psalm-⁠reader in the Church of the Holy Trinity at Shartash, then from May of the same year in the Church of the Sign at Verkhny Tagil, and in 1908 he was moved to the Church of the Nativity of Christ in the village of Reutinsky. In 1911 he was sent to the Church of Saint Nicholas in the factory settlement of Verkh-⁠Neyvinsk, where he served and also taught mathematics at the boys' school. In 1915 he was moved again to Verkhny Tagil.

On 31 January 1916 he married Evdokia Elpidiforovna, daughter of a psalm-⁠reader of Verkhny Tagil, and in 1917 they had a daughter, Olga. On 1 April 1916 he was ordained deacon by Bishop Seraphim (Golubyatnikov) of Yekaterinburg at the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts. In February 1917 he was moved to the Transfiguration cathedral at Nevyansk, where he witnessed the outbreak of revolution and civil war.

In November 1919 he was ordained priest by Bishop Gregory (Yatskovsky) and sent to the church of Saint Procopius of Ustyug in the village of Fedkovka. There he was greatly respected, and the villagers valued him, which hindered the local Bolsheviks in their propaganda. One of the denunciations made against him said that the priest had caught the villagers in his web.

Arrest and death

In July 1920 the local Bolsheviks held lectures on religion and communism. While a librarian was reading from a book, Father John came in, snatched the book from his hands and tried to tear it, and the lecture was broken up. He is said to have disrupted other anti-⁠religious gatherings, once coming with an accordion and playing to drown the voice of the lecturer.

The authorities asked several times for him to be isolated. On 9 October 1920 he was arrested, accused of discrediting Soviet power and of anti-⁠religious propaganda among the unenlightened. He denied the charge, saying that the arrest came from the local authorities' wish to settle personal scores with him. He was held in a concentration camp until the end of the civil war. In the same year the Extraordinary Commission of the Yekaterinburg province decided he should suffer the supreme penalty, and the sentence was carried out soon after.

Family and remembrance

His father, Vsevolod Vyacheslavovich (1859 to 1910), came from the family of an official in Perm, entered the clergy in 1894 and served in several churches of the diocese, also working as a teacher. His mother, Nadezhda Ivanovna (1864 to 1916), a priest's daughter, taught mathematics at the Perm gymnasium. On 11 February 2024, with the blessing of Bishop Theodosius (Chashchin) of Nizhny Tagil and Nevyansk, the Sunday school "Transfiguration" beside the Church of the Resurrection at Verkh-⁠Neyvinsk was given the name of the holy hieromartyr John Vishnevsky.