Tatiana Gribkova

Holy Venerable Martyr Tatiana (Tatiana Ivanovna Gribkova, in the world) was a nun of the Russian Church, born in 1879 in the village of Shchukino (today within Moscow) and shot on 14 September 1937 at the Butovo firing range. She is commemorated on 1 September by the old calendar, the day of her martyrdom being 14 September. One source says that she was numbered among the saints in 2000, another that this was done on 17 July 2002, by decision of the Holy Synod, when she entered the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.

She was born into a peasant family, her father being a cab driver. In 1896 she entered the Kazan convent at Golovino, then nine versts from Moscow. After the closing of the convent in 1925 she returned to her village. She earned her bread by quilting blankets. Together with her sister, who worked on the collective farm, she let rooms in their house.

She was arrested on 9 August 1937 and imprisoned in the Novinsky prison, then in Butyrka, in Moscow. A lodger of hers wrote a denunciation, stating that she lived mostly on renting rooms, that before religious feasts she went to Moscow where she met priests and former acquaintances from the convent, that she had many religious books and brochures, that she held anti-⁠Soviet conversations and spread rumours about the coming of the Antichrist, considering comrade Lenin the first Antichrist, and that she called the collective farms serfdom. It states also that she believed that soon the authorities would change and religion would triumph.

At the interrogation she answered that no one visited her except a nun who was her relative and that she had given no one religious books. Asked whether she admitted guilt of counter-⁠revolutionary agitation among the collective farmers, she answered that she did not, for she had never done it.

The NKVD troika for the Moscow region sentenced her to death on 10 September 1937, under article 58, points 10 and 11, for "anti-⁠Soviet agitation and slander of the leaders of the party and the government". She did not admit guilt. She was shot on 14 September 1937 at the Butovo firing range.

The Russian Church commemorates her on the day of her martyrdom and in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.