Holy Hierarch Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia

Vasily Belavin was born in 1865 into a priest's family in the Pskov province and, as a monk, took the name Tikhon. He became bishop of Lublin, then in 1898 bishop of the Aleutian Islands and Alaska, and later archbishop of Yaroslavl and Vilna. In 1917 he was made metropolitan of Moscow, and in November of the same year, when the Russian Church restored the patriarchate, he was chosen patriarch by lot.

He led the Church through the first years of Soviet power, protesting the seizure of church property and appealing for help for the starving in the famine of 1921. He was held under house arrest and imprisoned in 1922–23. He died on 7 April 1925 and was buried at the Donskoy monastery. The Russian Church glorified him in 1989, on 9 October (26 September, Old Style).