Evdokia Pavlova

Holy Venerable Martyr Evdokia Pavlova, a novice, in the world Evdokia Pavlovna Pavlova, was born on 1 August 1876 in Moscow and died in the camp on 20 April 1939. The Russian Church honours her among the New Martyrs and Confessors of the twentieth century.

At eleven, her parents gave her, together with her sister Pelagia, two years younger, to be raised in the Passion Monastery in Moscow; later the sisters were received as novices and laboured there until the monastery was closed. After its dissolution, some nuns and novices rented a semi-⁠basement room on Tikhvinskaya Street, put it in order and settled there, earning their living by handwork, sewing quilts. With Evdokia lived her sister Pelagia, the novices Vera Morozova, Maria Nosova and Sophia Seliverstova; all, as in the monastery, kept the rule of prayer and sometimes invited priests to serve molebens.

The novice Evdokia was arrested on 25 October 1937, held in Butyrka and interrogated the same day. The investigator asked whether any of her relatives had been arrested by Soviet power and whom of those in prison she had helped. She answered that she had sent a parcel to a camp to a nephew and to a priest in chains, and denied having held anti-⁠Soviet conversations.

Witnesses were called. A neighbour in the house said he had heard no anti-⁠Soviet word from the nuns, only once, passing, he heard them say among themselves that, being old women, they had nowhere to pray, and that he had seen a priest come to them several times. During his account the investigator wrote something in the record, and the witness signed without reading it; the investigator had written that the novices had conducted anti-⁠Soviet and counter-⁠revolutionary activity.

Then a neighbour who worked as a warder at Butyrka was called as witness, who said that the novices conducted counter-⁠revolutionary agitation and that their apartment was visited by socially alien people, priests, readers and other ministers of the cult.

On 16 November 1937 one of the investigators, the head of the Sverdlovsk district section of the NKVD of the Moscow region, Belyshev, drawing up the indictment, wrote that after the dissolution of the Passion Monastery a group of nuns settled in one apartment in which they organized illegal prayers and, hostile to Soviet power, conducted counter-⁠revolutionary agitation among those around them. On 19 November 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced the novice Evdokia to ten years in a corrective labour camp.

On 27 December 1937 she arrived with the transport at the Mariinsk distribution point of Sibirlag. The novice Evdokia Pavlova died on 20 April 1939 in an NKVD labour camp in the Novosibirsk region and was buried in an unknown grave.

In 1940 one of the arrested novices demanded a review of the case, and the witnesses were questioned again. In place of the Butyrka warder came her sister, who said that her sister could not come to the interrogation because she had been sentenced to two years of deprivation of liberty for slander, and that she knew nothing bad of the former nuns, had never heard anti-⁠Soviet conversations from them and that they were very hard-⁠working. Despite the exculpatory testimony, the sentence was not annulled, on the ground that the arrested women had long been in a monastery and therefore were socially dangerous elements.

She is commemorated on 20 April, on 7 February in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church (new style), on 29 August in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kuzbass, and on 5 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.