Anisia Maslanova

Holy Martyr Anisia Maslanova (Anisia Ivanovna Maslanova) was born on 25 December 1878 in the village of Barmino, in the Makaryev district of the Nizhny Novgorod province, in a peasant family. She was church warden of the church of Saint John the Baptist in Nizhny Novgorod. She was shot in December 1937 (according to some sources on 11, to others on 14 December). She was glorified by the Council of Bishops of the Russian Church in the year 2000.

Her father, John Maslanov, was engaged in fishing on the Volga and in trade. Barmino was then a large and prosperous village, with pious traditions. As a young woman Anisia went to Nizhny Novgorod and entered the service of the entrepreneur Ivan Ivanovich Shalygin, who had a gypsum and timber works and was elected to the city Duma, where, just and pious, he defended the interests of the poor. When Ivan Ivanovich was widowed, Anisia became his wife and full mistress of the house and the wealth. She was hospitable and receptive to the needs of ordinary people. A fellow villager of hers, Nadezhda Mikhailovna Zakharova, who had fled from Barmino to escape an unwanted marriage, lived a year in her house; Nadezhda's descendants keep to this day, as a precious family heirloom, the photograph of the martyr Anisia.

After private trade was no longer allowed, alone, without family or children, Anisia Ivanovna devoted herself entirely to the service of the Church. From 1929 she was church warden of the church of Saint John the Baptist in Nizhny Novgorod. On 6 November 1937 she was arrested and put in the special wing of the Gorky prison, on a charge of ties with the clergy of Nizhny Novgorod and of her apartment being a gathering place of anti-⁠Soviet elements, clergy and wandering nuns. At the interrogation of 22 November she answered every question that she did not admit guilt, that she had belonged to no counter-⁠revolutionary organisation and that she had nothing to hide from the investigation. The special NKVD troika of 2 to 3 December 1937 sentenced her to death.

When Nadezhda Zakharova learned of the arrest, her husband, Konstantin Ivanovich Doronin, applied three times to the NKVD to learn the fate of the arrested woman. The last time he was told that she had been sent by stages to Siberia and died on the way. In fact the martyr's earthly life ended in the cells of the Gorky prison. In 1977 the wooden church at Barmino, her native village, burned; by God's providence the village prayer house was at first the house of her niece, Tatiana Alexeevna Maslanova. Today in the village's house church there is an icon of Saint Anisia, before which not only her relatives but all the inhabitants pray. She is commemorated on 11 December, on 7 February and in the Synaxis of the Saints of Nizhny Novgorod, on 12 September.