The Martyred Bishops

The hierarch-martyrs who bore the persecution at the head of the Church: Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev, the first bishop to fall (1918); Metropolitan Veniamin of Petrograd, killed in the 1922 valuables campaign; Metropolitan Peter (Polyansky) of Krutitsy, the patriarchal locum tenens shot in 1937 after a decade of imprisonment; and Metropolitan Kirill (Smirnov) of Kazan, Patriarch Tikhon’s designated first candidate for the locum tenens, shot the same year. The destruction of the episcopate was a strategic aim of the persecution, and these four stand for a martyred hierarchy.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

Why the Bishops Mattered

The Soviet assault on the Church was, among other things, an assault on the episcopate, because the bishops are the Church’s structural principle: they ordain the clergy, guard the canonical succession, and hold the local churches in communion. To imprison and kill the bishops was to attempt to decapitate the Church, and the state pursued this with method — so that by the end of the 1930s only about four ruling hierarchs remained at liberty out of a pre-revolutionary episcopate of well over a hundred (Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982, SVS Press, 1984, vol. 1; see The Terror of the 1930s). Four hierarch-martyrs, drawn from the two great waves of the persecution, stand for the whole.

Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev (†1918)

Metropolitan Vladimir (Bogoyavlensky) of Kiev and Galicia was the protomartyr of the hierarchs — the first bishop of the Russian Church killed in the persecution. A senior hierarch who had occupied in turn the three primatial sees of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev, he was seized by armed men from within the Kiev Caves Lavra on the night of 25 January 1918 (7 February, new style), led outside the walls, and shot and bayoneted; his body was found the next morning near the monastery wall (OrthodoxWiki, “Vladimir (Bogoyavlensky) of Kiev”; Orthodox Church in America, “Saint Vladimir, Metropolitan of Kiev and Gallich,” oca.org). His martyrdom, at the very outset of the terror, gave the Local Council then sitting in Moscow its first martyr-bishop and set the note for all that followed; and it is his commemoration date that anchors the feast of the entire Synaxis of the New Martyrs (see The Feast and the Cult). He was glorified by the Moscow Patriarchate at the Bishops’ Council of 1992 (OrthodoxWiki, “Vladimir (Bogoyavlensky) of Kiev,” on the 1992 glorification).

Metropolitan Veniamin of Petrograd (†1922)

Metropolitan Veniamin (Kazansky) of Petrograd and Gdov was the great hierarch-martyr of the second wave, the church-valuables campaign of 1922. Elected to his see by the free vote of the clergy and people of Petrograd — one of the few such elections in the Church’s modern history — he was beloved as a pastor and firm against both the sacrilegious seizure of the consecrated vessels and the state-sponsored Renovationist schism. Arrested on 29 May 1922, he was the principal defendant in the Petrograd show trial, and the court sentenced him to death together with Archimandrite Sergius (Shein) and the laymen Yuri Novitsky and Ivan (Ioann) Kovsharov. The four were shot in secret on the night of 12/13 August 1922 (holynewmartyrs.org, “Hieromartyr Benjamin, Metropolitan of Petrograd, and Those with Him”; OrthodoxWiki, “Benjamin of Petrograd,” on the arrest, trial, and execution; see The Revolution and the First Blood). Metropolitan Veniamin and his companions were glorified by the Moscow Patriarchate at the Bishops’ Council of 1992.

Metropolitan Peter (Polyansky) of Krutitsy (†1937)

Metropolitan Peter (Pyotr Fyodorovich Polyansky) of Krutitsy carried the very succession of the patriarchate into martyrdom. When St. Tikhon died in 1925, Peter, as the senior of the candidates able to act, became patriarchal locum tenens — the guardian of the vacant patriarchal throne, since the state would not permit an election. He held the office only a matter of months in freedom before his arrest late in 1925, and thereafter he remained the nominal locum tenens through nearly twelve years of imprisonment, isolation, and exile, refusing under pressure to resign the office or to make the political declarations the authorities demanded of him. He was finally shot on 10 October 1937, near Magnitogorsk in the Chelyabinsk region, at the height of the Great Terror (OrthodoxWiki, “Peter (Polyansky) of Krutitsy,” on his locum tenens from 1925, his long imprisonment, and his execution on 10 October 1937; Orthodox Church in America synaxarion, oca.org). His long refusal to buy his freedom by resigning or by yielding to the state’s demands makes him a peculiarly pure case of the confessing hierarch who became a martyr; his deputy Sergius, meanwhile, governed the Church and issued the 1927 Declaration in Peter’s name and absence (see St. Tikhon and the Patriarchal Church and The Glorifications: Methodology). Metropolitan Peter was glorified by the Moscow Patriarchate among the New Martyrs (canonized 1997).

Metropolitan Kirill (Smirnov) of Kazan (†1937)

Metropolitan Kirill (Konstantin Ilarionovich Smirnov) of Kazan and Sviyazhsk was, by St. Tikhon’s own will, the first-named candidate for the office of locum tenens — the man Tikhon regarded as the senior hierarch of the Church — and he became one of the most respected figures of the persecuted episcopate. Repeatedly arrested and exiled from the early 1920s onward, Kirill became a leading conscience among the bishops who could not in conscience accept Metropolitan Sergius’s 1927 Declaration and its terms of loyalty to the atheist state; his correspondence with Sergius on the limits of a bishop’s submission to the civil power is one of the key texts of the whole controversy (on Kirill’s stance in the Sergianism dispute, see The Glorifications: Methodology). He spent the years to his death in exile and imprisonment and was shot on 20 November 1937 at the Lisiy (Fox) Ravine near Chimkent in Kazakhstan, together with Metropolitan Joseph (Petrovых) of Petrograd, another leader of the non-Sergian hierarchs (OrthodoxWiki, “Cyril (Smirnov) of Kazan,” and holytrinitymission.com, “Hieromartyr Kirill, Metropolitan of Kazan,” on his execution on 20 November 1937 near Chimkent with Metropolitan Joseph). Metropolitan Kirill was glorified by the Moscow Patriarchate among the New Martyrs at the Jubilee Council of 2000.

The Martyred Episcopate

These four are representative, not exhaustive. Dozens of bishops were shot or died in the camps: the two metropolitans killed together at Chimkent in 1937 are only one instance of how the Terror consumed the senior hierarchy en masse. The point the four make together is that the persecution reached the Church’s very summit and its very structure — the primatial sees (Vladimir), the great metropolitan cities (Veniamin), and the patriarchal succession itself (Peter and Kirill, the two men Tikhon had marked as guardians of his throne). That the Church survived the loss of nearly its whole episcopate is, in the theology of the New Martyrs, itself a sign; that it lost them at all is the measure of what was done to it (Pospielovsky, 1984, vol. 1, on the destruction of the episcopate). The mass of the martyrs, however, was not among the bishops but among the parish clergy and the laity, to whom the next file turns (see The Priest and Lay Martyrs).

See Also

References

  • Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984. (The destruction of the episcopate; the succession crisis; the locum tenens Peter and the 1927 Declaration.)
  • OrthodoxWiki, “Vladimir (Bogoyavlensky) of Kiev”; Orthodox Church in America, “Saint Vladimir, Metropolitan of Kiev and Gallich,” oca.org. (Vladimir’s martyrdom of 25 Jan / 7 Feb 1918; glorification 1992.)
  • “Hieromartyr Benjamin, Metropolitan of Petrograd, and Those with Him,” holynewmartyrs.org; OrthodoxWiki, “Benjamin of Petrograd.” (Veniamin’s arrest, trial, and execution of the night of 12/13 August 1922 with Shein, Novitsky, Kovsharov; glorification 1992.)
  • OrthodoxWiki, “Peter (Polyansky) of Krutitsy”; Orthodox Church in America synaxarion, oca.org. (Peter’s locum tenens from 1925, imprisonment, and execution on 10 October 1937 near Magnitogorsk; glorification 1997.)
  • OrthodoxWiki, “Cyril (Smirnov) of Kazan”; holytrinitymission.com, “Hieromartyr Kirill, Metropolitan of Kazan and Sviyazhsk.” (Kirill as Tikhon’s first candidate for locum tenens; execution on 20 November 1937 near Chimkent with Metropolitan Joseph; glorification 2000.)