Catherine Konstantinova

Holy Venerable Martyr Catherine (Ekaterina Grigorievna Konstantinova) was a novice of the Sorrows Convent in Moscow. She was born in 1887 in the village of Savrasovo, Cherkizovo volost, Moscow district, and was shot on 20 March 1938 at the Butovo firing range. The Holy Synod of the Russian Church numbered her among the New Martyrs of Russia on 12 March 2002, for veneration throughout the Church. She is commemorated on 7 March by the old calendar (20 March by the new), in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia (the first Sunday after 25 January) and in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo.

She was born into the family of a well-⁠off peasant, Grigory Semyonovich Konstantinov, who had a carpenter's workshop and a grocery shop, and his wife, Tatiana Matveevna, and was baptized the next day. In 1905 she became a novice of the Sorrows Convent in Moscow, near the Butyrka gate. This convent, founded in honour of the icon of the Mother of God "Joy of All Who Sorrow", was called Skorbyashchensky by the people. It was established in 1890 by Princess Alexandra Golitsyna. At the time when the novice Catherine came to it, the convent had four churches and a girls' school.

After the revolution the convent was closed, and Catherine went to her village, Savrasovo (today in the Solnechnogorsk district). After a time, after joining the collective farm, she left it because of her health. She earned her bread by quilting blankets and mending sacks for the collective farm. On 24 February 1938 she was arrested and put in the holding cell of the Solnechnogorsk militia station. The interrogation took place the same day. The investigator called a fellow villager as witness. On 11 March 1938 the NKVD troika for the Moscow region sentenced her to death for "systematic counter-⁠revolutionary agitation, expression of terrorist intentions and spreading slander about the famine in the USSR". On 20 March 1938 she was shot at the Butovo range and buried in a common grave. She was rehabilitated in July 1989.

Catherine lost her father early: Grigory Semyonovich Konstantinov died of typhoid fever at twenty-⁠four. After his death her brother Grigory was born, and the widow married a peasant of the same village, Sergei Nikolaevich Fyodorov. Tatiana Matveevna outlived her daughter and died in 1949.