Blessed Leonid Feodorov

Leonid Ivanovich Feodorov (Russian: Леонид Иванович Фёдоров; 4 November 1879 – 7 March 1935) was a Studite hieromonk from the Russian Greek Catholic Church, the first Exarch of the Russian Catholic Apostolic Exarchate of Russia, and a survivor of the Gulag at Solovki prison camp. He was beatified at Lviv by Pope John Paul II on 27 June 2001. Feodorov was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on 4 November 1879, into a Russian Orthodox family. His father, Ivan Feodorovich Feodorov, was the son of a former State serf from Yaroslavl Governorate and had become the owner of the Malii Yaroslaviets, a highly successful St. Petersburg restaurant, which was one of the centers of the Imperial capital's artistic, literary, and intellectual ferment during the Silver Age. The restaurant's regular patrons included poet and philosopher Vladimir Soloviev and a young Joseph Stalin, who, according to Simon Sebag Montefiore, more than once braved the risk of arrest during Tsarist secret police manhunts out of a longing to eat at his "favorite hangout" of "Fedorov's restaurant." Leonid's mother, Lyubov Feodorov, a woman of Greek descent, raised him as a single mother after his father's early death. Lubov Feodorov used her husband's legacy of 15,000 rubles to send her son, out of a desire for him to move up in the world, to the First Imperial Gymnasium, where he was educated alongside the sons of the Russian nobility. Although she also attempted to raise her son as a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church, she simultaneously encouraged him to read the popular novelists of the day. He later recalled, "So I began to devour the best known French novelists of the day, Zola, Hugo, Maupassant, and Dumas. I became acquainted with the Italian Renaissance and its corrupt literature, Boccaccio and Ariosto. My head came to be like a sewer into which the foulest muck was emptied." While attending the Second Imperial Gymnasium in St.