Metropolitan Elevferii of Lithuania: One May See Unexpected Changes if He Lives Long Enough

September 17

The Soviet Union invaded Poland on this day in 1939.

On the left Metropolitan Elevferii Bogoiavlenskii (d. 1940) and on the right Bishop Feosodii Feodosiev (d. 1943)

On September 12, I wrote about the Church in Lithuania in the fourteenth century. Now we will look what was happening there in the twentienth century.

In 1917, following Feburary Revolution, the Russian Provisional Government recognized the independent Polish state. In 1919, Polish troops took over Vilno (Vilnius) from the Bolsheviks. In September of the same year, Polish officers attempted a butchered coup d’état in the Lithuanian capital of Kaunas. In December of the same year, the British foreign minister Curzon proposed a demarcation line between the two countries. The following year, Soviet Russia recognized the independent Lithuanian state with
Vilnius as its capital. During the Russo-Polish war of 1920, the Bolsheviks took over Vilnius, but the Poles pushed them back and
re-occupied it.

Archbishop Elevferii at the openining of a session of the Lithuanian parliament (Seimas) in 1923, in Kaunas, then the capital of the state

In 1925, the former dioceses of the Russian Church in Poland proclaimed autocephaly, which had been bestowed upon them by the Ecumenical Throne (Patriarchate of Constantinople), but the Russian Church did not recognize it.

Vilnius became embroiled in this canonical controversy. The Church in Lithuania remained within the Russian Church headed by Metropolitan Elevferii (Bogoiavlenskii), who had been consecrated Bishop of Kovno (Kaunas) in 1911.

In 1927 Metropolitan Sergii (Stragorodskii), Deputy Patriarchal Locum Tenens to St. Metropolitan Peter of Krutitsy, was suddenly released from prison by the Soviets and was allowed to assemble the Synod. Metropolitan Elevferii’s diocese in Lithuania became the largest diocese of the Russian Church under this Synod in Moscow outside of the USSR. To show Metropolitan Elevferii the freedom of the Orthodox Church in the USSR the Soviet authorities permitted him to visit the country for one week in 1928.