Magdalina Zabelina

Holy Venerable Martyr Magdalina Zabelina (1863-1931), a nun, was born at Orel in the family of the worker Sergei Zabelin and was baptized Maria. At thirteen she settled in the village of Pososhki, where a merchant had founded an almshouse that became the community of Saint John the Forerunner; there she finished school and stayed as a novice, then a nun with the name Magdalina. When the persecution began she moved to the Zosima Hermitage in the Moscow province. After it was closed, in 1929, she settled with several novices in the village of Novinskaya, and they lived by handwork, reading the Psalter over the dead and helping the priest.

The arrest

In 1931 the authorities resolved to arrest all the monastics driven out of monasteries, and on 22 May Magdalina was arrested. Asked about her convictions, she answered that she was indifferent to politics and parties and had lived by her work, helping the peasants, without agitating against the collective farm. All the nuns were accused of agitation against the collective farms and of urging peasant women to ask the village council to return to the priest the cow taken for tax. The investigation was short: on 29 May the OGPU troika sentenced her, with the others, to five years of exile in Kazakhstan, by prison convoy. Unable to bear the long road and the hardships, she died on 8 December 1931 and was buried in an unknown grave.

She is commemorated on 8 December, the day of her death, in the new style, on the movable day around 7 February in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and on the movable day around 5 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.