Cyril Smirnov

Saint Cyril Smirnov, Hieromartyr, was Metropolitan of Kazan and Sviyazhsk, a hierarch of great missionary service, exarch of the Caucasus and one of the leaders of the moderate wing that opposed Metropolitan Sergius Stragorodsky. Born at Kronstadt in 1863, he was shot on 20 November 1937 at Lisy Ovrag near Chimkent in Kazakhstan. The Russian Church Outside Russia numbered him among the saints in 1981, and the Russian Church in 2000. He is commemorated on 7 November Old Style, that is 20 November, the day of his martyrdom.

Youth and priesthood

Born Konstantin Illarionovich Smirnov into the family of a reader at Kronstadt, he graduated from the Alexander Nevsky ecclesiastical school (1877), the St Petersburg seminary (1883) and the St Petersburg Theological Academy (1887), as candidate of theology, with a thesis on "Nicephorus Theotokis and His Significance in the History of the Russian Church and Spiritual Literature", which Professor Nikolai Barsov judged so valuable that he wished to see it, after more careful revision, as a master's thesis. He married Olga Nikolaevna Aziatskaya, a priest's daughter. He was ordained deacon on 15 November 1887 and priest on 21 November, as teacher of religion and priest of the house church of the Elisavetpol gymnasium in the Caucasus. From 1894 he was teacher of religion at the second gymnasium in St Petersburg, and from 1896 priest of its church of the Nativity of the Mother of God. From 1897 he was a member of the St Petersburg committee of the Orthodox Missionary Society.

From October 1900 he was rector of the cemetery church of the Holy Trinity at Kronstadt, at his own request, perhaps to be near Archpriest John of Kronstadt, with whom he was bound by a strong spiritual tie; after Saint John's death he came to Kronstadt, served the memorial liturgy, spoke the graveside word and accompanied the coffin to St Petersburg. In 1901 his daughter Olga died, having accidentally swallowed a needle, and soon his wife also died.

The Urmia mission

On 24 April 1902 he was named head of the spiritual mission at Urmia in Persia, today northern Iran, and on 10 May he was tonsured a monk with the name Cyril. The team reached Urmia at the end of August 1902 and set to work: daily services in the mission's house church, to which village priests were called to learn; an examination of the local Orthodox clergy and a settling of each one's position toward the mission; a commission of translators of classical Syriac specialists, to translate Orthodox liturgical books into Syriac; a printing press, from 1903, with Orthodox publications in good type; correct relations with the other missions and good relations with the consul general at Tabriz, and from 1903 a Russian vice-⁠consulate was opened at Urmia, mostly to help the mission's flock. Through the zeal of Archimandrite Cyril and other supporters, the "Cyril and Sergius Urmia Brotherhood" was founded at St Petersburg in autumn 1903 and registered in early 1904, named after Saint Cyril the Slav and Saint Sergius of Radonezh, with members including the deputy procurator of the Holy Synod, V. K. Sabler, and other important persons, under the patronage of Empress Maria Feodorovna. In 1904 he returned to St Petersburg.

Bishop of Gdov and of Tambov

On 6 August 1904 he was consecrated Bishop of Gdov, third vicar of the St Petersburg diocese (from 1908, first). He served as chairman of the diocesan brotherhood of the Mother of God and of the Estonian Orthodox brotherhood of Saint Isidore of Yuryev and was among the closest collaborators of Metropolitan Anthony Vadkovsky, who had ordained him priest. He was a man of principle: in 1909, at the Theophany service, in the presence of the tsar's family, he refused the police demand that he bless boiled water.

On 30 December 1909 he was named Bishop of Tambov and Shatsk, abbot of the Kazan monastery. He gave talks in churches, introduced congregational singing in services, did much charity and set up a commission to reduce clerical paperwork, and was greatly loved by the people. He helped a craft orphanage for children, supported the Holy Cross brotherhood which maintained the school for blind children and in 1913 founded the Pitirim missionary brotherhood and a church archaeology committee. On 6 May 1913 he was raised to archbishop. He worked to spread veneration of Saint Pitirim of Tambov, supported the idea of his glorification and took part in preparing the canonization of 1914. In 1917 he was chairman of the seventh section of the Pre-⁠Conciliar Council and a member of the Local Council of 1917 to 1918, at all three sessions, chairman of the fifteenth section, deputy chairman of the council at the third session and member of the Council's board; as official representative, he took part in October 1917 in talks with the minister of confessions Anton Kartashov and with Kerensky on the fate of parish schools.

Exarch of the Caucasus and Metropolitan of Kazan

On 1 April 1918 he was named Metropolitan of Tiflis and Baku, exarch of the Caucasus. The Church of Georgia had proclaimed autocephaly in 1917, unrecognized by the Russian church authority, and he asked that Dagestan and the Caspian region be joined to the exarchate. On 19 May he reached Baku by sea, but the autocephalist Georgian clergy did not let him reach Tiflis. On 4 July 1918 the diocesan congress at Nizhny Novgorod elected him bishop of that diocese, but Patriarch Tikhon decided to leave him at Tiflis and Baku. In August 1918 he returned to Moscow. In 1919 he was a member of the Holy Synod and chairman of the financial department of the Supreme Church Council, and from December 1919 to February 1920 he was in prison.

On 22 April 1920 he was named Metropolitan of Kazan and Sviyazhsk, but he arrived only on 9 July because of opposition from the secret police. On 19 August 1920 he was arrested at Kazan and taken to Moscow, and on 27 August sentenced to imprisonment "until the end of the civil war" for having left Moscow for Kazan without the secret police's leave; later the sentence was changed to five years. S. E. Trubetskoy, recalling his days in prison, wrote that he "carried his cross with worthy simplicity to the end, setting an example to many". In January 1922 he was released and returned to Kazan. He refused to support the Renovationist movement, tied to the Bolsheviks, and in August 1922 was arrested again, then expelled to Ust-⁠Sysolsk. Patriarch Tikhon asked him not to trade the release of bishops for the admission of odious representatives of Renovationism into church leadership, and he answered: "Your Holiness, do not think of us bishops. Now we are good only for prisons." He was exiled to the Zyryan region.

Candidate for locum tenens and opposition

In Patriarch Tikhon's testament of 25 December 1924 he was named first to whom the patriarchal rights would temporarily pass, but since he and the second candidate, Metropolitan Agathangel, were in exile, at the patriarch's death in April 1925 Metropolitan Peter Polyansky took the leadership, and then, after his arrest, Metropolitan Sergius Stragorodsky. In autumn 1926, at the initiative of Bishop Pavlin Kroshechkin and Archbishop Cornelius Sobolev, a secret election of the patriarch by poll was held among the bishops, and most of the bishops spoke for Cyril, as first in the testament. The historian Fr Alexander Mazyrin established that about forty-⁠five bishops managed to take part. The procedure ended in mass arrests of bishops, among them Metropolitan Sergius. Metropolitan Cyril himself had not been informed of the election and wrote that the venture was "entirely unknown" to him.

In spring 1927, in the prison at Vyatka, where he was from January to April, Evgeny Tuchkov, responsible for Soviet church policy, came to him and offered that he head the Church, on condition that he agree to the transfers of bishops unwelcome to the authorities. Cyril answered: "You are not a cannon, and I am not the bomb with which you want to blow up the Russian Church from inside." After these words the sentence of three years of exile was carried out. In 1928 he sharply condemned Sergius's actions, the transfers of bishops from their sees and the suspension of those who did not accept the policy of compromise with the state, and opposed the provisional Synod he set up. In July 1928 he wrote that he did not recognize the new form of church administration and did not regard the late patriarch as a counter-⁠revolutionary, and that he regarded the statement made about them in Sergius's Declaration as slander. In 1929 he sent Sergius a copy of a letter to a vicar in which he wrote that Sergius had exceeded his powers by setting up a collegial administration and that he no longer considered his administrative orders binding and refrained from eucharistic communion with him.

Martyrdom

On 20 November 1937 he was shot at Lisy Ovrag near Chimkent. The Russian Church Outside Russia canonized him in 1981, and the Russian Church of the Moscow Patriarchate in 2000, as hieromartyr.