Vera Samsonova

Holy Martyr Vera Samsonova was a teacher and warden of the Pyatnitskaya church in Kasimov, in the Ryazan region. She died in a camp on 14 June 1940, two weeks before the end of her sentence.

She was born on 17 August 1880 in the village of Veryaevo in the Elatma district, Tambov province, in the family of Nicholas Samsonov, keeper of an arrest house. She graduated with distinction from the girls' gymnasium of Kasimov and worked as a teacher until the content of the teaching came into conflict with her faith, after power passed to the godless. Devout and educated, she was zealous for everything touching the Church. At the end of the 1920s she was elected warden of the Pyatnitskaya church in the Kazan monastery, by then closed.

In the summer of 1935 the NKVD arrested priests and laity who venerated the blessed Matrona of the village of Anemnyasevo and the grave of Tsarevich Jacob, who died in the seventeenth century and was buried in the Kazan monastery. Vera was arrested on 28 June and held in Butyrka prison in Moscow. Her character report called her "religious to fanaticism", said she gave lessons of the Law of God and handed out prosphora to believers. At the interrogation she said that she had venerated the tsarevich's grave since before the revolution, prayed there and sometimes took part in the memorial services served by Father Nicholas Pravdolyubov, that she had sent a parcel to the blessed Matrona without knowing her personally, and that she disagreed with Soviet power over faith, closed churches, the arrest of innocent people and the separation of school from the Church. She admitted that after leaving school she had secretly taught the Law of God in parents' homes. Of the sick at the grave she said that she prayed with them and anointed them with oil from the lamp. She did not admit guilt of the counter-⁠revolutionary charge.

The investigation closed on 16 July without evidence. On 2 August 1935 the Special Council of the NKVD sentenced her to five years in a camp, and on 30 August she reached a camp of the White Sea-⁠Baltic Combine. Hard labor undermined her health. On 19 February 1940 she was placed in the central infirmary at Vecheraksha, and at dawn on 14 June 1940 she died.

The saint is commemorated on 14 June and, in the new style, on 7 February (movable) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, on 23 June in the Synaxis of the Saints of Ryazan, on 23 August in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Solovki and on 1 November (movable) in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Land of Karelia.