Veniamin of Petrograd

Life and Ministry

Vasily Pavlovich Kazansky was born at the village of Andreevskoye in the Olonets Governorate in AD 1873, the son of a parish priest, ordained monk and given the name Veniamin (Benjamin) at the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy in AD 1895, and consecrated bishop of Gdov in AD 1910. Elected by the Petrograd diocesan congress in the wake of the February Revolution of AD 1917 — one of the first popular episcopal elections in modern Russian history — he became Metropolitan of Petrograd on 6 March AD 1917 and was confirmed by the Local Council of Moscow that summer. He governed the Petrograd diocese through the Bolshevik seizure of power in October AD 1917, the closure of the theological academy, the nationalization of church properties, and the famine of AD 1921, maintaining open services in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra and at the Kazan Cathedral.

Circumstances of Death

In February AD 1922 the Soviet government decreed the confiscation of all consecrated vessels from Orthodox churches for famine relief — a measure widely understood as a pretext for the systematic plunder of liturgical metals. Veniamin published a pastoral letter accepting the principle of relief but specifying canonical procedures by which sacred vessels could be replaced and ransomed in their function. The Petrograd Cheka treated the pastoral letter as obstruction and arrested him on 31 May AD 1922 with eighty-six other clergy and laity. Tried by the Petrograd revolutionary tribunal in a show trial chaired by Nikolai Krylenko in June and July AD 1922, Veniamin and three of his co-defendants — Archimandrite Sergius, Yuri Novitsky, and Ivan Kovsharov — were sentenced to death and shot in the small hours of 13 August AD 1922 at the railway station of Porokhovye in the northern outskirts of Petrograd, in a forest pit dug by the Cheka. His body was never recovered.

Legacy

Metropolitan Veniamin was glorified as a New Martyr by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in AD 1981 and by the Moscow Patriarchate in AD 1992, in the calendar of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. The Petrograd Cathedral of the Theological Academy holds his memorial annually on 13 August. His witness is that the metropolitan dies for the chalice: the bishop who would not permit the casual confiscation of the consecrated cup gave his own body in its place. The Russian Orthodox Church in Saint Petersburg, restored after AD 1991, treats the line of new martyrs that begins with Veniamin as the founding patrimony of its post-Soviet reconstruction.