Anna Shashkina

Holy Martyr Anna Shashkina (Anna Vasilievna Shashkina) was born on 13 February 1888 in the village of Pigaskino, in the Poshekhonye district of the Yaroslavl province, in the family of the peasant Vasily Shashkin. She died in the camp on 11 May 1940. The Russian Church honours her among the New Martyrs and Confessors.

After the village school she lived with her parents and thought of one day entering a monastery. She often went to the Pavlo-⁠Obnorsky Monastery in the Vologda province, to its abbot, Archimandrite Nikon Chulkov, to whom many seekers of salvation came for counsel and help in prayer; among them were many women and girls, from whom Father Nikon later founded a monastic community in the village of Zakharovo, which because of the persecution existed first in the form of an agricultural artel, then of a commune. As earlier the Pavlo-⁠Obnorsky Monastery, so now, after its closing by the godless, the community at Zakharovo was visited by believers, who met Archimandrite Nikon there.

In the mid-⁠thirties priests arrested between 1929 and 1931 began returning from exile and prison and started to serve again in churches; meanwhile the Renovationists, who in the interval had seized churches with the authorities' support, could hardly hold them, having no flock. Then they again called on the authorities and the NKVD to help in the struggle against the Orthodox Church. At the end of 1936 the NKVD at Yaroslavl began arrests of clergy and believers in the region. On 10 January 1937 Anna Vasilievna Shashkina was summoned for interrogation: she was asked whether it was true that she had collected the signatures of residents who wished to belong to the Tikhonite community. She explained that in 1935 her brother's grandson had died and their parish priest, Peter Bogorodsky, had refused to take part in the funeral, saying that the residents of the village did not belong to the Orthodox community and that they should first decide whether they went to the Orthodox church or to the Renovationists; then she undertook to collect the signatures of those who considered themselves Orthodox. At the interrogation of 20 February the investigator reproached her with hiding her acquaintance with the church warden Alexis Evgrafovich Smirnov, who had given her a forbidden book to read; she said she had hidden it so as not to betray Smirnov. On 4 March 1937 the investigator told her she was arrested as a suspect.

On 18 March she admitted her ties with Smirnov, her visits to his house and going to church together, but denied having spread counter-⁠revolutionary rumours; she admitted that at Bogorodsky's urging she had collected signatures for the Tikhonite community. She refused to answer whether she had visited the "commune", whether she knew it was in fact an illegal monastery or where Archimandrite Nikon was. At the last interrogation, of 3 April, she said that she had no contact with Archimandrite Nikon and did not know where he was. On 15 August 1937 the Special Council of the NKVD sentenced Anna Vasilievna to five years in a camp and she was sent with the first transport to the north-⁠eastern camps of the NKVD. Anna Vasilievna Shashkina died on 11 May 1940 in the hospital of the Mylga camp point and was buried in an unknown grave. She is commemorated on 11 May, on 7 February and in the Synaxis of the Saints of Rostov and Yaroslavl, on 5 June.