Commemorated on October 31st
Our righteous father John Kochurov, hieromartyr of the Soviet revolution, was one of a number of young educated priests who came to the United States in the late 1890s as missionaries among the émigrés from Carpatho-Russia and Galicia. He was active in establishing parishes and aiding communities, mainly in the Midwest. After returning to Russia he was assigned to Estonia where he put into action the teaching skills he learned in America before he was assigned in 1916 to Tsarskoye Selo. On the morning of October 30, 1917, the Bolshevik forces fired on the town of Tsarskoye Selo and the inhabitants, who did not yet know that the country was in the midst of a civil war, fled to the church of St. Catherine in hopes of finding prayerful serenity and an explanation of the awful events. Father John and Father Steven Fokko organized a sacred procession throughout the town to pray for a peaceful conclusion to the civil strife. Fr. John was wrongly thought to have been praying for a Cossack victory over the Bolsheviks and was killed.
