Andronik

Andronik (in the world Vladimir Alexandrovich Nikolsky) was a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church and is venerated among the New Martyrs of twentieth-century Russia. He was born on 1 August 1870 in the village of Povodnevo, in the Myshkinsky Uyezd of the Yaroslavl Governorate of the Russian Empire, the son of a deacon. After the Yaroslavl Theological Seminary he entered the Moscow Theological Academy, graduating in 1895 as a candidate of theology. In 1893, while still at the academy, he was tonsured a monk with the name Andronik and ordained to the diaconate; he was ordained hieromonk about the time of his graduation. That path—seminary, academy, and early monastic tonsure—was the usual route into the episcopate in the imperial Russian Church, which required bishops to be monks.

In 1897 he was sent to the Russian Orthodox mission in Japan, then led by Archbishop Nicholas (Kasatkin), later glorified as St. Nicholas of Japan. Andronik served in the mission for about a decade, learned Japanese, taught in catechetical schools, and worked in Kyoto and other centers of the small Japanese Orthodox community. In 1906 he was consecrated Bishop of Kyoto, a vicar of the Japanese diocese, and thus became one of the first Orthodox bishops to hold a see in Japan. Recalled to Russia in 1907, he was appointed Bishop of Tikhvin, vicar of the Novgorod diocese. In 1913 he was transferred to Omsk and Pavlodar in Siberia, and in 1914 he was appointed to Perm and Solikamsk in the western Urals, where he served as ruling hierarch and is remembered with the title of archbishop.

His years in Perm coincided with the First World War and the revolutions of 1917. He was a hierarch of conservative, monarchist convictions, active in preaching and diocesan administration and opposed to secularizing and anti-church measures. He took part in the All-Russian Local Council of 1917–1918 in Moscow, which restored the patriarchate and elected Patriarch Tikhon. After returning to Perm he resisted Soviet decrees affecting the Church, including seizures of church property and interference by local soviets in parish life, and he encouraged public processions and firmness among clergy and laity. Perm and the industrial district of Motovilikha became a scene of sharp conflict between the new regime and the Church; many clergy of the diocese were killed in 1918, an episode later called the Golgotha of Perm.

In June 1918 the Perm Cheka arrested Archbishop Andronik. He was taken from prison and killed in the vicinity of the city on or about 20 June 1918 (7 June on the Julian calendar then used by the Russian Church). Inquiries undertaken after anti-Bolshevik forces occupied Perm later that year, together with subsequent church tradition, treat his death as a martyrdom. Accounts of the manner of death vary: some reports state that he was shot, others that he was buried alive in a forest grave. His body was not identified or recovered. He was numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in 1981 and glorified as a hieromartyr by the Moscow Patriarchate at the Jubilee Bishops’ Council of 2000. The Russian Orthodox Church commemorates Hieromartyr Andronik, Archbishop of Perm, on 7 June (Julian), and also with the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.