Xenia Petrukhina

Holy Venerable Martyr Xenia Petrukhina, a novice, was born in 1897 in the village of Chanki, Kolomna district, Moscow province, in the family of the peasant Semyon Petrukhin. She suffered together with the Venerable Martyr Anna Gorokhova; both struggled at the Dormition Brusensky monastery in Kolomna.

In 1913 Xenia entered the Dormition monastery in Kolomna as a novice. In 1919, after the godless power began to close monasteries, she returned to her village and helped at the church of the Entry of the Mother of God into the Temple; she lived first in the watchman's hut, then with acquaintances, earning her bread by sewing quilts. Anna was born in 1896 in the same village, in the family of the peasant Ivan Gorokhov; in 1914 she entered the Dormition Brusensky monastery as a novice, and in 1919, like Xenia, she returned to her native village and helped her aged father on the farm.

In the persecution of monastics at the beginning of the thirties both novices were arrested on 22 May 1931 and put in the Kolomna prison. At the interrogations they said that they went with other believers to the church of the Entry of the Mother of God, gathered around it and talked about supplies and the harvest, saying that the Lord, for sins, was giving neither harvest, nor provisions, nor goods, and that all this came from godlessness and mockery of the Holy Church. On 10 June 1931 the OGPU troika sentenced them to three years of exile in Kazakhstan and they were sent by stages to Karaganda.

In 1934, at the end of the exile, they returned home: Xenia worked as a nurse's aide at the medical post of Golutvino station, and Anna took work on the collective farm, but they did not give up sewing quilts and, as before, went to church. Soon a new wave of persecution came. The novices Xenia and Anna were arrested on 5 March 1938 and put in the Kolomna prison. The witnesses called said that although after returning from exile the novices hardly visited anyone and had even taken Soviet jobs to hide their faith, they stayed in touch with the local priest, and many people from this village and from others came to them, and at home they carried on anti-⁠Soviet propaganda. A few days later the investigator questioned them. Asking what they did and why they had been arrested before, he asked whether they knew certain local people, and, learning that they did, said that the novices had engaged in counter-⁠revolutionary activity among the collective farmers and read them the witnesses' statements. Xenia and Anna categorically rejected these statements, saying that they had engaged in no anti-⁠Soviet activity and no agitation against the government among the people.

On 10 March the investigation ended. On 12 March 1938 the NKVD troika sentenced them to death, and they were sent from Kolomna to the Taganka prison in Moscow, where on 17 March the prison photographer took photographs of them for the executioners. The novices Xenia Petrukhina and Anna Gorokhova were shot on 20 March 1938 and buried in an unknown mass grave at the Butovo firing range near Moscow.

Saint Xenia is commemorated on 20 March, the day of her death, on 29 May, with the Synaxis of the New Martyrs who suffered at Butovo (the date moves), and on 5 September, with the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow, in the new style.