Anna Efremova

Holy Venerable Martyr Anna Efremova, a novice, was born on 25 March 1882 in the village of Gnezdilovo, in the Fatezh district of the Kursk province, in the family of the peasant Athanasius Efremov. She was shot on 17 February 1938 at Butovo, near Moscow. The Russian Church honours her among the New Martyrs of Moscow.

In 1903 she entered the Sorrows Monastery in Moscow, founded in 1890 by Princess Golitsyna, on Dolgorukovskaya Street, near the Butyrskaya Gate. She stayed there until the destruction of the monastery in 1928, after which she settled in an apartment on Butyrskaya Street, beside the monastery walls. She lived there with other sisters of the closed monastery, who kept the monastic rule in all things, earning their living by handwork and keeping up ties of prayer and friendship with other monastic communities settled in the city and villages. As a former novice, according to the authorities' orders, she was to be destroyed, and on 17 January 1938 she was arrested and imprisoned first at Butyrka, then at Taganka in Moscow.

The investigator asked her whether she had helped nuns exiled for counter-⁠revolutionary activity; she answered that she had indeed helped the nuns. Asked her attitude to the Soviet authorities, she answered that it was hostile, because they arrest monastics, exile innocent clergy, close churches and organise persecution of religion. Asked why she was arrested, she said: "I consider that I was arrested because I am a nun, and nuns are now arrested without any guilt." On 14 February the NKVD troika sentenced her to death. The novice Anna Efremova was shot on 17 February 1938 and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo firing range. She is commemorated on 17 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and the Synaxis of the Moscow Saints.