Martyr Olga (Olga Vasilyevna Evdokimova) was born on July 11, 1896, in the village of Novo-Rozhdestvenskoye, Ramenskaya Volost, Bronnitsky Uyezd, Moscow Province. Her father worked as a forester on the estate of landowner Ilyin. Olga completed her education at the village school and married a peasant, Pyotr Matveyevich Evdokimov. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, he was drafted into the army, and after the war, he worked at a factory in Ramenskoye. From 1914, he served as a watchman in the village of Mikhnevo. He passed away in 1921, leaving Olga with two children.
Since childhood, Olga was a devoted parishioner of the Church of St. John the Baptist in Novo-Rozhdestvenskoye and actively participated in all events related to the church.
After the church was closed in 1937, Olga Vasilyevna was arrested on September 4, 1937, along with the priests, the psalmist, and the church warden. She was taken to Taganka Prison in Moscow and interrogated the same day.
Interrogation Transcript:
—Give detailed testimony about your connections with the clergy of the parish.
—My connection with the clergy was based on religious beliefs and church rites, meaning I actively attended church, welcomed priests into my home, and considered them my spiritual mentors, with whom I have maintained contact to this day.
—Give detailed testimony about your counter-revolutionary statements against representatives of Soviet power among the church crowd.
—I said that the church should not be closed, and that we needed to elect a representative and send a petition to Moscow to keep the church open. I also said that they talk about freedom, yet here we are being oppressed again, and that it is our local government who is persecuting us believers.
—Who instructed you to seize the church keys from the warden and hand them over to Kopeykin, warning her not to give them to the authorities?
— I did not seize the keys from the church warden. I only said that the keys were irrelevant—if they put a seal on the door or change the lock, our keys would be of no use.
—Who incited you to engage in open anti-Soviet agitation and call for resistance against the Soviet government’s decision to close the church?
— No one incited me. I consciously took this hostile path myself because the Soviet government acted wrongly by closing the church in our village.
On October 17, 1937, the NKVD troika sentenced Olga Vasilyevna to ten years in a forced labor camp.
She died in prison on February 10, 1938, and was buried in an unmarked grave.
From Igumen Damaskin (Orlovsky), Lives of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia in the 20th Century. January, (Tver, 2005), 402–404.
