Barbara Loseva

Holy Martyr Barbara Loseva was born in 1894 in a peasant family, and at her birth the parents moved to Moscow, where her father worked as a shoemaker. They gave her a good education and she became a teacher. In 1915 she married Sergei Alexandrovich Losev, soon ordained deacon and then priest. Father Sergius, born on 20 September 1893 in the village of Vanilovo, in the family of a psalm-⁠reader, finished the Moscow seminary in 1915 and from 1926 served at the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God in the village of Kapotnya, now within Moscow. During the persecution he did all he could so that the church would not be closed, often asking parishioners for help in paying the taxes laid on the church.

On 27 November 1937 Father Sergius was arrested and held in Taganka prison, then interrogated. He was accused of organizing collections, of holding services at harvest time to disrupt work on the collective farm, and of counter-⁠revolutionary agitation. He admitted the collections for the needs of the church and the services held on feast days and Sundays, but denied any agitation. On 7 December 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced him to ten years in a camp, in Azerbaijan. He died in custody on 29 September 1942. Soon the same false witnesses wrote denunciations to the NKVD against his wife, Barbara Ivanovna, claiming that she had said they had put her husband in prison and had threatened them with revenge.

Barbara Ivanovna was arrested on 16 February 1938 and held in Egorievsk. The investigator asked whether she had carried on counter-⁠revolutionary activity and threatened party members, and she denied it. She admitted only that the clergy had received the October Revolution with hostility, and of her husband she said she did not know why he was arrested but believed he had harmed no one. She did not admit guilt. On 25 February 1938 an NKVD troika sentenced her to death. Barbara Ivanovna Loseva was shot on 7 March 1938 and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo firing range near Moscow.

She is commemorated on 7 March (a movable date), on 29 May (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo, and on 5 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, all in the new style. The priest Sergius is commemorated on 16/29 September.