Anna Demidova

Anna Stepanovna Demidova was the lady's maid of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, who stayed with the Russian imperial family in exile and was killed with it at Yekaterinburg, on the night of 17 July 1918. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia canonized her in 1981, with the other retainers killed with the family, and the Moscow Patriarchate considered her for canonization but has not numbered her among the saints. She is honoured as a new martyr.

Youth She was born on 26 January 1878 at Cherepovets, daughter of the well-⁠off merchant Stepan Demidov, who also served on the city duma and was of the noble Demidov house, and she had a brother and a sister. In the family she was called "Nyuta". She studied at the Leushino school, knew several foreign languages and played the piano. According to family tradition the empress Alexandra was drawn by her needlework at an exhibition of the Leushino convent in Yaroslavl, and so in 1901 she entered the service of the imperial family; according to other accounts her friend Elizaveta Ersberg found her about 1905 a place at court as a governess. The English tutor of the children, Charles Sydney Gibbes, described her as "of a singularly timid and shrinking disposition". She was tall and handsome. For her service she and her relatives received hereditary nobility.

Exile and end After the February Revolution of 1917 she stayed with the imperial family and followed it into exile at Tobolsk, then Yekaterinburg. In April 1918 she accompanied her mistress, Tsar Nicholas II and Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna when the Bolsheviks moved them from Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg. The other four children of the family stayed another month at Tobolsk, because Tsarevich Alexei was ill with haemophilia. As she left she said to Gibbes: "I am so frightened of the Bolsheviks, Mr. Gibbes. I do not know what they will do to us." On the night of 16 to 17 July 1918 the family was woken, told to dress and brought down to the cellar of the Ipatiev house. Anna carried two pillows into which gems had been sewn. She was killed with the family of Nicholas II and other retainers, after the first shots failed to kill her.

Discovery of remains and veneration The Bolsheviks and then the Soviet government tried to hide the news of the murder of the Romanov family and retainers. In 1979 the grave holding several bodies was found by an amateur, but the government did not acknowledge it until 1989. DNA analysis identified the family members. On 17 July 1998 a state funeral was held in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg for the imperial family, for Demidova and the other victims killed by the Bolsheviks eighty years before. At that time the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church did not attend, because they doubted the identification. In 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church canonized the seven members of the imperial family, Nicholas and Alexandra and their five children, and Anna Demidova was under consideration for canonization in 2016. The reason for the canonization of 1981 by the Church Outside Russia was the precedent of canonizing confessors who were not baptized, such as the pagans who joined the Christians at the execution in the story of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste.