Benjamin of Petrograd and Those with Him

The priest's son from Olonets

Vasily Pavlovich Kazansky was born on 17 April 1873 in the Olonets province of the Russian north, the son of a village priest, and was formed in the ordinary way of the clerical estate: seminary at Petrozavodsk, then the St Petersburg Theological Academy. As a student he worked in the Society for the Propagation of Religious and Moral Education, preaching in the factory districts and the poorest quarters of the capital, and it was that work, not the academy, that made him. He was tonsured with the name Benjamin in 1895 and ordained hieromonk in 1896.

He taught and then served as rector of seminaries at Riga, Kholm and Petersburg, and in 1910 was consecrated bishop of Gdov, a vicariate of the capital. As a vicar bishop he was known for being constantly out of his residence: he served in the parish churches of the working districts, went on foot, and was called by the factory people "our bishop" — an unusual reputation for a Russian hierarch of the last years of the empire, and the reason for what happened next.

Elected by the diocese

The revolution of February 1917 swept away the synodal machinery by which bishops had been appointed. In the summer of 1917 the diocese of Petrograd, for the first time in the history of the Russian Church, elected its own bishop, by the votes of the parish clergy and the laity. They chose Benjamin, over candidates of far greater standing, and he became archbishop and then metropolitan of Petrograd and Gdov. It is the single fact that governs everything afterwards: he was not the government's man and never had been, and when the new government came to destroy him it had to destroy his standing with the people first, and could not.

He took part in the Local Council of 1917–1918 which restored the patriarchate, and stood beside Patriarch Tikhon through the first years of the persecution.

The valuables of 1922

The famine on the Volga in 1921–1922 was the occasion the Soviet leadership had been waiting for. A decree of February 1922 ordered the confiscation of church valuables for famine relief; the internal correspondence of the time makes it plain that the object was to break the Church while public sympathy would tolerate it.

Benjamin's response was to give. He declared publicly that everything not consecrated to the altar should be handed over freely for the starving, and that the consecrated vessels too might be melted down if the Church herself offered them — on the one condition that the transfer be made by the parishes and under their own control, and that the faithful should see their gift go to the hungry. On 6 March 1922 he met the state commission and an agreement to that effect was reached; for a few days it looked as though Petrograd would escape the violence that had produced bloodshed at Shuya and elsewhere.

The agreement was repudiated from above. On 24 March a letter appeared in Pravda over the signatures of twelve Petrograd priests denouncing the metropolitan and the church leadership as counter-revolutionaries — the opening move of the Renovationist or "Living Church" schism, by which a body of clergy backed by the state attempted to seize the administration of the Russian Church while Patriarch Tikhon was under arrest.

The excommunication and the arrest

When the leaders of the schism, Alexander Vvedensky foremost among them, presented themselves in Petrograd with a mandate to take over the diocese, Benjamin did the only thing a bishop could do. He declared them outside the Church until they should repent — an act of ordinary canonical discipline, and in the circumstances an act of extraordinary courage, since it directly defied the state that had sent them. He was told plainly that the excommunication would cost lives, and did not withdraw it. He was arrested on 1 June 1922.

The trial

The Petrograd trial opened on 10 June 1922 in the hall of the former Nobles' Assembly, with eighty-six defendants in the dock and the metropolitan at their head, charged with resisting the confiscation of the valuables. It ran a fortnight. Defence witnesses testified for him; his own advocate's speech was widely reported; the crowds outside were large enough that the authorities took precautions. None of it made any difference: the verdict had been settled before the hearing.

Benjamin's own conduct at the trial is what is remembered. He refused to shift responsibility onto any of his clergy, took what he could upon himself, and asked the court to release the others. When asked at the end whether he wished to say anything in his own defence, he said that he was and remained a servant of Christ, and that whatever the court decided — life or death — he would answer it with the same words: "Glory to Thee, O Lord, glory to Thee for all things" — the refrain of the Akathist of Thanksgiving, itself composed in those years in the camps.

On 5 July 1922, at nine in the evening, ten of the accused were sentenced to death. Six sentences were commuted after appeals. Four were carried out.

Those with him

• Archimandrite Sergius, in the world Vasily Pavlovich Shein (b. 1866) — a landowner and jurist, a member of the Fourth State Duma, and secretary of the Local Council of 1917–1918, who took monastic vows after the revolution and became the superior of a Petrograd monastic community and the secretary of the diocesan board of parishes. At the trial he answered the prosecutor's questions about his politics by saying that he had been a monk for four years and had no other business. A venerable martyr.
• Yuri Petrovich Novitsky (b. 1882) — professor of criminal law in the University of Petrograd, a specialist in juvenile justice, and chairman of the board of the united Orthodox parishes of the city; a widower with a young daughter, whose letter of farewell to her survives. Commemorated as the martyr George.
• Ivan Mikhailovich Kovsharov (b. 1878) — an advocate, formerly the legal counsel of the Kiev Caves Lavra and then of the Petrograd parish board; the wit of the four, who is said to have joked with his guards to the end. Commemorated as the martyr John.

The execution

In the night of 12–13 August 1922 the four were taken out and shot. Before the execution they were shaved and dressed in rags, so that the men detailed to shoot them should not recognise a metropolitan, an archimandrite and two gentlemen of the city; the precaution is recorded by the tradition and is the detail that has fixed itself in the memory of the Russian Church. The place is not certainly known — the Porokhovye district on the northern edge of Petrograd and the Rzhevsky artillery range are both named — and the bodies were never given up. The commemoration is kept on the church date 31 July, the Old Calendar equivalent of 13 August.

Glorification

Their memory was kept privately through the Soviet decades and openly in the Russian emigration. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia numbered them among the New Martyrs and Confessors in 1981, and the Moscow Patriarchate glorified them at the Bishops' Council of April 1992, among the first canonisations of the new martyrs after the fall of the Soviet state. They are commemorated on this day and again with the whole company of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, whose feast is movable.