Venerable Martyr Maria was born in 1869 in the city of Yaroslavl into the family of a factory worker, Vasily Zeitlin. In 1886, she entered the Bogoroditse-Smolensky Novodevichy Convent as a novice. After the revolution, the monastery was looted and closed. Nun Maria settled on Bolshaya Pirogovskaya Street, where she gathered together with other sisters.
Informants who lived in the same building as Nun Maria or nearby regularly reported to the NKVD that the former sisters of the monastery would sometimes gather together and hold conversations, comparing their present life with the pre-revolutionary period. The authorities arrested her on March 21, 1938, and the next day she was interrogated.
On June 3, 1938, an NKVD troika sentenced her to eight years of imprisonment in a corrective labor camp. On December 7, 1938, she arrived at Siblag, where she died on December 15 and was buried in an unknown grave.
