Mikhaila Ivanova

Holy Venerable Martyr Mikhaila (in the world Marfa Ivanovna Ivanova) was a schemanun of the Russian Church, put to death by shooting on 9 October 1937 at the Butovo firing range near Moscow. The sources give the year of her birth as 1876 and as 1867. She was numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia; our sources do not show the year of her canonization.

She was born into a peasant family, in the village of Ivanino, Ruza district, Moscow province. In her youth she entered the Kazan convent at Golovino. After the closing of the convent and the placing of a sanatorium on its grounds, she began to work there as a dishwasher. After five years the authorities began to dismiss from the sanatorium the former novices and nuns, who scattered through the surrounding villages. The spiritual father of many sisters of the convent was then Archimandrite Ambrose (Astakhov), who in the early 1930s tonsured Marfa Ivanova, known for her strict and devout life, into the schema, giving her the name Mikhaila.

She was arrested on 26 August 1937. At the interrogation, asked why those who honoured her visited her, she answered that they came to her for advice and prayers, for instance those who had relatives in exile or sick, and asked her to pray for them. They also asked her whether war would come soon; some of her visitors wanted war to come as soon as possible and the then authority to fall, for they thought it was hard to live under it. In her house there were also conversations about the fact that Soviet power persecutes religion, that people are arrested and sent into exile unjustly, and those who came from the villages asked her whether they should join the collective farm.

One of the regular witnesses of the authorities said that among her admirers she was known as blessed and far-⁠seeing; her dwelling was in fact a secret church, where secret tonsures into monasticism and secret services were held; the schemanun gave shelter in her dwelling to priests and monks returned from exile. On 8 October 1937 the three-⁠man tribunal of the political police for the Moscow region sentenced her to death. She was shot on 9 October 1937 at the Butovo range and buried in an unknown common grave.