Vladimir (Bogoyavlensky)

Metropolitan Vladimir (secular name Vasily Nikiforovich Bogoyavlensky) was born on 1 January 1848 in the village of Malaya Morshka, Morshansk district, Tambov Governorate, in the Russian Empire, the son of a parish priest. He was educated at the Tambov Theological School and the Tambov Theological Seminary, then completed the course of the Kiev Theological Academy in 1874. For several years thereafter he taught homiletics, liturgics, and related subjects at the Tambov Seminary. In the early 1880s he was ordained to the priesthood. After the death of his wife and their only child he received the monastic tonsure with the name Vladimir, was raised to the rank of archimandrite, and served as rector of theological schools in Kozlov and Tambov and later of the Novgorod Seminary.

In 1888 he was consecrated bishop, first as vicar bishop of Staraya Russa in the Novgorod diocese. He was translated in 1891 to the independent see of Samara and Stavropol, and in 1892 became Archbishop of Kartli and Kakheti and Exarch of Georgia, a post in which he worked among a diverse Caucasian flock and promoted missionary and educational activity. In 1898 he was appointed Metropolitan of Moscow and Kolomna, one of the leading chairs of the Russian Church. During his long tenure in Moscow he supported parish temperance societies, missionary work through the Orthodox Missionary Society, and various charitable institutions, while also taking a conservative public stance during the revolutionary years after 1905. In 1912 he was transferred to the metropolitan see of Saint Petersburg and Ladoga, and in 1915 to Kiev and Galicia. The last transfer was widely interpreted as a result of court and synodal politics, including his known opposition to Grigori Rasputin.

As Metropolitan of Kiev he resided at the Kiev Pechersk Lavra. In 1917 he took part in the All-Russian Local Council that restored the Patriarchate; he received substantial support in the election of a patriarch, though the lot ultimately fell to Tikhon of Moscow. After the October Revolution and the declaration of Ukrainian independence, Kiev became a battleground. When Bolshevik forces under Mikhail Muravyov took the city in January 1918, troops entered the Lavra. On 25 January 1918 armed men seized Metropolitan Vladimir from his quarters, subjected him to humiliation and robbery, and shot him outside the monastery. He died of multiple gunshot and bayonet wounds. Contemporary church accounts treated him as the first bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church to be killed by the new Soviet regime.

He was buried in the Church of the Exaltation of the Cross at the Far Caves of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia included him among the New Martyrs glorified in 1981. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate glorified him as a hieromartyr in 1992, and he was subsequently numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia in the church-wide glorification of 2000. His principal feast is kept on 25 January (7 February on the civil calendar).