Natalia Kozlova

Saint Natalia Kozlova, new martyr, was a peasant woman and church warden and was shot on 14 September 1937 at the Butovo firing range near Moscow. She was canonized as a new martyr of the Russian Orthodox Church by the Council of Bishops of the year 2000. She is commemorated on 14 September (1 September by the old calendar), the day of her death, on the Sunday nearest to 7 February, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, and on the fourth Saturday after Pascha, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo.

She was born on 9 December 1889 in the village of Novy Pochinok Stanovykh (Churiki), Mikhailov district, Ryazan governorate, into a peasant family. She finished the three-⁠class village school. At marriageable age she married Stepan Vasilievich Kozlov, a fellow villager, and they had eight children. She was a member of the church council. On 26 June 1935 she received an honorary certificate with the blessing of the ruling bishop. During the persecution she pressed for the village church to be returned to the church community, for the parish priest Eugene Svetlov to be released, and kept up contact with the bishop of Skopin, the holy hieromartyr Ignatius (Sadkovsky), who was in prison. In 1937 she went to Moscow, visited the reception office of M. I. Kalinin and presented more than four hundred signatures demanding that the church building be returned to the community.

She was arrested on 14 August 1937. On 10 September 1937 she was sentenced by the troika attached to the NKVD for the Moscow region under articles 58-10 and 58-11 of the criminal code of the RSFSR. She was condemned to the highest penalty, shooting. She did not admit guilt. She was held in the prison at Skopin, then in Taganka prison in Moscow. She was shot on 14 September 1937 at the Butovo range. She was rehabilitated on 27 March 1989.