Matrona Vlasova

Venerable Confessor Matrona Vlasova was a nun of the Diveevo Monastery, an icon painter and a confessor of the faith during the Communist persecution. She spent long years in camps and exile, and at the end she returned to her native village, where she fell asleep in the Lord in 1963. She is commemorated on 25 October (7 November by the new calendar).

Childhood and life in the convent

She was born on 6 (18) November 1889 in the village of Puza in the Ardatov district of Nizhny Novgorod province, to peasant parents, Grigory Stepanovich and Ekaterina Pavlovna Vlasov. She had two brothers, Ivan and Andrei, who were taken to the front in 1914. Ivan was killed in the war, while Andrei came home with the Cross of Saint George and later took his sister into his house.

She was orphaned at the age of six and was given to be raised in the girls' shelter of the Saint Seraphim Diveevo Monastery, where her aunt, the nun Kaleria, lived as a sister. The girl showed a gift for drawing, studied with painters, and painting became her obedience. She also had a good ear and sang in the choir. She was tonsured, keeping her baptismal name, and painted icons. In obedience and prayer she lived in the convent until it was closed.

After the closing of the convent

On 21 September 1927 an official arrived and announced to Abbess Alexandra (Trakovskaya) the court's decision to expel the nuns. Sister Matrona settled with three Diveevo sisters, Maria Stepakova, Elena Zhavoronkova and Anna Artemova, in the village of Kuzyatovo. The sisters lived quietly, earned their living by handwork and served in the village church of the Ascension, which drew the displeasure of the local authorities.

In April 1933 she was arrested with the sisters living with her. On 21 May 1933 she was sentenced to three years and sent to the Dmitrov camp near Moscow. On her return she settled in the village of Verigino, where in the church of the Protection of the Mother of God she read and sang in the choir and worked as watchwoman and cleaner.

The second arrest and Karlag

On 10 November 1937 she was arrested a second time and called to interrogation at the NKVD in Arzamas, accused of belonging to a counter-⁠revolutionary organization. In the same case thirty-⁠nine people were convicted, thirteen to death and the rest, among them Matrona, to a labour camp in Kazakhstan, at Karlag.

She travelled in a freight car with two-⁠tier plank beds, a small iron stove and a hole in the floor for a latrine, through which snow blew in. The daily ration was a piece of frozen bread and half a rusty herring, and many suffered torment from thirst, some dying on the way. In the camp she did heavy labour and then worked as a hospital cleaner, and the authorities noted her diligence and humble conduct. She told how crosses were taken from around their necks and icons confiscated. She never spoke to her relatives about what she had lived through there. Once she survived a shooting incident as if by a miracle. After three years she asked for a review of her case, but received no answer. She served her full sentence and was released on 11 November 1947. With her convent in ruins, she settled in the village of Vyezdnoe near Arzamas, where the church of the Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God was one of the few still open in the area. She supported herself by knitting kerchiefs, stockings and mittens.

The third arrest and the return home

On 19 October 1949 she was arrested once more, on the basis of the old 1937 case for which she had already served ten years. Investigators held her at interrogations that lasted hours, demanding that she admit guilt, name supposed accomplices and slander the priest of the Verigino church, Father John Tsarevsky. She did not admit guilt and spoke against no one. She was sentenced to exile for an indefinite term in the village of Kamenka in the Dzhambul region of Kazakhstan.

In 1954 her brother Andrei petitioned for her pardon, and on 9 October 1954 Matrona returned to Puza, where her brother arranged a cell for her. Her icon corner was full of holy images, including a large icon of the Mother of God of Tenderness that she had painted herself. People of the village remembered her as humble, quiet, gentle and silent, addressing her relatives formally, in very plain dress with her kerchief tied in the Diveevo manner. She earned her living by knitting, embroidery, painting and repairing icons. Most of the day she prayed: she went to bed at eight or nine in the evening, rose at midnight to pray until one, and rose again at five in the morning. She taught her nieces to pray.

In Diveevo she would visit the ruined churches and pray for long hours on the Holy Ditch of the Mother of God. She received communion on great feasts at Vyezdnoe near Arzamas. About a year before her death she took to her bed, her health broken by the labour of the camps, and she gave away nearly all her belongings, icons and books to relatives and acquaintances. She asked to be buried in monastic clothing and to have her face covered. She fell asleep in peace on 7 November 1963, and sisters from Puza and Arzamas came to see her off. She was buried beside the grave of the martyrs Eudocia, Daria, Daria and Maria.

Glorification

On 6 October 2001 the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, under Patriarch Alexy II, decided to include the nun Matrona Vlasova in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. Her holy relics were found on 5 September 2007 and now rest in the Kazan Cathedral of the Diveevo Monastery.