Russian myrrh-bearing women

The feat of faith of Orthodox women in Soviet times is comparable to the feat of evangelical myrrh-bearing women who did not leave Christ during suffering and after death.
Thanks to the feat of fidelity to Russian myrrh-bearing women in Russia, there is someone to restore faith. “It was they who maintained continuity until the time when it was no longer scary to confess Christ. Myrrh-bearing women of our land carried this faith »

Persecution Strengthens Faith

The Lord preserved His Holy Orthodoxy in Russia with His all-good and wise Providence during the time of the Atheism. The old women - the “white handkerchiefs”, the sorcerers of their lost relatives, and the gray-bearded elders, reminiscent of the Old Testament patriarchs with their impressive appearance, were indestructible in faith. All the anger and fury of the God-opponents, meeting their strongest confession of Christ our God, were powerless. not only old men and women, but believers of all ages, and this wheat on the field of Christ was without tares.

Saint Tikhon, the patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, who took upon himself the hardships of protecting the Russian Orthodox Church from the Red Terror, lovingly called the “white handkerchiefs” of unknown women who, after the October Revolution of 1917, did not leave their Christian ministry, saved the faith, saved the icons from the ravaged temples.
"White handkerchiefs saved the Russian Church." It was the “white handkerchiefs,” that is, the Orthodox grandmothers who continued to visit churches during all the years of atheistic domination, saved them from closure, and the Church in Russia from complete destruction. The Soviet power of these grandmothers, due to their low social status, did not particularly persecute them, hoping that they would simply die out over time. But generations changed, and “white handkerchiefs” continued to fill the temples, and the atheistic power was forced to reckon with this.

However, not only these little-known, quiet parishioners strengthened the Russian Church during the years of persecution. There were those whose feat left a greater mark in history. There were many among Russian women and those who had suffered for the blood for Christ. The scale of their feat is such that they surpassed everything revealed by the Russian Church in all the centuries of its history before the bloody persecution of the twentieth century. This fact is illustrated quite clearly by the Mesyatseslov (calendar of the memory of saints) of the Russian Orthodox Church, its state until 1917, and how it changed, including the presence of female names in it, over the past two and a half decades.