Anna Ivanovna Abrikosova, TOSD (; 23 January 1882 – 23 July 1936), later known as "Mother Catherine of Siena" (, transcribed Ekaterina Sienskaya), 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.
Abrikosova was also the foundress of a Byzantine Catholic 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 for the Salvation of the Russian people. This community has since gained wide attention, even among 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 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."
Because of the surviving sisters, the Russian Greek Catholic Church continued to exist on Soviet soil among both the sisters and the laity, even when there were no longer any Russian Catholic priests left to administer the Sacraments. This continued until 1979, when the surviving sisters arranged for Georgii Friedmann to be secretly and illegally ordained by a Bishop of the underground Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Furthermore, because Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn interviewed the surviving Greek-Catholic Dominican sister Nora Rubashova in Moscow during his research process, Mother Catherine and the persecution of her monastic community are mentioned briefly in the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago.
Since 2002, Abrikosova's life has been under scrutiny for possible beatification by the Holy See, as one of those whom Christopher Zugger has termed, "the Passion bearers of the Russian Catholic Exarchate". 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."
Ancestry
Although her ancestors had only recently been peasant serfs enslaved by the aristocratic Balashov family in Penza Governorate, by the time of Anna's birth in 1882, the Abrikosovs were a fabulously wealthy and cultured family of industrialists and philanthropists. The Abrikosov family ran a company which was the official supplier of confections, gingerbread, candies, and jams to the Russian Imperial Court and had accordingly been raised to the hereditary Russian nobility by Tsar Alexander III. Anna's grandfather, the industrialist Alexei Ivanovich Abrikosov, was the founder of the family fortune. Her charismatic and gregarious father, Ivan Alexeievich Abrikosov, was expected to take over the family firm until his premature death from tuberculosis. Her brothers included senior Russian Foreign Office diplomat Dmitri Ivanovich Abrikosov and Alexei Ivanovich Abrikosov, the doctor who embalmed Vladimir Lenin and later served as the personal physician to Joseph Stalin. Anna's cousin and adopted brother Khrisanf Abrikosov was a close friend of novelist Leo Tolstoy and a senior member of the latter's religious movement.
Although the younger members of the family rarely attended Divine Liturgy, the Abrikosovs regarded themselves as pillars of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Early life
Childhood
Anna Ivanovna Abrikosova was born on 23 January 1882 in Kitaigorod, Moscow, Russian Empire. The memoirs of Anna's brother Dmitrii allege that their parents had longed for a daughter, but that their mother, Anna Dmitrievna (née Arbuzova), died while giving birth to Anna, and their father died ten days later, of tuberculosis.