Athanasia Lepeshkina

Saint Athanasia Lepeshkina, Venerable Martyr and abbess, was born in 1885 in Moscow into a wealthy merchant family and died in exile in Kazakhstan in 1931. She is commemorated on 7 February, with the synaxis of the new martyrs and confessors of the Russian Church, on 12 May, and on 5 September with the saints of Moscow. The Russian Orthodox Church numbered her among the saints, the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, at the Jubilee Bishops' Council of August 2000.

Born Alexandra Vasilyevna Lepeshkina, she belonged to a Moscow merchant family known for generations for its charity, especially for building and restoring churches. In 1902 she finished the Usachev-⁠Chernyaev girls' school in Moscow and, at seventeen, entered as a novice the monastery of the Holy Trinity and the Mother of God Hodegetria at Zosima Hermitage, in the Vereya district of the Moscow province, of which her great-⁠grandfather had been the builder and benefactor. Through his labours the community had been confirmed as a monastery in 1856. For six months she studied icon painting at the Seraphim-⁠Ponetaevsky monastery, and after 1914 she was tonsured a rassophore with the name Athanasia.

After 1917 the monastery was closed, but the nuns managed to organize themselves into an agricultural cooperative, "Zosima Hermitage", which lasted until 1928. Mother Athanasia was elected chairwoman of the cooperative. In 1920 she was tonsured into the mantle and chosen abbess by the sisters. All the heavy work of organizing and running the cooperative, which supported two hundred sisters, fell on her shoulders. Through all those years the services did not stop in the monastery that lived almost illegally.

In 1928 the cooperative was broken up, and Mother Athanasia settled with her novice Evdokia Buchinyova in the village of Petrovskoe (Alabino), Naro-⁠Fominsk district, near the Alabino hospital, being already gravely ill with tuberculosis and a heart defect. They lived by their own work, quilting blankets.

In May 1931 the abbess Athanasia was arrested and, on a charge of "anti-⁠Soviet agitation", sent into exile for five years in Kazakhstan. The record of her interrogation has these words of hers: "During my time in the monastery I was firmly devoted to God, and I am so now, ready to lay down my life for God and Christ. I can say nothing more." On the second day after arriving at the new place of exile she reposed. The next day her faithful novice Dunya also reposed. They were buried in one grave, in June (or July) 1931.