Vera Morozova

Holy Venerable Martyr Vera Morozova was a novice of the Strastnoy monastery in Moscow and was shot on 26 February 1938 at the Butovo firing ground.

She was born in 1870 in the town of Torzhok, Tver province, in the family of the tailor Semyon Morozov. At twenty she entered the Strastnoy monastery in Moscow as a novice and lived there until it was closed in the early twenties. After that, together with other novices and nuns, she rented a room in a house on Tikhvinskaya street, and they tried to keep the rule of the monastery, earning their living by handwork. Vera worked as a nurse at a tuberculosis institute.

On 28 October 1937 an informer, a party member and duty witness who lived in the same house, signed at the request of the NKVD a false statement: Vera was supposed to have said that the authorities were confused, that believers now had to gather in basements, and that people should pray more so that God would put an end to the Bolsheviks. On this basis her arrest was requested and approved the next day, and on 16 January 1938 the novice was arrested and questioned. She denied everything: that she was guilty of anti-⁠Soviet activity, that she had agitated, that she had shown any hostility to the leadership of the party.

Since she admitted nothing, a worker-⁠correspondent who lived in the same house was brought as a witness. She declared that many socially alien people, that is priests, came to Vera, that Vera said peasants from the collective farms were dissatisfied, that life was hard, that God had sent such a government for the sins of the people, and that after the arrest of the nuns who lived in the house she spread the rumor that people were arrested for nothing. The investigation closed on 21 January, and on 21 February an NKVD troika sentenced her to death. She was shot on 26 February 1938 and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo firing ground near Moscow.

The saint is commemorated on 26 February and, in the new style, on 29 May (movable) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and on 5 September (movable) in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.