Helen Korobkova

Holy Venerable Martyr Helen Korobkova, a nun, was born in 1879 in the village of Maleevo in the Volokolamsk district of the Moscow province, in the family of the peasant Peter Korobkov, who was later a clerk in an English shop in Saint Petersburg. At baptism she was given the name Elizabeth. She died in the camp on 7 June 1938 and is honoured among the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church.

Her father died when she was fourteen, and she lived in the village with her mother. She had finished the village school, and at twenty-⁠four she entered a monastery in the Moscow province, where she remained until it was closed in the persecution that followed the coming of Soviet power. There she was tonsured a nun with the name Helen. After the closing of the monastery she settled beside the Trinity church in the town of Skhodnya, Solnechnogorsk district, where she sang in the choir and did handwork, sewing quilts for her living.

In 1937 not only the clergy but also active parishioners began to be arrested. With such a group of parishioners the nun Helen was arrested too, the arrest document accusing her of spreading among the believers church literature, the so-⁠called spiritual Trinity leaflets, of having counter-⁠revolutionary church sympathies and of not giving up her church activity.

She was arrested on 29 October 1937 and held in a cell of the NKVD section in Solnechnogorsk. At the interrogation the investigator asked her whether, being acquainted with churchmen and nuns, they had gathered at one another's homes and spoken against Soviet power. She answered that she had been with believers and churchmen, but that they had not spoken against the authorities and that she had carried on no counter-⁠revolutionary activity.

Then the interrogations ended, and the nun Helen was transferred to the Taganka prison in Moscow. On 15 November 1937 the NKVD troika of the Moscow region sentenced her to ten years in a corrective labour camp. The nun Helen died in detention on 7 June 1938 and was buried in an unknown grave.

She is commemorated on 25 May (7 June in the new style), 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.