Seraphima Gorshkova

Venerable Martyr Seraphima Gorshkova (in the world Anna Alekseevna Gorshkova) was a nun of the Russian Orthodox Church, born in 1893 into a peasant family in the village of Khmelniki, in the Uglich district, Yaroslavl province, and shot in the night of 20 November 1937 at Chimkent. She was numbered among the new martyrs and confessors of Russia in August 2000, on the presentation of the diocese of Chimkent. She is remembered on 6 November, old calendar (19 November), the day of her sentence.

Youth and monastic life

She studied at the parish school. Before 1917 she entered a convent, but neither the place, nor the name of the convent, nor the time of her tonsure with the name Seraphima is known. It is supposed that she might have been a nun at the Transfiguration hermitage in Yepikharka, in the Uglich district. After the revolution of 1917 the convent was closed and until 1921 Sister Seraphima led a wandering life. In 1921 she managed to enter the Resurrection (Novodevichy) convent in Petrograd, where her elder sister, Elizabeth, also lived. The nuns were forced to provide their own food. From the papers of the investigation file it is known that the nun Seraphima worked as a glazier in an artel formed in the convent.

On 17 February 1932 she was arrested for the first time, among the one hundred and twenty-⁠six sisters arrested in the convent. On 22 March the nun Seraphima was sentenced, under article 58, point 10, of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, to three years of exile in Kazakhstan. After the term was over, she remained in Kazakhstan, to be near her spiritual fathers, giving herself to the service of the clergy exiled in that region.

Martyrdom

She was arrested a second time on 9 October 1937 in the city of Chimkent, in the South Kazakhstan region, and during the investigation was held in the Chimkent prison. The records of her interrogation match word for word those of Hieromonk Gabriel (Vladimirov) and others in the same case. She was charged with having "been a member of a counter-⁠revolutionary organization of churchmen; together with the nun Baranova (Maria Mikhailovna) she took part in an illegal meeting of the counter-⁠revolutionary centre, in working out methods of developing counter-⁠revolutionary work among the people, to prepare an action against Soviet power; in the apartment of Gorshkova and Baranova illegal gatherings of the members of the organization were held".

All those arrested in the case, among them the nun Seraphima, were charged under articles 58-10 and 58-11 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR: it was said that they belonged to a counter-⁠revolutionary organization of churchmen, led by a "counter-⁠revolutionary centre" made up of the former metropolitans Smirnov K., Petrovykh I. and Bishop Kobranov E., who were in administrative exile and lived, until their arrest, in the territory of the South Kazakhstan region. Asked by the investigator about counter-⁠revolutionary activity, she answered: "I do not engage in counter-⁠revolutionary activity and can say nothing about it". On 19 November 1937 she was sentenced to death by shooting by the troika of the UNKVD for the South Kazakhstan region. In the night of 20 November she was shot in Lisya Balka, near Chimkent, a place of ill repute, of the destruction of the condemned. The place of burial is not known; it is supposed that all those condemned and shot in this case were buried in a common grave there. She was rehabilitated on 12 December 1957 by the Military Tribunal of the Turkestan Military District, "for lack of proof of the elements of a crime".