Nun Ia, in the world Olga Ivanovna Repina, was born in June, 1889 in in the village of Starkovo, Vysokovskaya volost, Yaroslavl province. She finished her studies at the Konstantinovskaya gymnasium, became a typist, and before the revolution served in Neftepromyshlenny share society, then in the Russian Groznensky standard, from 1918 in the regional department of Social Security.
In the same year she visited Optina Desert and fell in love with monasticism. From 1919 she was working in the Vyborg children’s hospital, and from 1921 in the “Tremoss” trust. In February, 1922 she was retired because of invalidity. In 1923 she was arrested for “anti-Soviet agitation” and “the spreading of counter-revolutionary appeals” – that is, distributing the appeals of Patriarch Tikhon. In 1925 she was secretly tonsured into the mantia with the name Ia by Bishop Sergius (Druzhinin). She was a member of the parish council of the church of the Resurrection.
On January 7, 1930 she was arrested in connection with the case of the Petrograd branch of the True Orthodox Church, and was cast into Petrograd Domzak. During her interrogation she said:
“I belong to the group of the Josephites*, since the Josephites stand on the correct and Orthodox path… I cannot rejoice at the destruction of churches and the persecution, and also at the harassment of the faith of Christ, as does Metropolitan Sergius, I cannot accept the closing of houses of prayer… Soviet power serves as, or is a weapon for, persecution against the Christian faith.”
* The Josephites were followers of St. Joseph the Metropolitan of Petrograd
On August 3 she was sentenced in accordance with articles 58-10 and 58-11 to five (according to another source, three) years in the camps. In September she was sent to Solovki. In 1935 she was released from camp and exiled for three years to the north. At the end of the 1930s she was released with restrictions on her domicile, and settled in Novgorod, where she joined Schema-Nun Anastasia.
The two nuns lived a strict ascetic life, and were served by Hieromonk Tikhon (Zorin) and Fr. Michael Rozhdestvensky, who buried Mother Ia. She died at the end of the 1970s and was buried in one plot with Schema-Nun Anastasia in Novgorod cemetery.