Alexandra Kasparova

Holy Venerable Martyr Alexandra Kasparova, a novice of the Ivanovsky Monastery in Moscow, was born in 1882 in Brest-⁠Litovsk and reposed in the Ivdellag camp on 18 February 1942, at the age of sixty. She was glorified by the Holy Synod of the Russian Church on 26 December 2006.

Her surname was written in the sources in several ways: Kasperovich, Kasperova, Kasparova. Her father, Joseph, was a carpenter who made coffins in his workshop; he died in 1893, when she was nine. Her mother went into service, and the family lived in poverty, so Alexandra could not attend school and taught herself to read. It is not known how she came to Moscow. At about fifteen she entered the Ivanovsky Monastery, opened as a common-⁠life monastery in 1879, where other young girls also came, among them Evdokia Aleshina, whom Alexandra cared for as a younger sister. Life there was ordered between services, prayer and handwork.

In 1918 the monastery was officially closed, but most of the sisters stayed on until the end of 1926. From 1918 Alexandra worked in a canteen on Varvarka Street, and from 1920 to 1930 she was a church worker at a church there. In the early 1930s the churches on Varvarka were closed. With Evdokia she settled in the village of Davydkovo, near Moscow, and took many kinds of work: at a medical laboratory, as a nanny at an institute for the care of mother and child, in the NKVD sewing workshop, and from February 1937 as a shop watchwoman. She nursed Evdokia, who was ill with cancer, and to whom Father Alexis Troitsky, himself a future saint, came to give communion.

In 1937 came denunciations. Neighbours said, under pressure, that priests and nuns visited the sisters' house, that they spoke ill of the authorities, and that they gathered children to teach them prayers. Alexandra was arrested in August 1937 and questioned on 9 August; she denied any agitation. On 10 October 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced her to eight years in a labour camp for agitation against the authorities and the collective farms, although the file said nothing of collective farms.

She was sent first to Bamlag, and after its dissolution in 1938 to Ivdellag in the Urals, where for five years she laboured heavily in forest work, living in barracks. From exhausting work and dreadful conditions she reposed on 18 February 1942 and was buried in an unknown place. She was rehabilitated on 18 October 1996. Her life was compiled by Archimandrite Damascene Orlovsky. She is commemorated on 5 (18) February and in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church.