Anna Abrikosova

Anna Ivanovna Abrikosova was born in 1882 in Moscow, in the Russian Empire, into the wealthy Abrikosov family of merchants and confectioners, a house originally of Old Believer background that belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church. She received a thorough education in Moscow and later studied at Girton College, Cambridge. In 1903 she married her relative Vladimir Vladimirovich Abrikosov. The couple traveled widely in Western Europe, where they encountered Catholic life and thought. In 1908, during a stay in Paris, they were received into the Catholic Church and chose to remain in the Byzantine liturgical tradition rather than adopt the Latin Rite, thereby joining the small Russian Greek Catholic community.

After returning to Moscow, the Abrikosovs became leading figures in the Russian Byzantine Catholic movement, working in close association with Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, who supported efforts toward a Russian Catholicism of the Eastern rite. Vladimir was later ordained a priest of that rite. Anna entered the Third Order of Saint Dominic, taking the religious name Catherine of Siena, and gathered a community of women who combined Dominican tertiary vows and spirituality with the Byzantine liturgy. Their Moscow household served as a chapel, library, and gathering place for Russian Catholics and for intellectuals interested in reunion with Rome in the years before and during the First World War and the Revolution.

After the Bolshevik seizure of power the community faced mounting persecution. Vladimir Abrikosov was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1922 and lived the remainder of his life in exile. Anna remained in Moscow with her sisters. In November 1923 she and other members of the Dominican community were arrested by the Soviet secret police. She was sentenced to imprisonment and spent subsequent years in prisons, camps, and internal exile, where she continued to exercise a quiet spiritual influence among fellow prisoners.

Suffering from breast cancer, she was temporarily released for medical treatment and underwent surgery, but was later re-arrested. Anna Abrikosova died in 1936 in the hospital of Butyrka prison in Moscow. Her place of burial is not known. She is remembered as a principal lay and religious figure of the Russian Byzantine Catholic Church and as a confessor of the faith under Soviet persecution. She has not been formally beatified or canonized by the Catholic Church.