Antonina Bryanskikh

Holy Martyr Antonina Bryanskikh (Antonina Arsenievna Bryanskikh) was born on 10 June 1891 at Irkutsk, in the family of the second-⁠guild merchant Arseny Petrovich Bryanskikh. She was shot on 9 January 1938, in the festal days of Christmastide. She was glorified by the Council of Bishops of the Russian Church of 13 to 16 August 2000; the decision of the Holy Synod is of 21 August 2007. She is commemorated on 9 January, on 7 February and in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Arkhangelsk Metropolis, on 1 November.

Family and youth

The Bryanskikh family was known not only for prosperity and enterprise, but above all for generosity, piety and love of the Church. Arseny Petrovich gave his children a good education, inviting tutors to the house. Antonina's elder brothers, the future Bishop Parthenius and Protopriest Innocent, looked after her and helped her in her studies. From 1901 to 1908 Antonina studied at the eight-⁠class girls' gymnasium of Duchinskaya in Kyiv, and in 1913, on her elder brother's advice, entered the faculty of history and philosophy of the Moscow Higher Women's Courses, which she did not manage to finish because of the events of 1917. In those years the taking of priestly orders, still more of episcopal orders, was equivalent to choosing the path of martyrdom. This was the fate of Bishop Parthenius: at the end of 1922 he was exiled from Ananyev and settled in Moscow. In 1924 Antonina Arsenievna, with her mother, Anna Vasilievna, visited at the Saint Daniel Monastery in Moscow her persecuted brother, then bishop of Ananyev, vicar of the Odessa diocese, who, like many hierarchs deprived of their sees, was there without the right to leave. With those close to her, Antonina suffered many humiliations because of her non-⁠proletarian origin: no Soviet institution would employ Antonina, a merchant's daughter and a bishop's sister.

With her brother

She devoted her life to helping her confessor brother. She kept up the correspondence, put in order Bishop Parthenius's scholarly works and, more, it was she who brought him and their mother their means of living, although this was bound up with many difficulties. When the term of exile in Kazakhstan expired, Bishop Parthenius was arrested again and sent into exile, this time for five years, to the Northern Region. With their mother and sister the hierarch lived in a house on Petrogradskaya Street in Arkhangelsk. In that house his meetings with local and exiled clergy took place. Besides this the bishop served secret services in the house churches of parishioners of Solombala, Maimaksa and the Lomonosov district. That these meetings and services remained long secret from the chekists and their spies was the merit of his sister and companion, Antonina Arsenievna. She continued to bring their mother and brother the means of living, working now as accountant at the city printing house, now as teacher of German at a school for adults, now at odd jobs. So she carried out her daily labour, unnoticed by people, which ended in the death of a martyr.

Arrest and martyrdom

On 3 July 1937 Bishop Parthenius was arrested on a charge of "counter-⁠revolutionary activity". Thanks to his sister's foresight, at the search of the hierarch's home the chekists found no anti-⁠Soviet literature, nor even religious. But even prudent vigilance did not help: on 16 November 1937 Antonina Arsenievna too was arrested. No charge was brought against her; against her only one false witness testified, a secret collaborator of the NKVD. She was interrogated only once. At this single interrogation she bore herself very courageously and flatly denied that her brother and she herself had engaged in "counter-⁠revolutionary activity". But her fate, like Bishop Parthenius's, was decided beforehand: on 29 December 1937 the NKVD troika of the Arkhangelsk region judged Antonina Bryanskikh "an active churchwoman and an active participant in the counter-⁠revolutionary group of churchmen of Bishop Parthenius Bryanskikh, which carried on counter-⁠revolutionary agitation among the surrounding population" and sentenced her to death. On 9 January 1938, in the festal days of Christmastide, the sentence was carried out.