Alexander Saltykov

Alexander Alexandrovich Saltykov was born on 29 August 1941 in Moscow. His father, Alexander Borisovich Saltykov (1900 to 1959), was an art historian, and his mother, Tatyana Pavlovna Ryabkova, was a teacher. He regarded himself as a descendant of the old noble Saltykov family.

He later recalled growing up in a cultured, academic household where the children were carefully sheltered. He read from the age of four, and the family library held Russian classics, theology and books in French, since both his grandmother and his mother taught foreign languages. He attended School No. 59 in Starokonyushenny Lane, the former Medvednikov Gymnasium, and graduated from the art history section of the history faculty of Moscow State University.

After graduating, Saltykov joined the Andrei Rublev Central Museum of Ancient Russian Culture and Art, where he became a senior research fellow. He wrote the album guide to the museum, published in Leningrad in 1981 and reissued in 1989, and over the following decades published many articles on Old Russian icons and church art, including studies of Andrei Rublev's Holy Trinity, the icons of the age of Yaroslav the Wise and church art at the Stoglav Council of 1551. He also wrote two books on the history of the Church in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lectured widely on iconography and spoke on Radio Radonezh. He was a member of the Union of Artists of Russia.

He was ordained deacon on 14 October 1983 and priest on 12 September 1984, and served at the Church of St Nicholas in Kuznetsy. From the early 1980s until 1992 he taught at the Moscow Theological Academy and Seminary. He left to help create the theological courses that became the St Tikhon's Orthodox Theological Institute, later St Tikhon's Orthodox University (PSTGU). He was one of its founders and, from 1992, dean of its Faculty of Church Arts.

In 1992 he was appointed acting rector of the Church of the Resurrection of Christ in Kadashi, and he became rector in 1993, when the parish community was revived. He devoted great effort to restoring and beautifying the church and to its worship and educational work, and was chief editor of the proceedings of the Kadashi Readings conference. In 1999 he was also put in charge of the Patriarchal chapel of the Icon of the Mother of God of the Sign and St Alexander Nevsky, the monument to the grenadiers who fell at Plevna. In 2025 he became honorary rector of the Kadashi church.

Saltykov was a strong defender of the historic Zamoskvorechye district around his church. In 2010 he wrote an open letter to Moscow's mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, asking him to stop the destruction of the so-called Deacon's House near the church, and he was one of the leading figures in the 2011 parish protests over construction in the Kadashi area. He was an outspoken anti-communist, and in a 2011 interview with the portal Pravmir he argued that Patriarch Tikhon's anathema applied to those who shared or sympathised with communist views.

Archpriest Alexander Saltykov died in Moscow on 31 October 2026, in his 86th year, after a long and serious illness. The Kadashi parish said he died after receiving Holy Communion, and parishioners said that despite his illness he had kept coming to services, hearing confessions and giving communion whenever he had the strength.

His death was announced on 31 October by the Moscow city diocese, the Moscow Patriarchate and St Tikhon's Orthodox University, and reported by Miloserdie.ru and Tatianin Den. The diocese said the time and place of his funeral service would be announced later.

Saltykov is remembered as a scholar who bridged the Soviet museum world of Old Russian art and the revival of Orthodox church life after 1991. As a founder of St Tikhon's Orthodox University and long-serving dean of its Faculty of Church Arts, he helped train a generation of icon painters, restorers and church artists. His three decades at Kadashi restored one of Moscow's best known seventeenth-century churches as a working parish, and his campaigns helped draw attention to the preservation of historic Zamoskvorechye.