Anastasia Bobkova

Holy Venerable Martyr Anastasia Bobkova, a novice, was born on 16 December 1890 in the village of Kuzyaevo, in the Volokolamsk district of the Moscow province, in the family of the peasant Stepan Bobkov. She was shot on 5 April 1938 at Butovo, near Moscow. The Russian Church honours her among the New Martyrs of Moscow.

In 1920 her parents died and she entered the Holy Trinity Alexander Nevsky Monastery near the village of Akatovo, in the Klin district, where she stayed until its closing, in 1927. She then moved to the village of Zanino in the Volokolamsk district, served at the church of Shestakovo and, at the request of the faithful, went to read the Psalter for the departed. In 1930 the authorities decided to close the church at Shestakovo. A parish meeting was held, to which Komsomol members came, and the women drove them out so firmly that one fell. For "resisting representatives of the authorities" five people were arrested, three of them monastery novices, among them Anastasia. She was sentenced to three months in a labour camp. Returned, she settled in the same village.

On 13 February 1938 the NKVD heard Shustova, the chairwoman of the village council of Pokrovskoe, who said that in December 1937, in the house of Vasilisa Budkina, Anastasia had agitated against the elections to the Supreme Soviet, saying that the authorities took priests unjustly and that justice was only on paper. On 2 March 1938 she was arrested and imprisoned at Volokolamsk. At the interrogations, which lasted three days, she denied counter-⁠revolutionary activity, but admitted what she had said at Budkina's: that the Soviet authorities put priests in prison without cause, that in the time of the priests they lived well, that they had no need of this authority, and that "we have our own Authority, the Heavenly one". On 9 March 1938 the NKVD troika sentenced her to death. The novice Anastasia Bobkova was shot on 5 April 1938 and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo firing range. She is commemorated on 5 April, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and the Synaxis of the Moscow Saints.