Arsenia Dobronravova

Holy Venerable Martyr Arsenia (Anna Gavrilovna Dobronravova, in the world, and Foma in the schema) was abbess of the Sergievsky Resurrection-⁠Feodorovsky monastery near Shuya. She was born in 1879 and died on 23 January 1939 in the hospital of prison no. 1 at Ivanovo. She was glorified by the Council of Bishops of the Russian Church in 2000. She is commemorated on 10 (23) January, the day of her martyric death, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Ivanovo and in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.

She was born into the family of the priest Gabriel Dobronravov, of the church of the Entry of the Mother of God into the Temple in the village of Shegodskoe, in the Yuryev district, Vladimir province. Her elder brother, Vasily Dobronravov, was a known public figure in Vladimir province, author, together with Berezin, at the end of the nineteenth century, of the five-⁠volume historical and statistical description of the churches and parishes of the Vladimir diocese. In 1895 Anna graduated from the diocesan school in Vladimir, and in 1903 she entered as a teacher of reading and handiwork at the orphanage attached to the monastery of the Feodorovskaya icon of the Mother of God in the village of Sergievo, Shuya district, where she received tonsure with the name Arsenia. In 1915 she was appointed abbess of the monastery.

After the revolution of 1917 the monastery was constantly on the verge of closure. It was able to hold out for more than ten years only because, under Mother Arsenia's direction, the nuns organized an agricultural artel called "The Community". The authorities allowed the nuns to live in the monastery and to hold services on condition that they worked on the state farm. Arsenia remained abbess. In 1929 the monastery was finally liquidated. In the 1920s Metropolitan Seraphim lived in the monastery in exile for several years. Mother Arsenia had met him in 1903, when he was an archimandrite, when she came with the family of a relative to Sarov for the celebrations of the glorification of Saint Seraphim of Sarov.

In April 1932 she was arrested. She was accused of having carried on agitation among the population, using mainly the church, and of having called for resistance to Soviet power. Arsenia did not admit guilt. In October of the same year the Special Council of the secret police sentenced her to three years of exile in Kazakhstan. At first she lived in Alma-⁠Ata, then she was exiled to Karkaralinsk, where she received the schema with the name Foma. At the end of the exile, in 1935, the abbess came to Vladimir, where at the end of June 1938 she was arrested again, on a charge of having been an "active participant in a counter-⁠revolutionary organization of clergy and monastics". During the investigation she held firm and denied guilt. In prison she became gravely ill and in January 1939 she was placed in the hospital of prison no. 1 at Ivanovo, where she died on 23 January. According to the death certificate, death came from weakening of the heart on the ground of complete exhaustion of the body.