Elizabeth Timokhina

Holy Martyr Elizabeth Timokhina was born in 1881 in the town of Venev in the Tula province, in the family of the peasant Alexander Martynov, and received martyrdom by shooting on 7 March 1938, at the Butovo firing range near Moscow. The Russian Church honours her among the New Martyrs and Confessors of the twentieth century.

In 1912 she married Timothy Gerasimovich Timokhin, a widower with four children, a gendarmerie non-⁠commissioned officer at the Golitsyno station near Moscow. Though he served in the gendarmerie, in fact he cooperated with the revolutionaries, warning them of searches and arrests. Right after the revolution he was arrested as a former gendarme, but was soon released at the request of a revolutionary to Dzerzhinsky. Before marriage Elizabeth Alexandrovna earned her living as a seamstress, and afterwards she devoted herself to raising the children.

In 1922 she was elected to the church council of the Transfiguration church in the village of Bolshie Vyazemy in the Zvenigorod district, and from then on she gave much time and effort to the life of the parish, which had many difficulties from the persecution by the godless authorities, who wished to close the church.

In January 1938 the Zvenigorod NKVD section received an order to make arrests in the district. The head of the section himself drew up the list of those to be arrested, in which Elizabeth was included, as a member of the church council and as the wife of a former gendarmerie non-⁠commissioned officer. Then a group of false witnesses was gathered, who signed without reading the testimony required by the investigation, both about people they knew and about strangers.

Witnesses were also brought whom the militia investigators tried to deceive, having them sign a blank sheet or writing into their statements what they needed. After the case was drawn up, the victims were arrested.

Elizabeth Alexandrovna was arrested on 16 February 1938 and interrogated the same day. The investigator said that she was accused of counter-⁠revolutionary activity, that is, of spreading slander about Soviet power. She answered that she had never spread any slander, but that she was a churchwoman and, as a member of the church council, had to give attention to the church. The investigator demanded a full admission of the charge, and she answered that she did not admit guilt and could add nothing.

So the investigation ended and the case was handed to the NKVD troika. On 27 February 1938 the troika sentenced her to death. Elizabeth Alexandrovna Timokhina was shot on 7 March 1938 and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo range.

She is commemorated on 7 March, on 29 May in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo, and on 5 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.