Natalia Baklanova

Venerable Martyr Natalia (Baklanova), a nun, was born in 1890 in the village of Shestovo, Podolsk district of Moscow province, to the peasant Vasily Baklanov. At eight her parents sent her to school, and after finishing she helped them on the farm, and in 1903 she entered the Novodevichy Convent in Moscow as a novice. She lived there until 1918, when the persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church began and the convent was after a time closed. Remaining to live on the convent's grounds, where the cells had been turned into communal flats, she worked first as a cleaner, and when she had to leave the walls of the ravaged convent, she settled with the novices of the convent, the sisters Evdokia and Anastasia Proshkin, in the settlement by Skhodnya station, near Moscow, and worked in the households of various people. In 1931 she took a job as a cleaner at the Institute of Balneology in Moscow.

The nun Natalia was arrested on 27 November 1937. Employees of the institute said that Natalia Vasilievna always refused public assignments: if she took part in work she did only technical work, and shunned public work, showing hostility to it, refused to go to meetings, saying that with them it was only meetings and meetings and she had no time. As a witness the priest who served at the church of the settlement where the nun lived was questioned; he said that the three former nuns lived together in one flat and were closely bound to each other, and that Baklanova had said, "Now everything is directed against us, they do not let us believe freely in God," and of the rest home, that it was so dull there, only propaganda and propaganda, atheism, no religious books.

The investigator asked her whether, being in close contact with the priest Malinovsky and with Anastasia and Evdokia Proshkin, she held gatherings at her place where they discussed counter-⁠revolutionary questions. The nun answered that they had never discussed counter-⁠revolutionary questions and had carried on no counter-⁠revolutionary activity. When the investigator insisted that the priest Malinovsky visited her periodically, she admitted that Malinovsky had been to her home and they had talked, but in their talk they had discussed nothing counter-⁠revolutionary. On 7 December 1937 the NKVD troika sentenced her to eight years in a labour camp and she was sent to Siblag. On 8 January 1938 she arrived by transport at Mariinsk. The hard conditions of the camp were beyond her strength, she fell ill and was placed in the camp hospital in Mariinsk. The nun Natalia Baklanova died in the camp hospital on 31 March 1938 and was buried in an unknown grave. She is commemorated on 31 March, the day of her death, in the new style, with the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church (a movable day), on 29 August with the Synaxis of the Saints of Kuzbass (a movable day) and on 5 September with the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow (a movable day).