An avant-garde poet in a highly intellectual circle in St Petersburg, a member of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party, twice married and divorced, a mother of three, then a nun in the Russian Orthodox Church in exile, finally a resistance worker in occupied France, deported to the Ravensbruck concentration camp. where she died shortly before the Liberation- in outline this was the life of Mother Marie Skobtsova.

She was born Elisabeth Pilenko on 8 December 1891 (old calendar) in Riga, Latvia. Her family belonged to the Ukranian landed nobility, and one of her 18th century ancestors had married the sister of the Empress Anne of Russia. After her father's premature death, she and her mother went to live in St Petersburg. Although the family had relatives close to court circles, the young girl, whose poetic talent was already evident, was principally to be found among the avant-garde literary elite. Lise was close to the symbolist poet Alexander Blok. At eighteen years she married Dimitre Kouzmin-Karavayev, a lawyer and member of the Social Democratic Party. The young couple went out a great deal, forming part of the refined group who congregated around the writer Vyacheslav Ivanov.

Eventually, however, the discussions in this milieu, which often went on into the early morning, bored the young woman. She condemned the progressive intelligentsia for talking and talking about revolution without being prepared to give their lives for it. She herself was drawn towards a mystic populism, a messianism of the Russian people and earth. During the same period she began to feel desire to deepen her knowledge of the Orthodox Christian religion. St Petersburg was a centre of what has come to be known as the Russian religious renaissance of the early 20th century. She was one of the first women authorised to follow courses at St Petersburg Theological Academy as a free student.

Meanwhile her marriage had collapsed. When the Russian Revolution broke out, Lise joined the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, a group of idealists who believed, not without a certain confusion, in Russian populism with its aspirations to pravda (justice-truth) and the ideals of western democracy. But the cynical realism of Lenin's Bolshevik Party triumphed in Russia, eliminating the Socialist Revolutionary majority of the first democratically elected constituent assembly. She married a young army officer, Daniel Skobstov, during the civil war. Without renouncing her Socialist-Revolutionary ideals, or perhaps because of them, Elisabeth Skobtsova. shared in her husband's struggle against Bolshevism. The events of the civil war separated the couple. After the defeat of the White armies and the evacuation of Crimea, the only possibility was exile together with her mother and her daughter from her first marriage. Following the stream of Russian emigrants, the whole family settled in Paris in 1922, which had become the capital of "Russia outside the borders".

Life in Paris

Here the life of Elisabeth Skobtsova was to take a new course. The bonds between her and her husband became looser. Though remaining friends, they parted in 1927. She became totally involved in the Action chretienne des Etudiants russes ; (ACER) and the Orthodox youth movement which sprang up spontaneously among the Russian immigrants. This movement benefited from the influence of the Russian religious revival which had re-opened a dialogue between the intelligentsia and the Orthodox Church. Prominent intellectuals like the Marxist economist Sergei Bulgakov and the libertarian philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev underwent a veritable conversion. These "great converts", whose faith had undergone the trial of doubt, inspired young people in exile who aspired (to use their term) to "ecclesialise life", in other words, to allow the light of Christ to penetrate all of life in its social and personal dimensions, and to turn the actions of a culture into worship "in spirit and in truth". Bulgakov, was ordained a priest in 1918, taught dogmatics at St Sergius Theological Institute, which was founded in Paris in 1925. He became Lise's confessor and "spiritual father". She also became involved with other leading representatives of this new Christian intelligentsia.

As itinerant secretary of the ACER from 1928, Skobtsova visited Russian student groups being formed in university cities throughout France- Lyons, Marseilles, Toulouse, Strasbourg. Soon she realised that she could not limit herself to the university world. More and more she went into industrial regions, in working class areas where Russian emigres had found jobs in mines, and mills and the emerging chemical industry. During her travels she encountered Russians who were chronically ill; those with tuberculosis, alcoholics, people committed to psychiatric hospitals who could not be cared for because they could not communicate with the French-speaking doctors and nurses.

During the summer of 1932, after her monastic profession in March of that year, Mother Marie, as she was now known, visited women's monastic communities in Latvia and Estonia, where a regular and traditional monastic life continued. She returned convinced that these traditional forms were not appropriate for the Russian immigrants in Western Europe. Not only were they out of date, but they also struck her as contaminated by a "bourgeois" spirit diametrically opposed to the radicalism of the true monastic vocation. She believed that for many women monasticism represented an attempt to create a spiritual family that would provide them with security. The monastery was a refuge, the monastic community another family, where one could feel at ease, "protected by high walls from the ugliness and misery of the world".

Perhaps this concept was appropriate for another age, but not for the apocalyptic 1930s, with the victory of fascism. But it went further than that. Influenced by Lev Gillet, Mother Marie rediscovered the eschatological dynamism of early Christianity. She dreamed of a monasticism relatively renewed to respond to the call of the "signs of the times", a monasticism lived out not in the desert or behind protective walls but "in the world".

Russian immigrants were often among the first victims of the severe economic crisis in France. Mother Marie decided to open a house where, as long as there was room; all who came would be welcomed as brothers and sisters. She had no money, but she believed that, like the Apostle Peter, fixing her eyes on Jesus, she must learn to walk on the water. Thanks to gifts- often from Anglican friends- she managed to acquire her first house, 9 Villa de Saxe, in the seventh district. When this proved too small she bought a derelict blinding in the rue de Lourmel in the 15th district.

The Russian nun, with her wide smile, her hair all over the place, and her clothes stained with traces of what she had most recently been doing in the kitchen or the paint workshop, became a popular figure. To the rue de Lourmel came two or three nuns, a priest, the house chaplain, a professor of theology from St Sergius, and penniless unemployed people. Also, Russian petty offenders who after serving their sentence had nowhere to go, people shut up as mentally in but whom, since they were not considered dangerous, Mother Marie managed to have released from the psychiatric hospital. There, too, were young women whom she had brought out of prostitution, and from time to time, artists and dancers from the Russian opera or members of a Roman Catholic Gregorian choir.

The academy of religious philosophy founded by Berdyaev met in her house, and she took part in its meetings. She herself, with some friends, set up Action orthodoxe in 1935; this was a body responsible for a variety of activities in society as well as a spiritual fraternity of Orthodox inspiration and a reflective group. As such it published a journal Novii Grad ('-Me New City") which dealt with religious issues and social and political problems in a spirit of ecumenical openness.

War Years

Mother Marie had long foreseen the coming of the Second World War. After the "disaster" of 1940 came the German occupation, the food shortages, which hit the poor the hardest, then the hunt for the Jews, beginning with the foreign Jews. Mother Marie, one of whose best friends was the Russian Jew Elie Foundaminsky, did not hesitate for a moment. Her house soon became a refuge for those who felt endangered before they could be smuggled into the free zone. False baptism certificates were provided for those who wanted them.

It was said that Mother Marie was betrayed by someone who had eaten at her table. One day while she was out, the Gestapo came and arrested her son Yuri, a student, Dimitri Klepinine and Pianov, the administrator of Action orthodoxe. Mother Marie learned that they would be liberated if she gave herself up to the German police. When she went to them, she was arrested, but neither her son nor her friends were freed. All four were deported: the men to Buchenwald, Mother Marie to Ravensbruck, only Planov returned. About Mother Marie's behaviour during her captivity we have the testimonies of several co-detainees, including a niece of General de Gaulle, Madame Genevieve de Gaulle-Antonioz, who had a deep friendship and admiration for her.

Endowed with exceptional vitality sustained by an unbreakable faith, Mother Marie was well armed to stand up to the terrible test of concentration camp life. "Everybody in the block knew her". recalled one of her companions. "She would get on with the young people in the camp and with their parents, with people of progressive ideas, with believers and with non-believers". The last months prior to the Liberation were terrible. Suffering from dysentery, Mother Marie saw her strength failing. On a scrap of paper she scribbled a final message to Metropolitan Eulogius and to her spiritual father. These are my wishes I fully accept suffering... And I wish to accept death, if it comes, as a grace from above".

Nothing certain is known of Mother Marie's end. According to de Gaulle-Antonioz, she was separated from the other detainees, transferred to the Jungen-Lager, where the sick and the handicapped were left to die of hunger in isolation and utter destitution. Others say her name appeared on the list of prisoners gassed on 31 March 1945. It has also been said that she took the place of a young Polish woman due to be gassed. A few days later, in early April, the camp was liquidated in the face of the advance of the Russian army.

Marie Skobtsova's life might appear as a total failure. Her two marriages were broken; her children died young. She may have felt responsible for the arrest of her son. She never saw the victory over the Nazis for which she had so much hoped. Action orthodoxe ' died' shortly after her. She has no disciples within Orthodox monasticism. Yet she is still alive. Her passionate appeals raise questions and arouse us. Her influence within Orthodoxy after her death could perhaps be compared to that of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the Protestant world. Like Bonhoeffer she searched for a "secularised" Christianity. Over and above all the paralysing structure, she continues to call us to go towards Him who comes.

In November 1995 I was in Washington DC, and took the opportunity to spend a day at the Museum of the Holocaust. It was an immensely moving and disturbing day to be faced with not only the inhumanity of the Nazi regime during the 1930s and the war years, but also to know that the "silence of good people" towards the persecution of the Jews and other minority groups enabled such horrific deeds to go unchallenged for too long. It is even worse to know how silent the Christian community was, not only in Europe, but around the world. However, there were many individuals who did not hide their abhorrence of the Nazi's, and Mother Marie was one of them. Her name has been added to the 'Roll of Honour" in the Museum of the Holocaust in Washington DC, of those who sheltered, defended or aided Jews to escape and then paid the ultimate price of subsequent arrest, the camps and death.
Leonie B Liveris

Further reading:

Pearl of Great Price. The Life of Mother Marie Skobtsova, 1891-1945
Sergei Hackel
Foreward by Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh. Revised Edition (1982)
St Vladimir's Seminary Press :Crestwood, New York. ISBN 0-913836-85-0