Alexy II of Moscow - Early Life

Early Life

Alexey Ridiger was born and spent his childhood in the Republic of Estonia that had become a Russian Orthodox spiritual center and a home to many Russian émigrés after the Russian October Revolution in 1917.

From his early childhood Alexey Ridiger served in the Orthodox Church under the guidance of his spiritual father: Archpriest Ioann Bogoyavlensky.

Alexey Ridiger attended the Tallinn's Russian Gymnasium.

After the Soviet occupation of Estonia in 1940 Alexey Ridiger's family was listed for arrest in order to be deported from Estonia according to the Serov Instructions but were not found by the NKVD because instead of staying in their home they were hiding in a nearby hovel.

During Occupation of Estonia by Nazi Germany (1941–1944) Alexey Ridiger attended with his father Mikhail, who had become an Orthodox priest on 20 December 1942, the German prison camps in Estonia offering salvation to the Russian prisoners of war. Such activities were tolerated by the German occupation authorities because it was seen as an effective anti Soviet propaganda. After Soviet forces returned to Estonia in the autumn of 1944, unlike the most of the people with Baltic German roots, the Ridiger family chose to stay in Estonia and didn't evacuate to the west.

During the war Joseph Stalin had revived the Russian Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union. Having been closed during the war time, after the Soviet annexation of Estonia the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Tallinn was reopened in 1945. Alexey Ridiger who had become a Soviet citizen served as an altar boy in the cathedral from May to October 1946. He was made a psalm-reader in St.Simeon's Church later that year; in 1947, he officiated in the same office in the Church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God in Tallinn.