Volgograd Diocese

By 1917, there were about 600 parishes within the modern Volgograd diocese.

In 1918, His Holiness Patriarch Tikhon established the Tsaritsyno diocese and appointed the bishop of Peter the Great Damian (Govorov) as the reigning bishop. At the end of 1919 he left the city, was evacuated to the Crimea, moved through Constantinople to Bulgaria, where on April 19, 1936 he died in the dignity of Archbishop Tsaritsynsky.

In 1918, under the pressure of the authorities, the Kamyshin district religious school was closed, in 1920 the Ust-Medveditsky religious school . On October 9, 1922, monasteries were liquidated.

Confusion in the church life of the city was brought by Sergey Trufanov (banned in the service of hieromonk Iliodor in 1911 ), who returned to Tsaritsyn in the spring of 1921. He created a religious community and declared himself the “All-Russian patriarch”, recognized the correct teachings and policies of the Bolsheviks , stated that his personal views were not much different from communist ones. In 1922, Iliodor fled abroad.

In June 1922, a group of the Tsaritsyno-renovated clergy, supported by local authorities, announced the creation of the “Provisional Church Administration of the Tsaritsyno Diocese” led by Bishop Modest Ust-Medveditsky (Nikitin) . The Tsaritsyno Diocesan Administration, relying on the support of the Soviet authorities, launched a campaign to discredit Bishop Nifont (Fomin) and demanded his removal from Tsaritsyn. In the summer of 1922, Bishop Nifont was accused of deliberately concealing church values ​​and arrested. On April 10, 1923, the court sentenced him to imprisonment.

In the Tsaritsyno (from 1925 Stalingrad) diocese in the 1920s and 1930s there were simultaneously parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church and parishes of various renovation groups. In 1925, there were 35 parishes in the Stalingrad diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church, and 360 parishes in the hands of the Renovationists. Further, the authorities carried out a deliberate policy of closing the temples. On January 1, 1940, about 580 churches were closed within the Stalingrad region.

In conditions of the mass closure of churches, services in the temples of Stalingrad by order of Archbishop Peter (Sokolov) (1930-1935) were held around the clock so that all believers had the opportunity to attend them. Priests were allowed to worship in private apartments.

In the 1930s , arrests of clergy and believers on charges of anti-Soviet activities, terrorism, and espionage in favor of foreign states became more frequent. Since 1937, the Stalingrad department was not replaced. July 8, 1943 "custody of the Stalingrad diocese" was entrusted to the Archbishop of Saratov Grigory (Chukov) , with the assimilation of the title of "Saratov and Stalingrad."

On June 26, 1944, the parishes of the Stalingrad Region were subordinate to the Archbishop of Astrakhan Philip (Stavitsky), who became known as Astrakhan and Stalingrad.

On January 1, 1947, 40 temples and prayer houses were operating in the Stalingrad region ^[1] .

In the late 1950s , new persecutions of the Church began. A number of temples were destroyed, the number of parishes was reduced. On July 15, 1959, the Diocese of Stalingrad was annexed to the Saratov Diocese, which was called the Saratov and Stalingrad Diocese.

On January 31, 1991, the Volgograd Diocese was revived, being separated from the Saratov.

On March 15, 2012, the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church decided to secession from the Volgograd Orthodox Diocese of the Kalachev and Uryupinsk dioceses , as well as the formation of the Volgograd Metropolis as part of the Volgograd, Kalachev and Uryupinsk dioceses ^[2] .

• Tsaritsyn
• Stalingrad
• Volgograd since 1991
• Volgograd and Kamyshinskaya

• Damian (Govorov) (1918-1920)
• Nifont (Fomin) (until 1922)
• Trofim (Jacobchuk) (1923-1924)
• Tikhon (Rusinov) (July 4, 1924 - December 22, 1925)
• Nifont (Fomin) (1925-1927)
• Arseny (Smolenets) (November 14, 1927 - July 8, 1930)
• Dimitri (Dobroserdov) (July 8 - August 26, 1930)
• Theodosius (Vashchinsky) (August 26 - September 5, 1930)
• Peter (Sokolov) (September 5, 1930 - April 23, 1935)
• Anthony (Romanovsky) (December 8, 1935 - January 15, 1937)
• Philip (Perov) (January 15, 1937-1938)
  • 1938-1943 - the department widowed
• Grigory (Chukov) (July 8, 1943 - May 26, 1944)
• Guri (Egorov) (1953-1953) v / u
  • In 1959, the Stalingrad diocese was abolished and its territory included in the Saratov diocese
• German (Timofeev) (January 30, 1991 - December 28, 2018)
• Theodore (Kazanov) (since December 28, 2018)

The modern organizational structure of the diocese is as follows: ^[3]

• Department for Relations with the Armed Forces and Law Enforcement Agencies
• Hospital Counseling
• Mission department
• Youth Department
• Department of Education and Catechesis
• Press office
• Department of Social Services
• Department of Prison Counseling

The modern territorial structure of the diocese is as follows: ^[4]

• I deanery ( Krasnoarmeysky district of Volgograd )
• II deanery ( Soviet , Kirov districts).
• III deanery ( Voroshilovsky , Central , Dzerzhinsky and Gorodishchensky districts )
• IV deanery ( Krasnooktyabrsky and Traktorozavodsky districts)
• Dubovskiy deanery (Dubovskiy district)
• Kamyshin deanery ( Kamyshin , Kamyshin and Kotovsky districts)

• Volgograd Holy Spirit Monastery (male; Volgograd)
• Holy Ascension Dubovsky Monastery (female; Dubovka )

• Official site of the Volgograd and Kamyshin diocese
• Volgograd and Kamyshin diocese on the website of the Patriarchy.Ru
• Volgograd Diocese // Open Orthodox Encyclopedia "Tree" (inaccessible link)
• Volgograd and Kamyshin diocese on the site Orthodox Encyclopedia