Elizabeth Kuranova

Holy Martyr Elizabeth Kuranova (Elizaveta Viktorovna Kuranova) was born in 1877 in Moscow and was shot on 21 October 1937 at the Butovo firing range. The Russian Church numbered her among the saints as a martyr, for veneration throughout the Church, by decision of the Holy Synod of 7 October 2002. She is commemorated on 8 (21) October and in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.

She grew up in an orphanage. She married. In 1930 her husband was accused of sabotage and, by decision of the secret police troika, was shot. Their house was confiscated, and Elizabeth Kuranova, as an administratively exiled person, had to leave Moscow and settle in the town of Zvenigorod, near Moscow.

She was arrested on 9 September 1937 and imprisoned in the Butyrka prison. At the interrogation she was asked whether she had collected money and food from people to help prisoners and exiles. She answered no, that in 1937 she had sent two parcels to the imprisoned priest Sergei Grigorievich Zarubin, bought with her own money. She said she had carried on no counter-⁠revolutionary activity, that she was alone and without a fixed occupation and worked at odd jobs. She admitted that she kept in touch in writing with the priest Sergei Zarubin, whom she had known for nine years, and that in 1936 and 1937 she had sent about four parcels. To the charge that, dissatisfied with Soviet power, she had carried on anti-⁠Soviet agitation among believers, she said that she was dissatisfied with Soviet power because she had lived through the shooting of her husband, the confiscation of her property and exile, but that she had not openly expressed her dissatisfaction nor done agitation. She said that she considered that she had been arrested because she went to church and sang in the church choir.

By decision of the "special troika" of the NKVD for the Moscow region of 17 October 1937 she was sentenced to death for "anti-⁠Soviet agitation, counter-⁠revolutionary activity", together with Archpriest Peter Nikotin and the laymen Victor Frolov, John Rybin and Nikolai Kuzmin. She was shot on 21 October 1937 together with Archpriest Peter Nikotin and the laymen Victor Frolov and John Rybin (Nikolai Kuzmin was shot on 31 October 1937). All those shot were buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo range.