Missionary Teacher in Alaska
In 1902 Samoilovich took up a teaching post at the two-year school in Unalaska, in the Aleutian Islands, then part of the North American diocese of the Russian Church. By 1905 he was teaching at Sitka, where he was tonsured into the monastic mantiya by Bishop Innocent (Pustynsky) and, about a month later, ordained hieromonk. He went on to serve as rector of a local mission and to teach at the Sitka Theological Seminary, working as an associate of Archbishop Tikhon, the future Patriarch of Moscow.
Sources record that the harsh northern climate told upon his health, and after 1908 he returned to Russia. There he filled a sequence of offices — diocesan missionary, seminary confessor, and monastery vicar — including the post of vicar of the Uglich Protection Monastery from 1915, the see with which his name would afterward be joined.
Bishop and Deputy Locum Tenens
Seraphim was consecrated Bishop of Uglich in February 1920 as a vicar of the Yaroslavl Diocese and was elevated to archbishop by Patriarch Tikhon in 1924. After the patriarch's death the government's pressure on the Church intensified, and in 1926–1927, while Metropolitan Sergius was imprisoned, Seraphim served for a time as Deputy Patriarchal Locum Tenens. According to the tradition, when authorities pressed him to approve a slate of bishops favorable to the state, he refused and submitted his own list instead.
He was associated with the so-called Parallel Synod centered at the Danilov (St. Daniel) Monastery in Moscow, a circle of hierarchs that resisted state control of ecclesiastical affairs.
Opposition, Imprisonment, and Martyrdom
When Metropolitan Sergius issued his Declaration of 1927 pledging the Church's loyalty to the Soviet government, Seraphim refused to recognize it and joined the Yaroslavl Opposition, openly calling on Sergius to recant. In an epistle issued early in 1929 he denounced the policy, and he was sentenced to five years in a camp; sources relate that he was sent to the Solovki camp, established in the former Solovetsky monastery, where he was injured in an accident while at forced labor.
Further arrests and exiles followed across the Northern Territory, Mogilev, the Komi region, and Siberia. Arrested again in 1934 at Arkhangelsk on charges of organizing a counter-revolutionary group, he was sentenced to five years and held at the Suslov branch of Siblag. He was shot in the camp on October 22, 1937 (November 4 New Style). He was glorified among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, with general veneration approved in August 2000.
