TIKHON (born Vasilii Ivanovich Belavin; 1865–1925), patriarch of the Russian Orthodox church. Prior to becoming metropolitan of Moscow (1917), Tikhon served as archbishop of Vilna and archbishop of Yaroslavl. Before that he was bishop and archbishop of the Aleutians and North America (1898–1907), laying the foundations of the Orthodox church in America. The Alaskan mission, founded in 1794, was extended and coordinated, so that it was able to grow into an autocephalous church in 1970. Tikhon's plan was to permit the Orthodox of various nations to form a single church, initially dependent on the Russian church, but eventually becoming autocephalous. The goal of a single church in the United States remains to be achieved, its delay being one of the consequences of the Russian Revolution.

Patriarch Tikhon was elected twelve days after the Bolshevik coup by the Great Sobor, or Pomestnyi Sobor (1917–1918), the first assembly of magnitude in the Russian church since the...