Akilina Dubovskaya

Saint Akilina Dubovskaya (Akulina Stepanovna) was a believing peasant woman from Belarus, shot in 1942 in the Karlag camp in Kazakhstan. She is commemorated on 7 February, with the synaxis of the new martyrs and confessors of the Russian Church. She was numbered among the saints, the new martyrs and confessors of Russia, at the Bishops' Council of August 2000.

She was born in 1892 in the village of Novye Tserushki, in the Slutsk district of the Minsk province, into a well-⁠off peasant family. She was a deeply believing person. The first time she was arrested was in 1935, on a charge of having obstructed grain deliveries, and sentenced to three years in prison; she managed then to prove her innocence and was released. The second time she was arrested in the time of the harshest persecutions against the Russian Orthodox Church, and on 18 September 1937 she was imprisoned in the town of Slutsk. The next day the interrogation took place.

The investigator asked what agitation she had carried on against collectivization in 1929; she answered that she had done none. Asked whether she lived near the Sukhomil school, she answered yes, her house was beside the school. The investigator said he knew she had preached the Gospel among the schoolchildren; she said she had never preached the Gospel to schoolchildren, but she herself was a believer and sang prayers at home, and sometimes the schoolchildren listened to her singing prayers. On the charge of anti-⁠Soviet agitation in 1937 she said she had never done such a thing and did not admit guilt. She stated that the record was written down correctly from her words, but that she could not sign it because she was illiterate.

On 30 October 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced her to ten years in a labour camp, and she was sent to Karaganda. In 1942 she was arrested in the camp, in the group case of Evdokia (Andrianova) and eleven other prisoners, at Akmolinsk. On 20 April 1942 she was sentenced to death by the Judicial Collegium for criminal cases of the Karaganda regional court, at the Akmolinsk section of the Karlag camp. She was shot in 1942 at the Akmolinsk section. The place of burial is not known. She was rehabilitated on the basis of the law of the Republic of Kazakhstan of 14 April 1993.