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Biography

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Nikodim (born Nikolai Vasilyevich Krotkov) was a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church, later venerated as a hieromartyr. He was born in 1868 in the village of Pestsy in the Nerekhta district of the Kostroma Governorate, in a priest’s family, and was raised in the clerical world of the Upper Volga. He received a standard ecclesiastical education for a son of the clergy, studying at the Kostroma Theological Seminary and then at the Kiev Theological Academy, from which he graduated in the 1890s with the degree of candidate of theology. Rather than taking a married parish assignment, he followed the path of learned monasticism that supplied the Russian Church with many of its bishops.

In the late 1890s he was tonsured a monk with the name Nikodim and ordained hierodeacon and hieromonk. He was sent to the Caucasus, where he taught and then served as inspector and rector of Orthodox theological seminaries in Kutaisi and Tiflis (Tbilisi), and was raised to the rank of archimandrite. In 1907 he was consecrated a bishop, first as vicar bishop of Akkerman in the Kishinev (Chișinău) diocese of Bessarabia, and later as ruling bishop of Chișinău and Khotyn. His years in Bessarabia spanned the First World War and the fall of the Russian Empire. After Bessarabia united with Romania in 1918 he would not enter the Romanian Orthodox Church and remained under the Russian Church, leaving the region.

In the early Soviet years he served as Archbishop of Taurida (Crimea) and afterward as Archbishop of Kostroma and Galich, returning to his native diocese. He rejected the Renovationist (Living Church) schism, which in the 1920s enjoyed state backing against the patriarchal church. Like many bishops who would not accept that schism or the demands of the atheist authorities, he was arrested more than once, including in connection with the campaign to confiscate church valuables and in the later waves of anti-religious repression. He spent long periods in prison and exile through the 1920s and 1930s.

His last arrest came during the Great Terror of the mid-1930s. He was confined in Yaroslavl, where he died in the prison hospital on 21 August 1938. The place of burial is unknown. In 2000 the Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church glorified him as a hieromartyr among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. He is commemorated on 21 August (8 August Old Style) and with the synaxis of those new martyrs.

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