Saint Lev

Archimandrite Lev (Leonid Mikhailovich Egorov; February 26, 1889 - September 20, 1937) - clergyman of the Russian Orthodox Church, brother of Metropolitan Gurij (Egorov). In July 2003, he was glorified as a hieromartyr by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. Leonid Egorov graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology of the St. Petersburg University. Then in 1915 he entered the Petrograd Theological Academy and studied there for three years. In 1918, the Academy was closed. At the end of 1915, Leonid was tonsured a monk of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra with the name Lev, and ordained hierodeacon and later hieromonk; in the same year his brother Vyacheslav took monastic vows with the name Gurij. In 1916 Hieromonk Lev, along with his brother ("the Egorov brothers", as people started to call them at that time), and with Hieromonk Innokentij (Tikhonov), with the permission of the Diocesan authorities, started intensive missionary activity. They “went to the people,” that is, they turned to the workers and poor people living in the area of Ligovsky Prospekt. In 1918, according to Metropolitan Ioann (Wendland), “The fame of the ‘Egorov brothers’ spread throughout the city.” At the beginning of 1919, the “Egorov brothers” organized the Alexander Nevsky Brotherhood at the Lavra with the blessing of Metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd. After the beginning of the Renovationism movement, inspired by the Soviet authorities, and of the 1922 seizure of church valuables in Russia campaign, hieromonk Lev was arrested (June 16, 1922) and subsequently deported from Petrograd. He served almost two years of exile, first in the Orenburg province, and then in the West Kazakhstan region near Lake Elton. During his absence from Petrograd, despite the repressions, the functioning of the Alexander Nevsky Brotherhood did not stop. In 1924, the period of exile ended.