Maria Volnukhina

Holy Martyr Maria Volnukhina, with the full name Maria Nikolaevna Volnukhina, was born on 3 March 1876 in Moscow, in a merchant's family. She married the factory owner Ivan Gerasimovich Volnukhin; both were deeply believing people, for whom faith was the most precious value and the content of life. Soon after the revolution she lost her husband. In 1927 all her property was nationalized. In 1932 she was sentenced to three years of exile in the Northern Territory, at Kotlas, but soon left it and from then began to wander, with no fixed home. Among the faithful she was honoured for her ascetic life and foresight. Arrested, she did not admit guilt. Asked on what she had lived, she said from begging. Asked where she had lived after her return from exile, she said she had no fixed place but stayed with acquaintances, whom she refused to name.

On 17 October 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced those arrested to death by shooting. On 21 October, in the group case, Archbishop Dimitry (Dobroserdov), Archimandrite Ambrose (Astakhov), Hegumen Pachomius (Turkevich), the deacon John Khrenov, the nun Tatiana (Besfamilnaya) and the laymen Nikolai Rein, Maria Volnukhina and Nadezhda Azhgerevich were shot at the Butovo range near Moscow and buried in an unmarked common grave. Nadezhda, born in 1877, had received a blessing for monasticism but had not been tonsured, and lived among the nuns of closed monasteries. Of herself she said at the investigation that she was without fixed occupation, wandered and begged, and that she had given material help to the arrested from what she managed to collect.

She is commemorated on 21 October, the day of her death, in the new style, on the movable day around 29 May in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and on the movable day around 5 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.