Anna Serova

Saint Anna Vasilyevna Serova, martyr, was a Russian peasant woman from the Kostroma region and died in confinement in the early 1940s, during the Soviet persecution. She was glorified as a martyr by the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church in the year 2000, for veneration throughout the Church. She is commemorated on 31 July.

She was born in 1888 into a peasant family in the village of Bolshie Lomy, in the Vetluga district of the Kostroma governorate. She worked at the weaving factory named after Demyan Bedny.

She was arrested and imprisoned together with the clergy of the Dormition convent in Kineshma, the priest Constantine Razumov and laypeople. She was accused of counter-⁠revolutionary agitation, that is, of receiving priests in her home and attending services. She did not admit that she was guilty. On 15 July 1937 she was sentenced to five years in a labour camp and died in confinement.

Saint Anna is commemorated in the Synaxis of the Saints of Ivanovo and in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.