New Martyr Elena Chernova

Elena Chernova was a Russian Orthodox laywoman numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, the great company of believers who suffered under the Soviet anti-religious persecution of the twentieth century. The in-repo record places her death during that persecution in 1942; Russian church-calendar sources record her repose in the labor camps in 1943. She is commemorated on September 4 by the old (Julian) calendar, which corresponds to September 17 on the civil calendar.

Comparatively little is preserved about her life. Russian Orthodox calendar entries relate that she was born in 1874 into a peasant family and that she was arrested in 1937 on a charge of "counter-revolutionary activity," a standard accusation of the period, said to have arisen from her association with priests and devout people. By tradition she was sentenced by an NKVD troika to eight years in the labor camps, where she ultimately died.

Her name was added to the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, the collective commemoration established as the Russian Orthodox Church recovered and honored the memory of those who perished for the faith under the Soviet state. The Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church glorified her among the new martyrs by a decision dated December 26, 2006.