Raphaela Vishnyakova

Holy Venerable Martyr Raphaela Vishnyakova, a schema-⁠nun, was arrested in 1938 together with a large group of monks of the Holy Trinity St Sergius Lavra and of the faithful and was shot at Butovo on 17 February 1938.

She was born in 1887 in the village of Vilyatovo, Novogrudok district, Minsk province, in the family of the peasant Arkhip Vishnyakov, and received at baptism the name Marina. At nineteen she entered a convent in Grodno province; in the First World War the convent was evacuated deep into Russia, and Marina settled at the Saviour Blachernae Monastery in Moscow province. It is not known when she was tonsured a nun, but in the years of the Soviet persecution she received the schema with the name Raphaela. She had no fixed dwelling and lived with believers and nuns.

On 21 January 1938 she was arrested together with a large group of monks of the Lavra and of the faithful and imprisoned in Butyrka, Moscow. The same day she was interrogated: she said that she had no home and lived on alms, and she refused to say with whom she had stayed in Moscow. At the arrest, NKVD agents photographed her in the schema-⁠nun's habit, considering this sufficient proof of her deeds, and the investigator did not even ask whether she admitted guilt. The witnesses on duty stated that she was hostile to Soviet power, that she was always visiting holy places, that she said that God had sent the people a godless power as punishment for sins, but would have mercy, that there would be war and that fire would purify the power of the antichrist, that she made prophecies of the coming collapse of Soviet power, that she lived without a passport and that, at the elections to the Supreme Soviet, she told her admirers not to go and vote for the antichrists.

On 14 February 1938 an NKVD troika sentenced her to death. She was shot on 17 February 1938 and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo range near Moscow. She is commemorated on 17 February, on 29 May (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and on 5 September (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, in the new style.