Blessed Matrona of Anemnyasevo, the Confessor

Matrona Belyakova was born in 1864 into a poor peasant family in the village of Anemnyasevo, in the Ryazan region. Blind from childhood, she was later unable to walk and lived in her village house. From her late teens, people say, she had the gift of foresight and of consoling the troubled, and hundreds of people came to her for advice and prayer.

In 1935 the Soviet authorities arrested her as a “harmful element” and she died in 1936 in a Moscow hospital for the chronically ill. A life of her was written by the priest Nicholas Pravdolyubov and his brother, who were themselves arrested and sentenced to labour camp. She was glorified locally in 1999 and for the whole Russian Church in 2000, as a confessor.