Patriarch Alexius (Simansky)

On February 2, 1945, a Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church was held in Moscow, at which the Metropolitan of Leningrad and Novgorod, Alexius (Simansky), was elected Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus. His patriarchate, lasting more than a quarter of a century, was initially marked by positive trends in the development of church life, facilitated by the meeting in 1943 between I. V. Stalin and the metropolitans Sergey (Stragorodsky), Alexius (Simansky), and Nikolai (Yarushovich). However, in 1958, the authorities publicly condemned the established confessional policy and state-church relations and effectively returned to the period of persecution of the 1930s. Only with the end of Khrushchev's thaw (1964), which became the most difficult time for Russian Orthodoxy in the 20th century, and until the death of Patriarch Alexius (1970), the Orthodox Church attempted to recover from the blow inflicted by the Soviet state and the ruling Communist Party.

The circumstances of Patriarch Alexius (Simansky)'s ecclesiastical service and his personal life have been reconstructed based on newly uncovered archival sources with the involvement of scientific-historical and religious studies literature, testimonies and memories of contemporaries, as well as newspaper and magazine periodicals.