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.

Anna became the foundress of a Byzantine Catholic sisters' community of the Third Order of St. Dominic, who all vowed in August 1917, similarly to the Discalced Carmelite Martyrs of Compiègne, to offer themselves up as a sacrifice to the Holy Trinity for the Salvation of the Russian people.

The collector and editor of a 2001 anthology of women's memoirs from the Gulag, feminist historian Veronica Shapovalova, has highly praised Anna Abrikosova as, "a woman of remarkable erudition and strength of will", who, "managed to organize the sisters in such a way that even after their arrest they continued their work.

Volodymyr Prokopiv and by visiting Dominican Friars from the People's Republic of Poland until 1979; when the surviving sisters arranged for Soviet Jewish jazz musician and recent convert Georgii Friedmann to be secretly and illegally ordained by a Bishop of the underground Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.

[2] Furthermore, because Nobel Prize-winning Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn interviewed the surviving Greek-Catholic Dominican sister Nora Rubashova in Moscow during his research process,[3] Mother Catherine and the persecution of her monastic community are mentioned briefly in the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago.

[12] A "Family Chronicle" by Khrisanf Abrikosov, however, alleges that Anna's mother, who was suffering from postpartum depression and unable to face the imminent death of her husband from tuberculosis, in reality committed suicide six months after the birth of their daughter by taking poison.

She was a wonderfully nice and exceptionally refined person, never angry and equally kind to everybody; to her relatives and friends, the ten (and after the birth of another boy eleven) children and the numerous nurses, housekeepers, governesses, and other servants rich Russian families in days past.

"[15] Every year, the summers were spent at "The Oaks" (Russian: Дубы), a Chekhovian dacha and country estate at Tarasovka, Moscow Governorate, which Nikolai Abrikosov had purchased from an ethnic German businessman.

Chains were sometimes still visible on the walls and the house was said, by the servants, to be haunted by the ghost of Vanka Kain,[17] an infamous, "gangster, kidnapper, [and] burglar", who was, "the scourge of Moscow during the 1730s and '40s", and who, despite eventually becoming a police informant, remained a local folk hero.

[25][26] While Anna Abrikosova was, according to Lady Dorothy Howard, "a nice Russian girl of the anti-government type", and, while sympathetic to the agrarian socialist Narodniks and other Far Left groups, she opposed anarchism and also refused to join any secret society or paramilitary organization.

[35] While studying history from 1901 to 1903, Anna Abrikosova, according to a 1936 obituary written by Hélène Iswolsky and published in l'Année Dominicaine, was given the English language nickname "In Dead Earnest", by her fellow students.

"[38] At this time, Anna's cousin and adopted brother, Khrisanf Nikolaevich Abrikosov, was living with many fellow Russian political exiles, including at least one former member of the terrorist organization Narodnaya Volya, as part of the Tolstoyan commune in Croydon, Surrey.

At the urging of her fellow students, Anna formed a famine relief fund to set up a soup kitchen at Tarasovka and, to help raising money, imported embroidered Russian peasant women's scarves.

The other, whom Howard referred to only as "Sandro", was alleged in a letter dated January 18, 1904, either, "out of dispetto", ("spite") or having possibly, "ceased to care for Ania", to have recently become engaged to a princess and junior member of the British royal family.

Her paternal grandmother had forced her 17-year old aunt, Glafira Abrikosova, into an arranged marriage to a much older member of the Russian nobility, who expected his wife to tolerate live openly on a dilapidated country estate with both her husband and his mistress.

Nikolai Alexeievich Abrikosov then spent the next decade bribing corrupt civil service officials working in the Most Holy Synod until he finally obtained the signature of Tsar Alexander III on a document granting his sister Glafira an Orthodox ecclesiastical divorce.

"[51] It is very likely, therefore, that her Aunt Glafira's experiences were among the reasons why, after Anna Abrikosova left Girton College without receiving a degree, she returned to Moscow and, rather than marrying above her station, she instead accepted a marriage proposal from her first cousin, Vladimir Abrikosov.

[60] For this reason, many years later Anna Abrikosova would write, both in defense of the divinity of Jesus Christ and as a very harsh criticism of her younger self, "And when He at last definitively declared himself to be God, He placed all of His law as a binding obligation upon all mankind without exception.

"[64] According to Father Georgii Friedman, Vladimir and Anna Abrikosov experienced a life-changing vision eerily reminiscent of the one described in the 37th chapter of the Book of Ezekiel, "Once during their travels in Europe, the couple was walking in the evening along the seaside at sunset, watching people strolling along.

[68] Following her conversion, Anna Abrikosova went on reading and came to both enjoy and prefer Dominican spirituality, particularly Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire's biography of Saint Dominic,[69] as well as the sermons of Jacques-Marie-Louis Monsabré, and the other writings of St Catherine of Siena.

[78] It should come as no surprise, therefore, that upon their return to such a de-Christianized and hedonistic Moscow, the now deeply religious Vladimir and Anna Abrikosov were, according to Sister Philomena Ejsmont, "heartsick on account of the plight of Russia and the Russian Church...

Felix Wiercynski, a priest who had secretly concealed his membership in the Society of Jesus and entered the Russian Empire in 1904, intending, "to remain in Russia as long as possible to in order to promote the cause of Catholicism among the Orthodox".

Ever since the Abrikosovs' return to Moscow in 1910, plainclothes Tsarist secret police agents attending Tridentine Mass at St Peter and Paul Church had noticed that a growing number of fellow attendees were making the Sign of the Cross in the Byzantine Rite manner.

"[89] According to Hélène Iswolsky, Anna and Vladimir Abrikosova learned after the February Revolution that they had been under Tsarist secret police surveillance and that only the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II had saved them from imminent arrest.

"[109] Mother Catherine wrote Princess Volkonskaya a letter from Moscow, "I am, in the fullest sense of the word, alone with half naked children, with sisters who are wearing themselves out, with a youthful, wonderful, saintly but terribly young priest, Father Nikolai Alexandrov, who himself needs support, and with parishioners dismayed and bewildered, while I myself am waiting to be arrested, because when they searched here, they took away our Constitution and our rules.

"[112] Shortly before the Supreme Collegium of the OGPU handed down sentences, Mother Catherine told the sisters of her community, "Probably every one of you, having given your love to God and following in His way, has in your heart more than once asked Christ to grant you the opportunity to share in His sufferings.

"[127] Also according to Georgii Friedman, the surviving Sisters had acquired from their visiting chaplains an exceptionally rare and precious copy of the Greek-Catholic Horologion (Часocлoвъ, or "Chasoslov") in Old Church Slavonic, which they used unfailingly for chanting communal prayers for Orthros, Vespers, and All Night Vigil.

[129] Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Father Georgii Friedman and his fellow Russian Catholics, most of whom were directly linked to the surviving Abrikosov Dominican Sisters, began to cautiously appear in the open.

Robert Hugh Benson's subtle contempt for the Eastern Catholic Churches[135] and "Greek Christianity",[136] Anna Abrikosova also translated his dystopian novel Lord of the World from English to Russian shortly before the Bolshevik Revolution.

As was often the case with those whom they arrested before the Khrushchev thaw, the Soviet secret police chose to charge the Abrikosov sisters with being a terrorist organization with the covert backing of the Vatican and western foreign intelligence services and who were plotting the assassination of Joseph Stalin as a decapitation strike, followed by violent regime change.