Olga Kosheleva

Holy Martyr Olga Kosheleva was a believer of Moscow, arrested in 1938 because she said in the hearing of parishioners that the authorities arrested the clergy without guilt and closed churches, and she died in the Taganka prison on 6 March 1939.

Olga Semyonovna Kosheleva was born on 2 July 1874 in the village of Nizhny Belomut in the Zaraysk district of the Ryazan province, in a peasant family. She was married to a worker of the leather factory, Andrei Koshelev, and lived with her husband and children in Moscow, not far from the church of the Dormition of the Mother of God in Goncharakh, of which she had been a parishioner for many years.

In the second half of 1938 the Stalinist decree of mass repression ceased to be in force, but the NKVD apparatus, with its army of informers, continued to receive denunciations, and arrests on false denunciations did not stop. One of these secret informers denounced Olga Semyonovna too. The main argument for the arrest was her characterisation as an active churchwoman. She was arrested on 27 October 1938 and imprisoned at the Taganka. The investigator demanded testimony about "counter-⁠revolutionary activity", and she answered that she had not engaged in anything of the kind. But she admitted openly that she had said that Soviet power arrests the clergy without guilt, closes churches without the believers' consent and persecutes believers: "And now, seeing how innocently I have been arrested, I say once more that Soviet power arrests the clergy and the believers without guilt; churches are closed without the believers' consent, which is persecution of religion and the clergy." She said that she had spoken so from her religious conviction. She rejected the charge that she had shown terrorist dispositions toward the leaders.

Witnesses were called, among them the chairman of the church council of the Dormition church, but they confirmed only that Olga Semyonovna had said before the parishioners: "Lord, what is going on in the world, everywhere churches are being closed without the consent of the faithful, and the clergy and the faithful are arrested without guilt and sent to far-⁠off places. This is not life, but torment..." No witness accused her of terrorist dispositions, and the investigator did not want to call the informer as a witness. The prosecutor, to whom the NKVD had given the file to obtain permission to send it to court, judged the deed proven, but solely on the basis of the secret informer's reports; since the NKVD did not wish to reveal his name, the prosecutor ordered the file sent for extrajudicial consideration to the Special Council of the NKVD. Olga Semyonovna Kosheleva died in the Taganka prison on 6 March 1939 and was buried in an unknown place.

She is remembered on 6 March (a movable day), on 5 September (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, and on 7 February (a movable day) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, in the new style.