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Biography

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Vasily Pavlovich Kazansky, known in monasticism as Veniamin (Benjamin), was born on 17 April 1873 (Julian calendar) in the Nimensky churchyard of Kargopol Uyezd, Olonets Governorate, in the Russian Empire, the son of the parish priest Pavel Ivanovich Kazansky. He was formed in the clerical milieu of the late imperial Russian countryside, studied at the Olonets Theological Seminary, and then at the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy, from which he graduated in 1897. While still an academy student he was tonsured a monk in 1895, receiving the name Veniamin, and was ordained hierodeacon and hieromonk. His early career was spent in the Church’s educational system: he taught at the Riga Theological Seminary and later served as inspector and rector of seminaries, including as rector of the Saint Petersburg Theological Seminary, among the educated monastic clergy who staffed Russian ecclesiastical schools in the last decades of the empire.

In 1910 he was consecrated Bishop of Gdov, a vicar of the Saint Petersburg diocese, and became known for pastoral work, preaching, and charitable and educational activity in the capital region. After the February Revolution of 1917, when diocesan assemblies were allowed to elect their bishops, the clergy and laity of Petrograd chose him as ruling hierarch. He became Archbishop of Petrograd and Ladoga and was raised to Metropolitan of Petrograd and Gdov. In a time of war, political collapse, and the beginning of Bolshevik anti-religious policy he sought to preserve canonical order and parish life, remaining aligned with Patriarch Tikhon rather than with purely political factions.

In 1922 the Soviet authorities ordered the confiscation of church valuables, presenting the campaign as famine relief. Metropolitan Veniamin did not refuse aid to the starving but insisted that sacred liturgical vessels not be treated as ordinary property and that the Church take part in any collection. That stance, together with unrest among believers, was treated as counter-revolutionary resistance. He was arrested and made the principal defendant in a public trial in Petrograd in the summer of 1922. On 5 July he and several companions were sentenced to death. During the night of 12–13 August 1922 he was taken with Archimandrite Sergius (Shein), Yury Novitsky, and Ivan Kovsharov to an execution site near Porokhovye station and shot. Their burial place has never been identified.

The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia glorified him among the New Martyrs in 1981. The Moscow Patriarchate authorized local veneration in the Saint Petersburg diocese in 1992 and included him in the church-wide glorification of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia at the Jubilee Bishops’ Council of 2000. He is commemorated on 13 August (31 July Julian) and in the synaxis of the New Martyrs. Historical accounts present him as a hierarch of personal simplicity and pastoral concern who accepted a violent death rather than yield the Church’s liturgical and canonical integrity.

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