Paraskeva Kochneva

Holy Martyr Paraskeva Kochneva was born in 1890 in the village of Kochnevo in Orenburg province, in the family of the peasant Stepan Kochnev. She finished the village school, lived with her parents and, in the time of persecution, served at the church of her native village. In 1932 the authorities demanded that she, a zealous churchwoman who defended the church from closing, leave the village, and Paraskeva moved to the city of Miass in Chelyabinsk region, where she became a watchwoman at the church of Saint Alexander Nevsky. After a quarrel with the psalmist, whom she thought was breaking church order, she left for the village of Voznesenskoe and helped at the church there; a year later she returned to Miass and was elected to the church twenty, the group of twenty believers answerable for the church.

In 1937 the priest of the church was arrested, and the authorities refused to register any other priest the faithful found. Paraskeva proposed to the twenty that they write a complaint to the VTsIK. She reached Moscow on 27 December 1937, submitted the complaint and went to Metropolitan Sergius Stragorodsky, deputy locum tenens, asking for a priest. The metropolitan blessed to serve at Miass a priest who was waiting in the reception room. The two bought tickets at Kazan station to leave on 30 December.

The priest was from Bessarabia, which then belonged to Romania, where his parents and relatives lived, and he wished to move there. On 29 December he went to the Romanian consulate to learn the answer to his request, and at the station he was arrested, together with Paraskeva. They were held in Butyrka prison in Moscow and interrogated the same day. Paraskeva said that she was an active churchwoman and a member of the twenty of the Miass church, but denied counter-⁠revolutionary agitation; before her arrest, she said, she had only guarded the church.

On 14 February 1938 an NKVD troika sentenced her to ten years in a labour camp. She was sent to Bamlag, the Bureya railway camp, at Izvestkovaya station. Crushed during work, Paraskeva Kochneva died in the camp infirmary of her injuries on 8 April 1939.

She is commemorated on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 8 April, on 13 July in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Birobidzhan Diocese and on 11 October (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Chelyabinsk Metropolis, in the new style.