Tamara Provorkina

Holy Venerable Martyr Tamara Provorkina was a nun at Ivanovo-⁠Voznesensk and was shot in Kazakhstan on 15 December 1937, together with the nun Margaret (Zakachurina).

Life Tamara (in the world Evdokia Ivanovna Provorkina) was born on 20 February 1880 in the village of Anokhino, Yegoryevsk district, Ryazan province, in a peasant family, a priest's daughter according to another short summary. At fifteen she came to the Vladimir women's community, founded in 1901 at Ivanovo-⁠Voznesensk, and struggled there until its closing in 1928. In 1916 the community became the monastery of the Vladimir icon of the Mother of God, with nearly a hundred nuns. Evdokia received monastic tonsure with the name Tamara. Her sister Anya, left an orphan, she took into the monastery as a novice. In 1918 the monastery was turned into a work artel, in the 1920s part of the buildings was taken as a student dormitory, and the nuns and novices were moved into the refectory. In 1927 the buildings were fitted out as barracks for an aviation squadron, and the church was closed. The nuns worked at the Commission for Deaf-⁠Mute Children, doing handwork, with the money of which they bought houses together. After the closing of the monastery, Tamara settled with the abbess Augusta and the nuns Kalleria and Hierophea in a small house built by them, on 5th Aviation Street. She did not give up the monastic struggle, was an opponent of Renovationism and held to the rules of the Orthodox Church.

Arrests and martyrdom On 9 May 1932 she was arrested on a charge of spreading provocative rumours and imprisoned at Ivanovo. Other nuns were questioned, and neighbours, but no one confirmed the accusation; the only fact was that the nuns sometimes sang religious chants, and on 5 June she was released. A second time she was arrested on 22 March 1937 with other nuns and novices of the monastery and charged with being "a member of a counter-⁠revolutionary group of clergy and monastics, keeping and spreading the church-⁠monarchist book the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, carrying on anti-⁠Soviet agitation and spreading provocative counter-⁠revolutionary rumours about the collective farms". In the same group case, "The Sisterhood of the Venerable Cyprian, Ivanovo region, 1937", the nuns Margaret (Zakachurina), Fevronia (Ishina) and the priest's wife Maria Ivanovna Dmitrievskaya were tried. On 27 June 1937 the Special Council of the NKVD sentenced Margaret and Tamara to three years of exile in Kazakhstan, where they settled in the settlement of Maiskoe, Beskaragay district, Pavlodar region.

On 3 December 1937, barely arrived at the place of exile, they were arrested again, with the same charges for which they had already been sentenced. At the interrogation held at once, Margaret and Tamara gave the same answer: "We did no counter-⁠revolutionary work in exile at Maiskoe, but we kept telling the residents that Soviet power is given by God for the punishment of people, we asserted that it would soon fall and a power would come under which services could be held. We spoke so on the basis of Scripture and the Gospel." On 4 December 1937 the troika of the NKVD of the East Kazakhstan region sentenced them to death. Margaret and Tamara were shot on 15 December 1937 and buried in an unknown common grave. Tamara was numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church at the Jubilee Council of Bishops in August 2000. She is commemorated on 15 December (2 December in the old style), the day of her martyr's death, and, in the new style, on 7 February (a movable date) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors and on 20 June in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Ivanovo Metropolis (7 June in the old style).