Innokentiy (Tikhonov)

Innokenty (Tikhonov), in the world Ivan Aleksandrovich Tikhonov, was a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church and one of the hieromartyrs of the Soviet persecutions. He was born on 22 August 1889 in the village of Pazdery, Nolinsky Uyezd, Vyatka Governorate, in the Russian Empire, the son of a parish priest. Raised in a clerical household in the Vyatka region, he followed the ordinary path of a future monk-bishop: he completed the Vyatka Theological Seminary in 1911 and then the Kazan Theological Academy, graduating in 1915 with the degree of candidate of theology. While still at the academy he was tonsured a monk in November 1913 with the name Innokenty and was ordained hierodeacon and then hieromonk. After his academic course he taught in theological seminaries, preparing candidates for the priesthood on the eve of the collapse of the old ecclesiastical order.

The revolutions of 1917 and the Bolshevik campaign against religion destroyed the seminary system and placed remaining clergy under constant pressure. By the early 1920s Innokenty was serving in Petrograd, where the Church faced both the state-favored Renovationist schism and direct repression of the canonical hierarchy. In 1922 he was elevated to archimandrite. On 14 April 1923 he was consecrated Bishop of Ladoga, a vicar of the Petrograd diocese, after the see had been left vacant by the martyrdom of Metropolitan Benjamin (Kazansky) in 1922. As a young vicar he worked under surveillance and repeated administrative harassment, trying to hold parishes to the canonical Church against Renovationist claims.

The later 1920s brought a further split after Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) issued his 1927 declaration of loyalty to the Soviet state. Like several other Petrograd vicars, Bishop Innokenty was associated with the opposition that gathered around Metropolitan Joseph (Petrovykh), often called the Josephite movement, which refused to accept that declaration. He was arrested and sent into exile in these years. In the 1930s his name is connected with the Ukrainian see of Vinnitsa (Vinnytsia), where later martyrologies remember him as bishop. Documentation of every intermediate appointment is incomplete, as is typical for clergy who moved between prison, exile, and short periods of restricted service.

During the Great Terror of 1937 remaining bishops were targeted systematically. Bishop Innokenty was arrested by the NKVD, condemned by an extrajudicial troika, and shot on 29 November 1937. The place of burial is unknown; victims of those sentences were as a rule interred in unmarked mass graves. The Russian Orthodox Church glorified him as a hieromartyr at the Jubilee Bishops’ Council of August 2000, in the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. His memory is kept on 16 November according to the Julian calendar, and also in the general synaxis of the New Martyrs, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vyatka, and in the Synaxis of the Saints of the Saint Petersburg Metropolia. He belongs to the generation of academically trained monk-bishops who tried to keep diocesan life alive in the first two decades of Soviet rule and who were destroyed in the prisons and execution yards of the 1930s.