In April 1992 Benjamin was glorified (canonized) by the Russian Orthodox Church together with several other martyrs, including Archimandrite Sergius (Shein), Professor Yury Novitsky, and John Kovsharov (a lawyer), who were executed alongside him.

[1] Benjamin was born to a priestly family in the pogost (village) of Nimenskii in the Andreevskii volost of the Kargopolsky Uyezd near Arkhangelsk in the Olonets Governorate in the northwest of the Russian Empire.

Benjamin often served in the churches of the poorest and most remote suburbs of the capital and led the annual Easter and Christmas divine services at Putilovsky and Obukhovsky factories of St. Petersburg, and organized the charitable foundation of the Mother of God for the Care of Abandoned Women.

According to future Soviet dissident Dmitri Likhachev, who was then a devoutly Orthodox layman in Petrograd, "Persecution of the Church began almost contemporaneously with the October cataclysm.

[5] For example, during the anti-religious campaign at the height of the Russian Civil War, the Metropolitan made the offer that if the Soviet State withheld from seizing or otherwise desecrating the relics of St Alexander Nevsky, that he would suspend any Orthodox priest in his Diocese who aided the White Movement.

What is worse, all religions were viewed as dangerous counter-revolutionary ideologies that must be eliminated completely through religious persecution and coercively replaced with Marxist-Leninist atheism.

[7] In a 1918 article about the ongoing Soviet anti-religious campaign, Isaak Babel described how he attended an anti-Christian polemical lecture by a senior official of the Party's League of Militant Atheists.

Inside the former Great Hall of the Winter Palace, however, Babel witnessed as the Atheist speaker lectured about, "The All-forgiving Persona of Christ and Vomiting up the Anathema of Christianity" while being loudly heckled by Orthodox members of the audience.

[8] Babel then attended a Russian Orthodox Divine Liturgy inside the overwhelmingly crowded Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan on Nevsky Prospect.

For the first time in Russian history, the names of Orthodox and Catholic priests were signed to a Christian document drawn up against infernal forces.

[5] On 5 March 1922, Metropolitan Benjamin, hoping he was not contradicting Patriarch Tikhon or betraying Orthodox teaching about the Real Presence, signed an agreement with Petrograd party officials.

He agreed to hand over icon coverings and even chalices that had held the Eucharist, but with the sole condition that the Church itself would be allowed to deconsecrate and melt down these vessels into ingots before both religious and Government eyewitnesses.

[5] Catholic memoirist Martha Almedingen later recalled, "In most cases, [confiscation] raids were accompanied by wild outbursts of most abject and vulgar profanation, hardly ever checked by the higher officials who were invariably present at such proceedings.

"[21] The final conflict for Metropolitan Benjamin began when the State-controlled Living Church tried to wrest control away from Patriarch Tikhon and the established hierarchy.

[22] While secretly confident of the result, Metropolitan Benjamin offered to put the issue before his clergy and laity at the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.

Krasnitsky also praised the Living Church's rejection of the veneration of Saints and their relics, as well as their further break with Orthodox canon law by allowing Bishops to marry and both the divorce and remarriage of priests.

[25] Instead of backing down, Metropolitan Benjamin issued a 29 May pastoral letter to every parish and strictly forbade Vvedensky or any other Living Church priests from administering the sacraments within his Diocese until they had first repented before Patriarch Tikhon.

[27] In addition to anti-Soviet agitation, Metropolitan Benjamin stood accused of, "entering with evil intent into an agreement with... the Soviet Government... and thereby obtaining a relaxation of the decree on the requisitioning of valuables", and obstructing the efforts of the Renovationists to gain control of his Diocese.

[28] According to historian Paul Gabel, "The prosecutor was arch-atheist Peter Krasikov, who, like Krylenko in the Moscow Trial, saw conspiracy rather than genuine religious passion as the cause of the violence surrounding churches.

"[29] In a subsequent interview in Paris with Constantin de Grunwald, the Metropolitan's Jewish defence attorney, S. Gurovich, recalled, "I felt that I had a genuine Saint sitting behind me on the accused's bench.

[30] The defendants were given a chance to speak, and Benjamin addressed the court saying it grieved him to be called an enemy of the people whom he had always loved and to whom he had dedicated his life.

"[30] Meanwhile, the Living Church-controlled Church Administration passed its own sentence, stripping Metropolitan Benjamin, Novitsky, and Kovsharov of their priestly and monastic ranks and reducing them to members of the laity.

30–31 July] 1922 after having been shaved and dressed in rags so that the firing squad would not know that they were shooting members of the Orthodox clergy, Benjamin and those with him, Archimandrite Sergius, Yury Novitsky, and John Kovsharov,[5] were executed in the eastern outskirts of Petrograd, at the Porokhov Station of the Irinovskaya Railroad (a narrow-gauge railroad built to bring peat into the city for heating that starts in the Bolshaya Okhta district of St. Petersburg, across the Neva River from the Smolny Institute and ending at Vsevolozhsk 24 kilometres (15 mi) east of the city.)

Despite the continuing theological differences and the recent rift between them, both Exarch Leonid Feodorov and his superiors in the Vatican were devastated by the news of Metropolitan Benjamin's execution.

Although McCullagh was more successful in raising global awareness of the 1923 Moscow show trial of Archbishop Jan Cieplak, Monsignor Konstanty Budkiewicz, and Exarch Leonid Feodorov, the Captain later recalled, "Bishop Benjamin was a martyr quite as much as Mgr.

"[33] Although the anti-communist and White émigré hierarchy of Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) Canonized the Russian Orthodox Martyrs of the Red Terror decades before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the surviving hierarchy of the Moscow Patriarchate was taken over in 1926 by former Renovationist, Soviet secret police informant, and agent of influence, Metropolitan (later Patriarch) Sergei (Stragorodsky).

[34][35] Nevertheless, covert veneration of Metropolitan Benjamin and other Russian Orthodox Martyrs at the hands of the Soviet State continued within the Moscow Patriarchate anyway.