St. Petersburg in 1892. The new city of St. Petersburg, when it was founded in late spring 1703, was initially in the Novgorodian Eparchy, and Metropolitan Iov consecrated the first wooden Peter and Paul Cathedral in the Peter and Paul Fortress (the current cathedral is, of course, a later construction) in April 1704. Iov's vicar, Feofan Prokopovich, became one of Peter the Great's key advisors on religion and helped establish the Spiritual Regulations and the Holy Governing Synod (which governed the church from 1721 to 1917.) Prokopovich was named Archbishop of Novgorod in 1725, after Peter's death. Archbishop Dmitry (r. 1757-1767), served as Catherine the Great's spiritual advisor for the first few years of her reign and crowned her Empress in 1762. Soviet and Post-Soviet Period The Novgorodian Eparchy was combined again with Leningrad after the re-legalization of the church in 1943. It was briefly separated in the 1950s and combined with Leningrad, again, in the 1960s. It was last separated in 1990, when it was recreated as a bishopric. It was raised to archiepiscopal level again in 1995. The current title is "Archbishop of Novgorod the Great and Staraya Russa." From 1922-1936, thirteen bishops of Novgorod were named by the Living Church, or Renovationist Church, a movement (now deemed schismatic) that was sponsored by the Soviet authorities to split and thus weaken the Russian Church. The last of these, Veniamin Molchanov, was later Archbishop of Alma Ata, but nothing further is known of him after October 1936. He is thought to have been shot. The Renovationists fought with the patriarchal or main Orthodox Church before they were suppressed when the patriarchal church was legalized in 1943. In the patriarchal church, Archbishop Arsenius (Stadnitsky) was one of the candidates for Patriarch in the 1917 Moscow Council, when Tikhon was elected. He, like many of the hierarchs of the church, suffered repeated arrest in the 1920s. He was exiled to Central Asia in 1926 and made Bishop of Tashkent in 1933, where he died in 1936. A plaque on the old bishop's palace in Novgorod commemorates him and there is a festival in his honor in Novgorod today. During his long, absentee tenure as Archbishop and Metropolitan of Novgorod, the eparchy was administered by a number of vicars, including Alexius Simansky, who held the title of Archbishop of Khutyn. Alexius was briefly Metropolitan of Novgorod in 1933, and was succeeded by