Nadezhda Kruglova

Venerable Martyr Nadezhda Kruglova, a novice, was born in 1891 in the village of Denisovo, Pochinki volost, Yegoryevsk district of Moscow province, to the peasant Georgy Kruglov. From the age of nine her parents sent her to the parish school, where she studied three years, then she worked with her parents on the peasant farm. At twenty she entered as a novice the Holy Trinity-⁠Mariinsky convent in Yegoryevsk. The convent had been founded in 1900 through the efforts and donations of Nikifor Mikhailovich Bardygin, son of a baker, who by work and persistent reading became the owner of factories in Yegoryevsk. Brought up in rules of deep piety, he was in church at the first stroke of the bell, stood through the Liturgy, read the Apostle and sang on the choir. He was mayor of the town from 1872 to 1901, built the waterworks, pavements, street lighting, fire brigade, barracks, gymnasium, girls' school, public garden and house of industry, built the church of the Holy Great Martyr George and raised from his own funds the Holy Trinity-⁠Mariinsky convent.

Both novices, Antonina Novikova and Nadezhda, having entered the convent soon after its founding, struggled in it until its closure by the godless authorities in 1918, then settled in Yegoryevsk and, earning their bread by handiwork, helped at the church, keeping all the monastic rules, which the OGPU afterwards laid to them as the chief fault. The novices were arrested on 19 May 1931 and held at Yegoryevsk, together with thirty other nuns and novices. They were accused that after the closing of the convent in 1918 they had remained in the town, had lived as nuns and had continued the monastery's rule; that in one year, when the assembly of the villages of Savino and Pominovo resolved to close the old cemetery, the nuns agitated among the peasants against the closing, and the resolution was annulled; that lately religiosity was growing and the number of believers increasing. The nuns questioned did not admit guilt of anti-⁠Soviet agitation, but confessed only that after leaving the convent they had gone on living as nuns. On 29 May 1931 the OGPU troika sentenced them to five years of exile in Kazakhstan.

Returning from exile in 1935 to Yegoryevsk, they settled in the same flat, and Nadezhda, as the younger, took Antonina into her care. She worked as a cleaner at a school. They lived wholly devoted to the service of God, keeping all the monastic rules, but after exile they behaved carefully and tried not to form relations with unbelievers. In her duties at work Nadezhda was Christianly conscientious, and when NKVD men demanded of the school director a character reference, he wrote that Nadezhda "behaves well in her duties, works conscientiously and has no remarks on her work; at school she is quiet and decorous". But in the eyes of the authorities the crime was monasticism itself, and the secretary of the Yegoryevsk town council wrote in the reference of the novice Nadezhda that she had previously been exiled for monasticism.

On 1 March 1938 the novices were arrested again and held in Yegoryevsk during the interrogations. The investigator told Antonina that the organs of inquiry knew she was against Soviet power, that she had slandered the authorities and the collective farms. She answered that she had never said anything against Soviet power and had slandered neither the authorities nor the collective farms. In the same days the novice Nadezhda was questioned with the same charges and questions and rejected all the accusations. Then the standing witnesses were questioned, the landlords and neighbours of the house where the novices lived, who signed false testimony written by NKVD men. On 8 March the inquiry ended, and on 11 March the NKVD troika sentenced the novices Antonina and Nadezhda to death. After the troika's decision they were moved to the Taganka prison in Moscow. The novices of the Yegoryevsk Holy Trinity-⁠Mariinsky convent, Antonina Novikova and Nadezhda Kruglova, were shot on 20 March 1938 and buried in the unknown common grave at the Butovo range near Moscow. Nadezhda is commemorated on 20 March, 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).