Henrietta Catharina Luisa Schneider (, tr. ; 20 January 1856 – 4 September 1918) was a Baltic German tutor at the court of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra. She taught Alexandra Russian before her marriage, just as she had some years earlier taught Russian to the Tsarina's sister, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna before her marriage to Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia.

Schneider was murdered by the Bolsheviks at Perm in the fall of 1918 along with lady in waiting Anastasia Hendrikova. Schneider and Hendrikova were canonized as martyrs by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in 1981, in spite of the fact she was a Lutheran.

Catherine Schneider

Biography

Schneider, nicknamed "Trina," was born in Saint Petersburg to a Baltic German family and was the niece of the former imperial physician Dr. Hirsch. Her father was a Hof-Councillor. A courtier remembered her as "infinitely sweet tempered and good hearted." Schneider was also primly Victorian. She once refused to permit the four grand duchesses to put on a play because it contained the word "stockings." Schneider was devoted to the Empress and willingly followed her into imprisonment following the Russian Revolution of 1917. She was separated from the family at Ekaterinburg and imprisoned for months at Perm. In September 1918 the elderly Schneider and the thirty-one-year-old Hendrikova were driven to a forest outside Perm, told to march forward, and were killed with a rifle butt.

Catherine Schneider

The bodies of Hendrikova and Schneider were recovered by the Whites in May 1919, though the whereabouts of their final resting place remains a mystery.

Catherine Schneider

See also

New Martyr

Romanov sainthood

Notes

Rappaport, Helen. Four Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses. Pan Macmillan, 2014.

External links

ROCOR

1856 births

1918 deaths

Canonised servants of the Romanov household

Baltic-German people

German people executed abroad

20th-century executions by Russia

Eastern Orthodox Christians from Germany

Executed German women

20th-century Christian saints

Christian female saints of the Late Modern era

Court of Nicholas II of Russia