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Biography

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Saint Athanasius (Sakharov), known in the world as Sergei Grigorievich Sakharov, was born in 1887 in the city of Vladimir in the Russian Empire. Raised in a pious Orthodox household, he received his early theological education at the Vladimir Theological Seminary and then studied at the Moscow Theological Academy, completing the course in the early 1910s. In 1912 he was tonsured a monk with the name Athanasius, recalling Saint Athanasius the Great of Alexandria, and was ordained deacon and priest. He subsequently taught in theological schools and served in pastoral and academic posts in the years immediately before and during the First World War and the Russian Revolution.

In 1921 he was consecrated Bishop of Kovrov, a vicar of the Vladimir diocese, at a moment when the Russian Church faced both internal schism and mounting state persecution. He rejected the renovationist Living Church, which enjoyed Soviet support, and remained with the canonical hierarchy associated with Patriarch Tikhon. From 1922 he was arrested repeatedly. Over the next three decades he endured prisons, labor camps, and exile, a confinement that lasted on the order of thirty years in total. Despite isolation and hardship he sought to maintain a life of prayer and, when circumstances allowed, of study.

Bishop Athanasius became one of the foremost liturgical scholars of the Russian Church in the twentieth century. He devoted himself to the church calendar, the composition and editing of services in honor of Russian saints, and questions of the Typikon and the order of divine worship. His notes, letters, and compilations circulated among clergy and monastics and later formed an important body of material for Russian liturgical studies. After his final release in the mid-1950s he lived under restriction in the Vladimir region, principally in Petushki, where he continued to receive spiritual children, answer liturgical inquiries, and lead a quiet monastic life as a bishop without a functioning diocese.

He died in Petushki in 1962. The Russian Orthodox Church glorified him in 2000 at the Jubilee Bishops’ Council as one of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. He is commemorated on 28 October, the date of his repose. His relics have been venerated at the Bogolyubsky Monastery near Vladimir. His life is remembered both for steadfast confession under atheist persecution and for lasting contributions to the liturgical tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church.

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