Nadezhda Azhgerevich

Holy Martyr Nadezhda Azhgerevich was born in 1877 in the village of Golovenshchitsy, Sverzhen volost, Minsk province, to the peasant Grigory Azhgerevich. She was a deeply believing person and had received a blessing to enter monastic life, but had not managed to receive the tonsure. She had no home of her own and lived with the nuns of the closed convents of Moscow and the Moscow region. Arrested, she did not admit guilt.

The investigator asked her what she did and what she lived on. She answered, "I am without any particular occupation, I wander about and beg." She was asked whether she had collected money among the faithful to help those exiled for counter-⁠revolutionary activity. She said she did not deny that she had helped the arrested from what she had managed to collect. Asked whether she had spread rumours of a famine in the USSR, she answered, "I did not say this; without me everyone saw how the hungry who had come from Ukraine sat at the churches asking for food." Asked whether she had spread provocative rumours about persecution of religion and the clergy in the USSR, she answered, "Yes, I said that Soviet power arrests innocent people, runs riot and shoots an innocent people." She was asked to name her admirers who gave her lodging; she said she had received lodging from them, but did not know their names and addresses.

On 17 October 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced the arrested to death. On 21 October Archbishop Demetrius (Dobroserdov), Archimandrite Ambrose (Astakhov), Hegumen Pachomius (Turkevich), Deacon John Khrenov, the nun Tatiana (Besfamilnaya) and the laity Nikolai Rein, Maria Volnukhina and Nadezhda Azhgerevich were shot at the Butovo range near Moscow and buried in an unknown common grave. Nadezhda Azhgerevich is commemorated on 21 October, the day of her death, in the new style, with the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo (a movable day) and with the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, on 5 September (a movable day).