Helen Chernova

Holy Martyr Helen Chernova was born in 1874 in the village of Alexandrovka in the Tarusa district of the Kaluga province, in a peasant family, and passed to the Lord in 1943, in the camp, from hunger. She is honoured among the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church; she was numbered among the saints by decision of the Holy Synod on 26 December 2006.

Helen Ivanovna Chernova married in due time. She was arrested on 28 September 1937 and sent to the Butyrka prison, accused of being a member of an illegal, counter-⁠revolutionary, monarchist organization of churchgoers and of acting as a link between its leaders and the outside world. At the interrogation, a month later, she said that she was a believer and had gone to the church at the Semyonovsky cemetery, then to the church of Saint Elias in Cherkizovo and the one in Yelokhovo, that she knew the priests who served there, but that she had never spoken with them about public matters.

She also said that she had known a blind old woman, Seraphima, whose rooms she helped to clean and whose floors she washed, and that Seraphima had advised her to go to the church of the Deposition of the Robe behind the Donskoy Monastery, where Father Alexander Khotovitsky served. She rejected the charge of anti-⁠Soviet agitation. No witnesses were found against her; only on 16 November 1937 was a priest, Paul Tsvetkov, questioned, who said that Chernova spoke with hostility about Soviet power and the persecution of religion.

On 29 November 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced her to eight years in a camp. During the investigation she was held at Butyrka. On 27 December 1937 she arrived with a transport at the Sibirlag distribution point, and on 1 May 1942 she was sent to the Mariinsk camps (the Baimsk section of Sibirlag). She died of hunger on 17 September 1943 in the Baimsk section and was buried in its cemetery, in grave no. 18.

She is commemorated on 17 September, on 7 February in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church (new style), and in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.