1865–1925
Saint Tikhon of Moscow
The first Patriarch of Moscow in two hundred years, who condemned the Bolshevik persecution of the Church.
Biography
Tikhon (born Vasily Bellavin) was born in 1865 in the Pskov province of Russia. He became a monk at twenty-six, served as a bishop in Russia and on the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, and in 1917, after the death of Metropolitan Macarius, was elected Metropolitan of Moscow.
Shortly after, following the Bolshevik revolution, he was chosen by lot as the first Patriarch of Moscow in two hundred years of synodal rule. As the new regime seized Church property and violently persecuted the clergy, Tikhon publicly condemned the persecution, which led to his arrest and imprisonment in 1922.