Cyril (Smirnov)

Konstantin Ilarionovich Smirnov was born in 1863 in Kronstadt, in the Saint Petersburg Governorate of the Russian Empire, the son of a church psalm-reader. He was educated for the clerical life at the Saint Petersburg Theological Seminary and then at the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy, graduating in 1887 as a candidate of theology. In the same period he married and was ordained deacon and priest, beginning his ministry among the married (white) clergy, which was then a usual path for Russian priests who later entered the episcopate after bereavement.

After the death of his wife and their daughter he received the monastic tonsure in 1902, taking the name Kirill (Cyril), and was raised to the rank of archimandrite. He was assigned to theological schools and church administration. In 1904 he was consecrated Bishop of Gdov, a vicar of the Saint Petersburg diocese. In 1909 he became the ruling Bishop of Tambov and Shatsk, where he was associated with parish education, missionary work, and temperance efforts, and he took part in the pre-conciliar discussions that prepared the Local Council of 1917–1918 and the restoration of the Moscow patriarchate. In 1917 he was appointed Metropolitan of Tiflis and Baku and Exarch of the Caucasus; in 1918 he was transferred as Metropolitan of Kazan and Sviyazhsk.

Soviet rule brought repeated arrest, imprisonment, and exile from 1918 onward. Patriarch Tikhon held him in high regard and named him first among the hierarchs designated to serve as patriarchal locum tenens if the patriarch died or was removed. Because Kirill was in prison when Tikhon died in 1925, that duty passed to Metropolitan Peter of Krutitsy. Kirill refused to accept Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky)'s declaration of 1927, which pledged the church administration's loyalty to the Soviet state. He would not commemorate Sergius as locum tenens and became a leading moral authority for bishops and clergy who rejected that subordination. The later 1920s and 1930s were spent in prisons and in exile in the Russian north and in Kazakhstan.

In November 1937, during the Great Terror, an NKVD troika condemned him to death. He was shot on 20 November 1937 near Chimkent. The place of burial is unknown. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia glorified him among the New Martyrs in 1981; the Moscow Patriarchate canonized him as a hieromartyr at the Jubilee Bishops' Council of 2000. He is commemorated on 20 November and in the synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.