Stephen Frantov

Holy Martyr Stephen Frantov was a peasant and psalm-⁠reader and choir director of the church of the Transfiguration in Spas-⁠Mikhnevo near Moscow, and he was shot at Butovo on 7 March 1938.

He was born on 17 December 1877 in the village of Nashchekino, Bronnitsy district, in the family of the peasant Feodor Frantov. He finished the village school, helped his father on the farm for a time, then moved to Moscow and worked as a forwarding clerk. In the time of the civil war a decree was issued that all who owned bicycles must hand them in for the needs of the Red Army; Stephen did not hand his in and was sentenced to three months in prison. He went regularly to services in the church of the Transfiguration in Spas-⁠Mikhnevo and sang at the choir; after a year he became choir director and psalm-⁠reader. The authorities at once reacted to his active church life: they deprived him of electoral rights and confiscated his farm, but he went on to church. In 1931, when collectivization and the destruction of peasant farms reached their height in Nashchekino, he moved to Moscow for three years, then returned to his native village, worked as a labourer at the warehouse of the Borisovskaya artel and served as psalm-⁠reader at the church of the Transfiguration.

With the intensifying persecution in the second half of the thirties, material was gathered about him. The chairman of the Nashchekino village council stated that when in August 1937 it was decided to build a grain dryer, they began to take down the church fence, and Frantov was supposed to have said: "The communists are ruining our last church." When the Zalesye collective farm began to take apart the fence, believing women came to the church and demanded that it stop, and the work was interrupted. Another witness stated that in August 1937 Frantov, carrying on anti-⁠Soviet agitation among the collective farmers, said that Soviet power and the communists had ruined all the churches in the surrounding villages, almost all taken as collective-⁠farm barns or partly pulled down, and that this happened because we go little to church; and that, thanks to his agitation for the strengthening of religion, a considerable number of people from Nashchekino go to church, especially those in the choir organized by Frantov.

On 16 February 1938 he was arrested and imprisoned at Kolomna. The next day, at the interrogation, he said that he had carried out no anti-⁠Soviet agitation and did not admit guilt, that when the church fence was taken down he lived in the village and worked at the artel and had spoken with no one about the believers' resistance. On 27 February an NKVD troika sentenced him to death, he was moved to Taganka and was shot on 7 March 1938, then buried in an unknown common grave at Butovo.

He is commemorated on 7 March (a movable date) and, in the new style, on 29 May (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and on 5 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.