Anna Chetverikova

Holy Martyr Anna Chetverikova (Anna Pavlovna Chetverikova), born in 1873, died in the Arlyuk camp in the Kemerovo region on 2 March 1940, at the age of sixty-⁠seven. By the decision of the Holy Synod of the Russian Church of 6 October 2006 she was numbered among the holy martyrs; the documents for her glorification were submitted by the diocese of Moscow.

She was born in the village of Zakharyino, near Sergiev Posad, in a peasant family. It is known only that at the end of the 1910s she lived in Moscow, at Petrovskie Vorota, directly opposite the Vysoko-⁠Petrovsky Monastery, where she was arrested in 1937. She was a deeply believing person and took an active part in missionary work with the holy hieromartyr John Vostorgov and the martyr Nikolai Varzhansky, shot in 1918. Although she remained little schooled all her life, there is evidence that she took part in organising a sisterhood. In May 1919 the parishioners of the Vysoko-⁠Petrovsky monastery, whose buildings had passed, after the decree on the separation of Church and state, to the Moscow Soviet, asked that the monastery be given them for free use; among the names of the nearly three hundred signatories is that of Anna Pavlovna Chetverikova.

In 1937, to the investigator's question "Which of your acquaintances has been repressed by the Soviet authorities?" she answered: "My spiritual father, the hieromonk Esaph, the priest Polyansky...", that is, of the clergy of the Vysoko-⁠Petrovsky Monastery, the hieromonk Joasaph Isaev, later archimandrite, and the venerable martyr Archimandrite German Polyansky. At the interrogation she said courageously: "I do indeed maintain contact with the clergy exiled for counter-⁠revolutionary activity and I am engaged in collecting money for material aid to the exiled clergy; I did indeed give my apartment for lodging to Father Isidore, returned from exile, who was not registered in Moscow, and to Father Epiphanius, and I often let the wanderer Anna Emelyanovna and a secret nun, Tatiana, stay overnight with me." On 28 November the investigation was closed; the indictment says that "the secret nun Chetverikova Anna Pavlovna carried on anti-⁠Soviet agitation, spread provocative rumours of a persecution of religion and clergy in the USSR, collected money for aid to priests and monks exiled for counter-⁠revolutionary activity and, in 1935, received tonsure into secret monasticism, to which she also urged others".

On 29 November the NKVD troika of the Moscow region sentenced her to eight years in a camp. On 27 December she arrived at the distribution point of the Siblag camp and on 3 July 1938 was transferred to the Arlyuk section, some eighty kilometres west of Kemerovo, where conditions were dreadful: barracks unfit for habitation, cold, no firewood, filth, canvas tents with up to three hundred people, in darkness day and night. Anna Pavlovna Chetverikova died on 2 March 1940 and was buried in an unknown grave in the camp. In 2007 a memorial cross was set up on the burial place of the repressed of the Arlyuk section of the Siblag camp. She is commemorated on 2 March, on 7 February, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kuzbass, on 29 August, and in the Synaxis of the Moscow Saints.