Anna Makandina

Holy Venerable Martyr Anna (in the world Anna Alekseevna Makandina) was a nun of the Russian Church, shot at the Butovo firing range near Moscow in March 1938. She was numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia in the year 2000, for veneration throughout the Church. Her commemoration is on 1 March by the old calendar (14 March by the new) and in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. The sources give as the date of her death 8 March in one place and 14 March in another.

She was arrested on 22 February 1938, on a charge of spreading provocative rumours about the imminent fall of Soviet power, and was held first in the prison at Zagorsk, then in the Butyrka prison in Moscow. At the interrogation the investigator asked her why she had agitated among the people in October 1937. She answered that in October she was working by the day and recalled a case when several people were walking home from work together. They had talked about how life in the collective farms was now better and how Soviet power had given the collective farmers a happy life. That had been a private conversation, but she had never spoken against Soviet power. Asked whether she admitted guilt of ridiculing the leaders of the party and the government, she answered that she was not hostile to Soviet power, that she was content with it and that she did not admit guilt of anti-⁠Soviet agitation.

The three-⁠man tribunal of the political police for the Moscow region sentenced her to death, under article 58, points 10 and 11, for spreading counter-⁠revolutionary rumours about the imminent fall of Soviet power. She was shot and buried at the Butovo range, together with her sister, the nun Matrona.

In her troparion, in tone 4, she is presented as the lamb of Jesus, who cries out with a loud voice that she loves her Bridegroom and suffers seeking him, crucified and buried with him in his baptism, to reign in him and die for him, that she may live with him, and offers herself to him as a spotless sacrifice.