Hieromartyr Peter (Polyansky), Metropolitan of Krutitsy

DATE CLARIFICATION: the previous date "October 5" is confirmed correct but needs clarification — it is not the date of the hierarch's own death, but the joint commemoration in the Synaxis of Moscow Hierarchs (instituted 1596 for Sts. Peter [of Moscow, 14th c.], Alexy, Jonah, later expanded to include Philip, Job, Hermogenes, and, as the most recent addition, Hieromartyr Peter of Krutitsy). His personal day of martyrdom — September 27/October 10, 1937 — has been added as the primary date.

Peter (secular name Pyotr Fyodorovich Polyansky; 1862–1937) was a hieromartyr, Metropolitan of Krutitsy, and Patriarchal Locum Tenens. Born in the village of Storozhevoye, Voronezh Governorate, son of a priest, he graduated from the Moscow Theological Academy (1892) and spent decades as an official of the Holy Synod's Educational Committee. Tonsured a monk and consecrated bishop on the same day in 1920, he became Metropolitan of Krutitsy in 1924.

After Patriarch Tikhon's death in April 1925, he was named Patriarchal Locum Tenens and firmly refused all compromise with the Renovationist schism and Soviet authorities. Arrested in December 1925, he never regained freedom, enduring exile in the Urals, beyond the Arctic Circle at Khe, and imprisonment in Tobolsk and Verkhneuralsk.

On October 2, 1937, an NKVD special troika sentenced him to death; he was shot on October 10, 1937, in Magnitogorsk. His burial site remains unknown. Canonized by ROCOR in 1981 and by the Moscow Patriarchate's Bishops' Council on February 23, 1997, as a hieromartyr.