Hilarion (Troitsky), Archbishop of Verey, was a Russian theologian, professor, and bishop who became one of the foremost defenders of the Orthodox Church during the early Soviet persecution. Born Vladimir Alexeyevich Troitsky on September 13, 1886, in the village of Lipitsa in the Tula Province, he was educated at a local church school, a seminary in Tula, and the Moscow Theological Academy, from which he graduated in 1910 with a Candidate degree in theology with honors and where he remained to teach. He is commemorated as a New Martyr and Hieromartyr on December 15.
A scholar of the Church's history and dogma, he earned his Master's degree in 1913 for a thesis on the history of the dogma of the Church, and he wrote and lectured on the unity and nature of the Church, including the work 'The Unity of the Church.' He received monastic tonsure on March 28, 1913, at the Skete of the Paraclete of the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra, taking the name Hilarion, and was ordained a hieromonk and soon raised to archimandrite, serving as inspector and professor of Holy Scripture at the Moscow Academy.
At the All-Russian Church Council of 1917-1918 he was a forceful advocate for the restoration of the Moscow Patriarchate, which had lapsed since the reforms of Peter the Great in the eighteenth century, and after the election of Patriarch Tikhon he became one of his closest and most fervent supporters. Consecrated Bishop of Vereya in 1920, he was a leading opponent of the Renovationist (Living Church) schism that the Soviet authorities sought to use against the canonical Church.
Arrested repeatedly as the persecution intensified, he was sentenced in 1923 to the labor camp on the Solovki Islands, where he spent much of the remainder of his life. Worn down by years of imprisonment and exile and sentenced in 1929 to further banishment, he contracted typhus during his transport and died on December 15, 1929, at the age of forty-four. He was glorified as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church on May 10, 1999.
