Margarita Zakachurina

Holy Venerable Martyr Margarita Zakachurina, a nun, was born in 1884 in the village of Pakhota in the Lezhnevo district of the Ivanovo region, with the full name Margarita Ksenofontovna Zakachurina. From 1902 to 1926 she struggled in a monastery, and after its closing, without giving up her work of prayer, was forced to work in a secular labour association. Before her first arrest she was a seamstress in the artel "Trudovaya igla".

On 22 March 1937 Mother Margarita was arrested, accused of "counter-⁠revolutionary activity" and of "taking part in a counter-⁠revolutionary group of nuns and churchmen". The nuns Margarita, Fevronia, Tamara and a priest's wife, Maria Ivanovna, were put in one group case, "The Sisterhood of the Venerable Cyprian, Ivanovo region, 1937". Margarita and Tamara were sentenced to five years, and Fevronia and Maria Ivanovna to three years of exile in Kazakhstan. In exile they stayed together, in the settlement of Mayskoe in the Beskaragai district of the Pavlodar region, struggling in common prayer. On 3 December 1937 they were all arrested again and a new group case was drawn up, "Margarita Zakachurina and others, Pavlodar, 1937". On 4 December the investigation ended with the final sentence: the supreme penalty, shooting.

She is commemorated on 15 December, in the new style, on 20 June in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Ivanovo Metropolis and on the movable day near 7 February in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church.