Venerable Anna Abrikosova

Anna Ivanovna Abrikosova TOSD (Russian: Анна Ивановна Абрикосова; 23 January 1882 – 23 July 1936), later known as Mother Catherine of Siena (Russian: Екатери́на Сие́нская, Ekaterína Siénskaya), 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.