the holy new martyrs of eastern russia - Coptic Orthodox teaching

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attack on Menzelinsk. The Whites held out for four hours, but finally the
Bolsheviks burst into the city and began to take revenge… On August 21 and
22, they shot 150-200 people in the city. Mother Margaret was one of their
victims. Another was Priest Vozdvizhensky of the Trinity church.
According to the witness of the Red Army soldier Ya.F. Ostroumov, the
excuse for killing the abbess was the fact that the nuns were trying to defend
some White officers probably wounded) in the monastery. “Several White
officers who had been left in the monastery were hidden in the cells of the
women’s monastery and were… shot in the monastery courtyard. The abbess
of the monastery was also shot… for hiding White officers in the cells of the
monastery.”
According to another account that reached Prince Zhevakov across the
front line, the Bolsheviks, having burst into the territory of the monastery,
wanted to defile the church, but the abbess did not let them in there.
Matushka fearlessly went out to the crown of drunk and heavily armed
Bolsheviks and meekly said to them: ‘I do not fear death, for only after death
will I appear before the Lord Jesus Christ, to Whom I have striven all my life.
You will only bring forward my meeting with the Lord… But I wish to suffer
and endure endlessly in this life if only you would save your souls… In
killing my body, you kill your own souls… Think about that.”
In reply to this they hurled insults and curses at her and demanded that
she open the church. The abbess refused outright, and the Bolsheviks said to
her: “Look to it: early tomorrow we will kill you…” With these words they
left.
After their departure, having locked the monastery gates, Abbess Margaret
went together with the sisters into the church, where they spent the whole
night in prayer and communed at the early liturgy. The abbess had not
succeeded in leaving the church when the Bolsheviks, seeing her coming
down from the ambon, took aim at her and fired point-blank. “Glory to Thee,
O God!” cried the abbess loudly when she saw the Bolsheviks taking aim at
her, and… fell dead to the floor.
Nun Alevtina has a slightly different account: “The following day [after the
Whites left Menzelinsk], Abbess Margaret was arrested as a supposed
‘counter-revolutionary’ during a service. She was taken out onto the porch,
and having refused her request to partake of the Holy Mysteries, shot her.”
Immediately after the burial service, the sisters of the monastery buried her
behind the altar of the Ascension church where she had been shot.
It was only the next day that the abbess's request to be buried on the very
day of her death, which had at first seemed strange to the priest, became
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