Martyr John was born in 1880 in the village of Alexeyevka, in the Rozhdestvenskaya volost of the Borovsky district of Kaluga province, in the family of peasant Alexey Chernov. After finishing the village school, he engaged in farming. After the arrival of the godless and collectivization, he moved to the Narofominsk factory but was dismissed for religious activities. In 1938, the chairman of the village council wrote a report for the NKVD for his arrest, indicating that John’s daughter was in a monastery, and he himself was removed from work in the collective farm as a religious element.
John sought the restoration of worship in the Vvedenskaya church, collecting signatures for the opening of the church. On the day of the elections to the Supreme Soviet, he wrote a letter to a candidate for deputies, asking for freedom to perform religious rites. The letter reached the NKVD, and John was arrested on June 28, 1938, and imprisoned in Butyrka prison.
The investigation accused him of counter-revolutionary activity, but he did not admit his guilt. On September 19, 1938, he was sentenced to five years of imprisonment in a corrective labor camp. John died of hunger on April 10, 1939, in the hospital of the 14th camp point of the Semenovo Pudozh district of Karelia and was buried in an unmarked grave.
