Anna Abrikosova

This article's lead section may be too long. Please read the length guidelines and help move details into the article's body. (July 2024)

Servant of God Ekaterina Sienskaja Abrikosova TOSD
Born	Anna Ivanova Abrikosova January 23, 1882 Kitaigorod, Moscow, Russian Empire
Died	July 23, 1936 (aged 54) at the Butyrka prison, Moscow, Soviet Union

Anna Ivanovna Abrikosova TOSD (Russian: Анна Ивановна Абрикосова; 23 January 1882 – 23 July 1936), later known as Mother Catherine of Siena (Russian: Екатери́на Сие́нская, Ekaterína Siénskaya), was a Russian Greek Catholic religious sister and literary translator, who died after more than a decade of solitary confinement as a prisoner of conscience in Joseph Stalin's concentration camps.

Born into a family that had risen within only a few generations from serfdom into Chekhovian members of the hereditary Russian nobility, Abrikosova grew up as a family friend of Lev Tolstoy, Peter Kropotkin, and many other important figures in Russian political and intellectual life during the Silver Age.

By the time she attended Girton College, Cambridge, Abrikosova had become, according to her roommate Lady Dorothy Georgiana Howard (the grandmother of the present Lord Henley), "a nice Russian girl of the anti-Government-type"; meaning a Narodnik agrarian socialist, but who opposed the use of assassination, terrorism, or propaganda of the deed to achieve what she saw as positive change. After leaving Cambridge without a degree, Abrikosova married her first cousin Vladimir Abrikosov, who shared her Far Left views and spent many subsequent years living in West Europe.

After deciding that it was necessary to win her lifelong battle against clinical depression, Abrikosova returned to Christianity and was received into the Roman Catholic Church at the St. Vincent de Paul chapel of the Church of the Madeline in Paris in 1908. After some resistance on her husband's part, Vladimir Abrikosov was also received into the Catholic Church inside the same chapel in 1909. They were both told, however, that they belonged under Canon Law to the Byzantine Rite. After their return to Moscow in 1910, the Abrikosovs launched a successful but highly illegal campaign of evangelism among the overwhelmingly secularized Russian intelligentsia and became, alongside Pope St. Pius X, Andrey Sheptytsky, and Leonid Feodorov, one of the driving forces behind the canonical formation of the Russian Greek Catholic Church in 1917.

After their marriage was dissolved as being between too closely related spouses, Vladimir was ordained as a Byzantine Catholic priest. Anna became the foundress of a Byzantine Catholic sisters' community of the Third Order of St. Dominic, who all vowed in August 1917, similarly to the Discalced Carmelite Martyrs of Compiègne, to offer themselves up as a sacrifice to the Holy Trinity for the Salvation of the Russian people.

After the October Revolution and the beginning of seven decades of Atheist-motivated religious persecution under orders from Soviet Premier Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Abrikosova and the sisters continued their religious work. They also began, in nonviolent resistance to Soviet anti-religious legislation and despite fully knowing they were under Soviet secret police surveillance, a strictly illegal Catholic school for parishioners who did not wish to expose their children to indoctrination into Marxist-Leninist atheism in the Soviet public school system. The sisters also engaged in mass literary translation of Catholic books into the Russian language and, in defiance of censorship in the Soviet Union, circulated their translations as Samizdat.

Despite their mass arrest in November 1923, this sisters community has since gained wide attention, even among purely secular historians of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. The collector and editor of a 2001 anthology of women's memoirs from the Gulag, feminist historian Veronica Shapovalova, has highly praised Anna Abrikosova as, "a woman of remarkable erudition and strength of will", who, "managed to organize the sisters in such a way that even after their arrest they continued their work."^[1]

Despite Abrikosova's death from spinal cancer after more than a decade of solitary confinement in the Gulag in 1936, because of the surviving sisters of her community, the underground Russian Greek Catholic Church continued to exist on Soviet soil among both the sisters and their many secret converts among the laity, even when there were no longer any Russian Catholic priests left to administer the Sacraments. Following their release during the Khrushchev thaw of the mid-1950s, the surviving sisters and their underground Greek Catholic parish communities in both Moscow and Vilnius continued to be secretly ministered to by Ukrainian Catholic priest Fr. Volodymyr Prokopiv and by visiting Dominican Friars from the People's Republic of Poland until 1979; when the surviving sisters arranged for Soviet Jewish jazz musician and recent convert Georgii Friedmann to be secretly and illegally ordained by a Bishop of the underground Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.^[2] Furthermore, because Nobel Prize-winning Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn interviewed the surviving Greek-Catholic Dominican sister Nora Rubashova in Moscow during his research process,^[3] Mother Catherine and the persecution of her monastic community are mentioned briefly in the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago.^[4]

Since 2002, Abrikosova's life has been under scrutiny for possible beatification by the Holy See, which considers her a martyr under Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin's religious persecution of the Catholic Church in Russia and, in particular, as a martyr for the cause of Catholic schools and Classical Christian education. Abrikosova is one of the seven Soviet-era Martyrs and Confessors whom historian Fr. Christopher Lawrence Zugger has termed, "the Passion bearers of the Russian Catholic Exarchate".^[5] Mother Catherine Abrikosova's current title is Servant of God.

According to Pavel Parfentiev, the former Postulator for her Sainthood cause, "The early Christians gathered at the tombs of the martyrs for Christ, to render Him praise. The martyrs, having given their testimony to the truth of the Gospel, did not die. They remain in God and intercede before Him for the needs of the Church and for the needs of those who remain on this earth. Those martyrs who suffered for Christ in the twentieth century on the soil of Russia also pray for us. We too in our prayers are able to turn to these holy people who have suffered, like Mother Catherine, so that they can offer to God petitions for us. There is no doubt that through their intercessory prayer on our behalf God will hear our petitions."^[6]