Natalia Ulyanova

Venerable Martyr Natalia Ulyanova, a novice, was born in 1889 in the town of Yelets, Oryol province, to the carpenter Nikolai Nikolaevich Ulyanov. In 1910 she came to Moscow, entered the Novodevichy Convent and lived the ascetic life in it in various obediences until its closing in 1922. After the closing of the convent she remained, like many of its inmates, in one of the convent's cells, turned by the authorities into communal flats, where beside the nuns were settled people often hostile to the faith. The novice Natalia was a singer and reader in the churches of Moscow, and in 1930 she entered state service, as a courier and cleaner at the City Bank of Moscow, then situated on Ilyinka Street. In that time she had to bear, as labour duties, all the burdens that fell on the people: she was often mobilized now to clear snow from the railway, now to dig peat.

On 9 March 1938 witnesses signed against her the testimony written by the investigator, which said that Natalia was hostile to the existing order, said that life in the collective farms was bad and that there would be no benefit from them, that the peasants were hungry, undressed and barefoot. On a patch of ground in the courtyard of the Novodevichy Convent, in front of the windows of the former cells, she was said to have held such talk against the collective-⁠farm system, saying that the peasants work day and night but sit cold and hungry. The next day, 10 March, the novice Natalia was arrested and placed under guard in the 7th militia section of the Frunze district of Moscow. On 11 March the investigator questioned her. He asked whether she admitted guilt of slanderous inventions about the life of the collective-⁠farm peasantry in the USSR, spread among the inhabitants of her house. She answered that she did not, for she had carried on no agitation about the life of the collective-⁠farm peasantry. She was also told that in the summer of 1936 she had said in the courtyard of the former convent that "under Soviet power the peasants have been driven into the collective farms and thereby ruined, the peasants go hungry, barefoot, undressed, work day and night and receive nothing in the collective farms". She answered that she did not admit guilt, for among the inhabitants of her house she had carried on no agitation and had said to no one that the peasants live badly. On 13 March the investigators confronted the novice Natalia with witnesses, who said all that the investigators required of them. Hearing them, the novice refused to confirm their testimony.

On 15 March the NKVD troika sentenced her to death. The novice Natalia Ulyanova was shot on 22 March 1938 and buried in the unknown common grave at the Butovo range near Moscow. She is commemorated on 22 March, the day of her death, in the new style, with the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo (a movable day), with the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, on 5 September (a movable day), and with the Synaxis of the Saints of Lipetsk, on 23 September.