Marionilla Tseitlin

Holy Venerable Martyr Marionilla Tseitlin, a nun, was born in 1869 in Yaroslavl, in the family of the worker Vasily Tseitlin. Wishing to serve the Lord in the angelic habit, she entered in 1886 as a novice the Smolensk Mother of God Novodevichy convent, then on the edge of Moscow. Like all monasteries, this one was plundered and closed by the godless authorities after the revolution.

Like other sisters, the nun Marionilla settled near the convent, on Bolshaya Pirogovskaya street. Informers who lived in the same house or near it reported constantly to the NKVD that the sisters sometimes gathered and talked, comparing the present life with that before the revolution. In the time of the mass persecution, when not only priests but also the monastics of long-⁠closed monasteries were arrested, the authorities decided to arrest her. The warrant was written on 21 March 1938, and at two in the night of 22 March NKVD officers arrested her and shut her in the seventh militia station of Moscow. The next day she was questioned. To the question about her view of Soviet power, she answered that, as a believer, she thought that all power is from God and that it was all one to her who ruled the Soviet Union now. She said that, as a nun, she had been deprived of voting rights. About the case in which she was accused with other nuns, she acknowledged that she had gone to the home of the nuns Evdokia (Golovanova) and Matrona (Lipatova) and had said there that a hard time had come, that churches were being closed, that believers were discontented, that Soviet power plundered monasteries and closed churches, but that soon they would pay with their lives and then all would know that there is God.

On 3 June 1938 the NKVD troika sentenced the nun Marionilla Tseitlin to eight years of labour camp. On 7 December 1938 she arrived at Siblag, where a few days later, on 15 December 1938, while in the camp's transit point, she died and was buried in an unknown grave.

She is commemorated on 15 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, on the movable day around 29 August in the Synaxis of the Saints of Kuzbass and on the movable day around 5 September in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.