Metropolitan Nicholas was born in Kovno (now Kaunas, Lithuania), where his father, Archpriest Dorofey Filofeyevich Yarushevich, was rector of Alexander Nevsky Cathedral.

On March 25, 1922 he was consecrated Bishop of Peterhof, vicar of the Petrograd dioscese,[1] but he was almost immediately arrested for refusing to recognise the so-called Renovationism.

[1] Nicholas was one of just four bishops in the USSR who survived the Great Purge,[2] and was so trusted by the Soviet authorities that in 1940, after the Red Army had overrun Eastern Poland, under the terms of the Pact between Stalin and Hitler, he was appointed Metropolitan of Volhynia and Lutsk and Exarch of the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus.

On 2 November 1942, Metropolitan Nicholas became the first Russian priest in more than 20 years to be given an official position, when he was a member of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Atrocities of the German Fascist Invaders and their Accomplices.

[3]According to Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, both Patriarch Alexius and Metropolitan Nicholas, "were highly valued by the KGB as agents of influence.

[citation needed] He was dismissed from the position of the Chairman of the External Church Relations Department on June 21, 1960; on September 19, he was relieved of his other posts and vanished from public view.