Agathangel Preobrazhensky

Agathangel (born Alexander Lavrentievich Preobrazhensky) was a hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, metropolitan of Yaroslavl and Rostov, and later a glorified confessor among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. He was born on 27 September 1854 in the village of Mochily, Venevsky district, Tula Governorate, the son of a parish priest, Lavrenty Preobrazhensky. He was educated in the theological schools of Tula and completed the course of the Moscow Theological Academy in 1881 with the degree of candidate of theology. After a short period of teaching in church schools he received the monastic tonsure in 1885, taking the name Agathangel, and was ordained to the diaconate and priesthood. He was then sent to administrative work in Siberian seminaries, serving as inspector and later as rector, and in 1889 he was consecrated bishop of Kirensk, a vicar of the Irkutsk diocese. In 1893 he became bishop of Tobolsk and Siberia, where his tenure was associated with missionary and educational work among the peoples of that vast territory.

In 1897 he was transferred to the see of Riga and Mitau, which he occupied for more than a decade. The Baltic diocese was confessionally mixed, with a large Lutheran population, and Agathangel’s long service there was marked by attention to Orthodox parishes, schools, and seminary education. In 1910 he was appointed archbishop of Vilna and Lithuania. Toward the end of 1913 he was moved to Yaroslavl and Rostov, the see with which his later reputation is most closely bound; he was elevated to the rank of metropolitan in 1917. He took part in the All-Russian Local Council of 1917–1918, which restored the patriarchate after two centuries of synodal government, and he belonged to the senior circle of bishops around Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow in the first years of the new patriarchal administration.

After the Bolshevik Revolution he remained at Yaroslavl through the Civil War and the first Soviet campaigns against the Church. In 1922, while Patriarch Tikhon was under confinement and the state-supported Renovationist schism sought to seize church administration, Agathangel acted on earlier patriarchal instructions and issued an epistle assuming temporary leadership of the Church. He called the clergy and faithful to reject uncanonical structures and to wait for a free council. The authorities arrested him and sent him into exile in the Narym region of Siberia, where he spent several years under harsh conditions. He was allowed to return in 1926 and went back to his flock in Yaroslavl, already aged and in weakened health, at a moment when the patriarchal locum tenens, Metropolitan Peter of Krutitsy, was himself in prison and the deputy administration of Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) was taking shape.

The declaration of loyalty to the Soviet government issued by Metropolitan Sergius in 1927 divided the episcopate. In early 1928 Agathangel, together with other bishops of the Yaroslavl region, published a statement that withdrew from administrative submission to Sergius while trying to avoid a complete rupture of eucharistic communion. Correspondence later that spring showed his desire to limit the conflict and to spare the Church a lasting schism. He died in Yaroslavl on 16 October 1928 and was buried in the Leontyevskoye Cemetery. The Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, meeting in 2000 under Patriarch Alexy II, glorified him as a hieroconfessor among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. His principal feast is the day of his repose, 16 October (3 October on the Julian calendar), and he is also commemorated with the synaxis of the New Martyrs.