Veniamin (Kazansky) - Arrest and Execution

Arrest and Execution

On 24 March twelve priests broke ranks with the other clergy, whom they called counter-revolutionaries and blamed for the famine, and called for unconditional surrender of all Church valuables to the Soviets. This led to outrage which Benjamin tried to calm, asking for a meeting with the authorities leading to an agreement that parishes would be permitted to keep their sacred vessels if they substituted other property of equal value. This pacified the situation until some priests tried to wrest control of the Church from Patriarch Tikhon and the established hierarchy. Benjamin excommunicated his priests involved with the coup which enraged the Soviets who threatened Benjamin with his and others' arrest and execution. Benjamin reacted by commencing meeting with his friends in order to say farewell and giving instructions for the administration of the diocese.

In April and May 1922, a number of churchmen were arrested and tried as counter-revolutionaries for opposing the seizure of church valuables. Benjamin was placed under house arrest on 29 May and subsequently imprisoned after he had opposed efforts by Alexander Vvedensky to establish the renovationist All-Russian Church Administration as the new church government after Patriarch Tikhon abdicated on 12 May. Benjamin was tried by a revolutionary tribunal with ten other defendants from 10 June to 5 July. As Benjamin entered the courtroom for his trial, people stood up for him and he blessed them. The defendants were found guilty and condemned to death, but the sentences of six of the defendants were later commuted by the Politburo, though not of Benjamin and others seen as the main instigators of counterrevolution. The defendants were given a chance to speak, and Benjamin addressed the court saying it grieved him to be called an enemy of the people whom he had always loved and to whom he had dedicated his life to them.

During the night of 12-13 August 1922 after having been shaved and dressed in rags so that the firing squad would not know that they were shooting members of the clergy, Benjamin and those with him, Archimandrite Sergius, George and John of Petrograd, were executed in the eastern outskirts of Petrograd, at the Porokhov Station of the Irinovskaya Railroad (a narrow-gauge railroad built to bring peat into the city for heating that starts in the Bolshaya Okhta district of St. Petersburg, across the Neva River from the Smolny Institute and ending at Vsevolozhsk 24 kilometres (15 mi) east of the city.)

Benjamin's cenotaph is in the Nikolskoe Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra; the Decree of Canonization directs for Benjamin and others "That their precious remains, should they have been found, shall be considered holy relics."