Anna Ivanovna Abrikosova (; 23 January 1882 – 23 July 1936), later known as "Mother Catherine of Siena" (, ), 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."Veronica Shapovalov (2001), Remembering the Darkness: Women in Soviet Prisons, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Page 20.
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.
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".Christopher Zugger (2001), The Forgotten; Catholics in the Soviet Empire from Lenin to Stalin, Syracuse University Press, pages 157-169. Mother Catherine Abrikosova's current title is Servant of God.
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.The sweetest surname: The story of confectionery dynasty of the Abrikosovs Moscow Seasons, November 23, 2020.The fascinating story of Moscow's chocolate factory, which survived the Revolution and WWII, by Tatyana Shramchenko, Russia Beyond, April 3, 2018.Revelations of a Russian Diplomat: The Memoirs of Dmitrii I. Abrikossow, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1964, pages 3-8.
Although the younger members of the family rarely attended Divine Liturgy, the Abrikosovs regarded themselves as pillars of the Russian Orthodox Church.Revelations of a Russian Diplomat: The Memoirs of Dmitrii I. Abrikossow, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1964, p. 132.
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.Abrikossow (1964), pp. 5–10.
A "Family Chronicle" by Khrisanf Abrikosov, however, alleges that Anna's mother, who was suffering from postpartum depression and unable to face the imminent death of her husband from tuberculosis, in reality committed suicide six months after the birth of their daughter by taking poison. Khrisanf further alleges that this fact was carefully concealed from Anna and her brothers.
Following their deaths, Ivan and Anna Abrikosov were buried in the Aleksei Cemetery in Moscow, under an inscription which Ivan's father had chosen from the Book of Isaiah: "My thoughts are not your thoughts; neither are your ways My ways. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts higher than your thoughts."Revelations of a Russian Diplomat: The Memoirs of Dmitrii I. Abrikossow, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1964, pges 8-9.
As their father had stipulated before he died, Anna and her four brothers were adopted and raised by their paternal uncle, Nikolai Alekseevich Abrikosov.
Dmitrii Abrikosov later recalled, "We were healthy children, quickly became friends with our new brothers and sisters, and filled the big house of our uncle with perpetual noise. When I was older I often asked how my uncle and aunt, who were both young, loved to have a social life and receive guests, could so readily have reconciled themselves to the doubling of family. The answer lay, of course in their wonderful character. My uncle... had no interest in the innumerable businesses created by my grandfather and passed his spare time in his library or the laboratory. The habit of meditating about higher matters made a real philosopher of him; unperturbed by the little things of this life, he faced all difficulties with absolute calmness. He never regretted what might have been, and was always reconciled with the facts of life."Revelations of a Russian Diplomat: The Memoirs of Dmitrii I. Abrikossow, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1964, pages 9-10.
Dmitrii continues, "His wife, my aunt Vera, with whom he lived for fifty-three years through all the vicissitudes of fortune, was his chief support in life. She was a wonderfully nice and exceptionally refined person, never angry and equally kind to everybody; to her relatives and friends, the ten (and after the birth of another boy eleven) children and the numerous nurses, housekeepers, governesses, and other servants rich Russian families in days past. As a result everybody thought only of pleasing her."Revelations of a Russian Diplomat: The Memoirs of Dmitrii I. Abrikossow, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1964, pages 10.
Every year, the summers were spent at "The Oaks" (), a Chekhovian dacha and country estate at Tarasovka, Moscow Governorate, which Nikolai Abrikosov had purchased from an ethnic German businessman.Revelations of a Russian Diplomat: The Memoirs of Dmitrii I. Abrikossow, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1964, pages 15-18. The rest of the year was spent in the family's Moscow house near Chistye Prudy. The latter home had reportedly been a prison during the 18th-century and had survived the Great Fire of Moscow in 1812. Chains were sometimes still visible on the walls and the house was said, by the servants, to be haunted by the ghost of Vanka Kain,Revelations of a Russian Diplomat: The Memoirs of Dmitrii I. Abrikossow, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1964, pages 3, 11-13. an infamous, "gangster, kidnapper, [and] burglar", who was, "the scourge of Moscow during the 1730s and '40s", and who, despite eventually becoming a police informant, remained a local folk hero.Mark Galleotti (2019), The Vory: Russia's Super Mafia, Yale University Press. Pages 9-10.
The memoirs of Dmitrii Abrikosov "describes their childhood as carefree and joyous" and writes that their English governess "was quite shocked at the close relationship between parents and children." She used to say that in England, "children were seen and not heard."Sister Mary of the Sacred Heart, OP (2013), To Courageously Know and Follow After Truth, Dominican Nuns of Summit Publications. Page 9. Due to having been raised by an English governess, Anna Abrikosova always spoke the Russian language with a slight British upper class accent.Osipova (2014), page 274.
Education Teacher's college According to her college roommate Lady Dorothy Georgiana Howard, Anna Abrikosova first read about Girton College, the all-girls adjunct to Cambridge University, when she was only eight years of age and dreamed about attending. By the time she reached the age of 16, according to Lady Dorothy, Anna Abrikosova had shifted to, "dreams of teaching rows of little children all that was interesting and beautiful and good."Lady Dorothy Howard Papers, Girton College Archives.