Serafim Samoylovich

Serafim Samoylovich was born Semyon Nikolayevich Samoylovich on 19 July 1881 in Mirgorod, in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire (today in Ukraine). He came from a modest ecclesiastical family; his father served the Church as a psalm-reader. In the last decades of the imperial period he received a seminary education at the Poltava Theological Seminary and then entered monastic life, receiving the name Seraphim. As a hieromonk he worked in teaching and pastoral assignments in the Russian Orthodox Church before the revolutions of 1917, during a time when the Church was still legally established but already facing growing social and political strain.

In 1920, after the Bolshevik seizure of power and in the midst of civil war, he was consecrated Bishop of Uglich, a vicar bishopric of the Yaroslavl diocese, under Patriarch Tikhon. He was later raised to the dignity of archbishop. His see at Uglich, an ancient town on the Volga, placed him in the heart of one of the historic centers of Russian Orthodoxy. Following the death of Patriarch Tikhon in 1925, the Church’s leadership was thrown into crisis by successive arrests. Metropolitan Peter of Krutitsy, the patriarchal locum tenens, was imprisoned, and his designated deputy, Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky), was himself arrested in December 1926. In accordance with a previously established order of succession, Archbishop Seraphim of Uglich then assumed the duties of deputy patriarchal locum tenens. From December 1926 until the spring of 1927 he was, in effect, the acting primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, attempting to keep diocesan administration functioning under intense state pressure.

After Metropolitan Sergius was released and issued his July 1927 declaration of loyalty to the Soviet government, a large part of the episcopate divided over whether to accept that policy. Archbishop Seraphim, together with Metropolitan Agafangel of Yaroslavl and other bishops of the Yaroslavl region, eventually separated administratively from Metropolitan Sergius. Their stance, often called the Yaroslavl opposition, sought to defend the Church’s inner freedom without constituting a fully separate jurisdiction on the model of the Josephites. The Soviet authorities treated such resistance as a political offense. From the late 1920s Archbishop Seraphim was arrested on multiple occasions, subjected to imprisonment and exile within the Soviet penal system, and prevented from exercising a public ministry.

During the Great Terror of 1937 he was arrested once more, sentenced by an extrajudicial NKVD troika, and shot on 4 November 1937 in Yaroslavl. The place of his burial is unknown. He is venerated as a hieromartyr. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia included him among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia glorified in 1981; the Moscow Patriarchate canonized him at the Jubilee Bishops’ Council of 2000. His feast is kept on 4 November, as well as with the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church and with the saints of the Yaroslavl land. His short period as acting head of the Church and his later refusal to accept the 1927 declaration have given him a lasting place in the history of Orthodox resistance to state control in the Soviet period.