Hermogena Kadomtseva

Holy Venerable Martyr Hermogena Kadomtseva, a nun, was born on 4 December 1870 in the village of Mokry Michkass in the Nizhny Lomov district of Penza province, to the peasant Kapiton Kadomtsev. At baptism she received the name Varvara. She suffered in the time of the Bolshevik persecution and died in a camp in 1942.

In 1885 she entered the Dormition monastery at Nizhny Lomov. The monastery had arisen in the middle of the nineteenth century, first as an almshouse, then as a monastic community, and from 1880 as a coenobitic monastery, with the help of the local merchant Volkov. There Varvara was tonsured into the mantle with the name Hermogena and struggled until the monastery was closed by the godless authorities in the early 1920s. After that she settled in the town and for a long time earned her bread washing laundry and floors and doing other housework, then moved back to her native village.

In 1930 she went to Moscow and entered service as a maid. From 1931 she was a cleaner at the church of the Transfiguration in the village of Bogorodskoe in Moscow, where she remained until the year of the cruellest persecution, 1937.

Nun Hermogena was arrested on 5 October 1937 and imprisoned in the Butyrka prison. At the search the following were taken from her: Father John of Kronstadt's book My Life in Christ, a paramand, two skufias, her tonsure cross, two prayer ropes, fifty-⁠one metal crosses and four wooden ones, and a wooden folding icon. All these, as being of no value to the investigation, were destroyed by the NKVD on 14 October. She said she had bought the little crosses to exchange them for food in the village. At the interrogation she admitted that she had talked with the church's clergy and the faithful about baptisms, burials, confession and other sacraments, and that she had spoken of the famine in the country, where peasants, both individual farmers and collective farm members, went hungry without help.

Witnesses testified that she said that life was better under the tsar, that her brothers had been dispossessed unjustly, that the authorities persecuted the Church, closed churches and arrested priests. The investigation was finished the same month. On 11 November 1937 an NKVD troika sentenced her to ten years in a labour camp.

Nun Hermogena Kadomtseva died in the Onega camp (Onezhlag) on 10 June 1942 and was buried in an unknown grave. Her commemoration is kept on 28 May (10 June, new style). The calendar also commemorates her on 7 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 12 June, in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Penza Metropolis, on 5 September, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, and on 1 November, in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Arkhangelsk Metropolis.