She Who Remained on the Cross: Constructing the Martyrdom of Anna Abrikosova (1882 – 1936)

Anna Ivanovna Abrikosova (1882 – 1936) occupies a unique place in the history of Soviet women, Soviet martyrs, and the history of the Catholic Church in late imperial and early Soviet Russia. Born into a wealthy Moscow merchant family and educated abroad, Abrikosova converted to Catholicism in 1908 and established a women’s religious community of the Third Order of St. Dominic in Moscow in 1917, which combined Russian Greek-Catholic Byzantine liturgical practices with Dominican spirituality. Persecuted by the Soviet authorities for her religious proselytism, she has been hailed by hagiographers as either a self-sacrificing martyr or a penitent whose sufferings were expiation for upsetting the status quo among the Soviet Union’s Catholic minority. This thesis, however, argues that Abrikosova’s letters, writings, and public statements reveal her as a woman occupying the liminal space between voluntary and involuntary martyrdom, engaged in a personal, complex project of self-sacrifice as self-creation and self-realization.