Anastasia Titova

Holy Venerable Martyr Anastasia Titova, a novice, was born on 8 October 1873 in the village of Mashutino, in the Alexandrov district of the Vladimir province, in the family of the peasant Peter Titov. She died in the Ivdellag camp, on 17 December 1937. The Russian Church honours her among the New Martyrs of Moscow.

In 1895 she entered the Spaso-⁠Vlakherna Monastery, which for a time after the revolution still existed as an agricultural artel, and laboured there until 1927. Then she moved to her brother's home in Mashutino and took up sewing quilts and field work. There was no church in the village, so on feast days she went to the neighbouring village, where the church was not yet closed, and fulfilled at the service the duty of psalm-⁠reader. At the request of the faithful she collected money to pay the church's tax. In her talks with the peasants she urged them to go to church.

In August 1937, at the beginning of the merciless persecution, the authorities decided to arrest her. On 4 September the chairman of the Mashutino collective farm was questioned, and on 12 September three more villagers. The same day the nun Anastasia was arrested and held first at the NKVD department at Konstantinovo, and on 16 September moved to the prison at Zagorsk and interrogated. The investigator asked what she had done before and after the revolution and demanded that she admit anti-⁠Soviet agitation. She answered that she did not admit guilt of anti-⁠Soviet agitation, of spreading provocative rumours about war and the coming fall of Soviet power, nor of slander against the leader of the party. The next day the indictment was drawn up, and the NKVD troika on 10 October 1937 sentenced her to eight years in a camp. She was sent by stages to Ivdellag in the Sverdlovsk region, but stayed there only a short time: on 17 December 1937 the nun Anastasia Titova died and was buried in an unknown grave in the cemetery of the settlement of Sama, in the Ivdel district. She is commemorated on 17 December, on 7 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, and in the Synaxis of the Moscow Saints.