Tikhon of Moscow

Vasily Ivanovich Bellavin was born in 1865 in the village of Klin, in the Toropets district of Pskov Governorate in the Russian Empire, the son of a hereditary Orthodox priest. He was educated in church schools, then at the Pskov Theological Seminary and the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy, from which he graduated in 1888. After a period of teaching at the Pskov seminary he received the monastic tonsure in 1891, taking the name Tikhon, and was ordained to the priesthood. He served as inspector and later rector of the Kholm Theological Seminary. In 1897 he was consecrated a bishop and assigned as vicar in the Kholm-Warsaw diocese, beginning an episcopal career that would take him far beyond the western borderlands of the empire.

In 1898 Tikhon was appointed Bishop of the Aleutians and Alaska, later Archbishop of the Aleutians and North America. Over nearly a decade he reorganized a scattered immigrant church, created new diocesan structures, supported parish schools and a seminary, and oversaw the building of Saint Nicholas Cathedral in New York. He encouraged English in worship and tried to hold together Russians, Carpatho-Rusyns, Greeks, Arabs, and North American converts under one hierarchy. Recalled to Russia in 1907, he served as Archbishop of Yaroslavl and later of Vilna, gaining a reputation for pastoral accessibility rather than court politics.

After the February Revolution of 1917 he was elected Metropolitan of Moscow. The All-Russian Local Council of 1917–1918 restored the Patriarchate of Moscow, abolished in the eighteenth century under Peter the Great, and in November 1917 Tikhon was chosen Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia. His tenure coincided with the Bolshevik seizure of power, civil war, and a systematic assault on the Church. He condemned bloodshed and the seizure of church valuables, and in 1918 pronounced an anathema against those who shed innocent blood. The Soviet authorities placed him under house arrest and later imprisoned him, while promoting the collaborationist Living Church schism in an effort to break canonical resistance.

Under severe pressure in the early 1920s he issued more conciliatory statements, whose authenticity and the degree of coercion behind them remain debated by historians. He died in Moscow in 1925; rumors of poisoning circulated at the time but have not been conclusively proved. He was buried at the Donskoy Monastery. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia glorified him in 1981, and the Moscow Patriarchate in 1989. He is commemorated especially on 7 April, the day of his repose, and is remembered as a confessor who sought to preserve the canonical order of the Russian Church under political persecution.