Alyona Arzamasskaya (? — 1670) — organized an uprising in support of Stenka Razin.

Neither the surname nor the patronymic of the ataman Alyona are known. The evidence about her amounts to no more than two official dispatches ("otpiski") from tsarist military governors and a handful of mentions in the books of foreign contemporaries who witnessed the suppression of the "Razin revolt." Yet popular memory has preserved accounts of the heroism of this Russian Joan of Arc — a simple peasant woman who mounted a horse, took up arms, and led thousands of people into battle for justice. Like Joan, Alyona was also betrayed, denounced as a witch, and burned at the stake.

Alyona was born into a peasant family from Vyezdnaya Sloboda, near City of Arzamas. In her youth she was forcibly married to an elderly man. Left a widow, she took monastic vows at the Nikolaevsky Convent in Arzamas. There Alyona learned to read and write and discovered the secrets of folk healing. But monastic life weighed on her, and at the height of the Razin uprising the "staritsa" left the convent and, gathering peasants around her, marched her detachment toward Temnikov in the autumn of 1670 to join forces with the Don Cossack Fyodor Sidorov. Along the way she was joined by great numbers of peasants from Mordovian, Tatar, and Russian villages, so that by the end of the march there were some six thousand of them. For nearly two months Alyona and Fyodor, together with the town assembly, governed Temnikov and settled affairs according to justice. Meanwhile, storm clouds were gathering over the rebels. Prince Yuri Dolgoruky, the chief persecutor and executioner of the Razin followers, sent an army against them under the command of the military governor Likharev. On November 30, fifteen versts from Temnikov near the village of Vedenyapino, the insurgents were defeated, and the head Volzhinskiy was sent with a detachment into the city, which had been left almost without defenders. The town's "better people" came out to meet him with icons, crosses, and thirty forty-rouble coins, bowing in petition that he forgive them for having been "with the thieves' people against their will." When Volzhinskiy entered the city, the last handfuls of rebels were desperately defending the governor's office and the cathedral. Alyona took refuge in the cathedral and continued to shoot arrows from her bow. She fired her last arrow, and seeing that further resistance was impossible, she unbuckled her saber, flung it aside, and threw herself down toward the altar with her arms outstretched. It was in this pose that the soldiers who burst into the church found her. Describing this woman in military armor worn over a monastic cassock, a foreign mercenary admiringly compared her to an Amazon. She surpassed men in her extraordinary courage and strength: in all of Dolgoruky's army not a single man could be found who was able to draw her bow to the full! …On December 4, the tsarist military governor Prince Dolgoruky himself entered the city with his army. Two versts from the city gates he was met by the archpriest, the clergy, and "the people of Temnikov of all ranks" bearing icons and crosses. Behind this procession were led, bound by a single rope, "the thief and heretic the staritsa who thieved and gathered an army to herself, Alyona, Fyodor Sidorov, the priests Savva and Pimen who had supported the uprising, and fifteen more rebels." The military governor's verdict was merciless: the rebels brought before him he ordered hanged on Ryabchikova Hill beyond the Moksha River. And Alyona, together with her "thieving letters and roots," was to be burned in a log frame on the main square of Temnikov. The "Russian Joan of Arc" met her death sentence calmly, and endured her tortures with such fortitude that her executioners were shaken and spread the rumor that Alyona was a witch and therefore felt no pain. "Her courage was also displayed at the execution itself, when she calmly climbed to the edge of the hut constructed in the Muscovite fashion from wood, straw, and other combustible materials, and, making the sign of the cross, boldly leapt inside and pulled the lid shut behind her. And even as everything was engulfed in flames, she did not utter a sound." Having dealt with the indomitable Alyona, the punitive forces tried to destroy even her memory. For a long time afterward, people passed down the last words of the heroine as she walked to the pyre: "If only there could be found more people who acted as they ought, and fought just as bravely, then surely Prince Yuri would have turned back!" And yet no chains were found at the site of the execution, so a belief kindled in the popular imagination that Alyona had been saved, was alive, and would soon mount her horse again… And she did return! Across the centuries, the image of the people's champion was brought to life in the works of Dmitry Kedrin, Vasily Shukshin, Sergey Zlobin, and in the paintings of Nizhny Novgorod artists Sergey Sorokin and Galiy Nadyezhdin.