Russian Orthodox Church Head Gundyaev Has Been Accompanied By A Secret Common-law Wife For More Than 50 Years
- 22.12.2025, 14:52
This woman also owns his property.
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Vladimir Gundyaev, has been accompanied for more than 50 years by a female companion who lives in his apartment and flies abroad with the patriarch, according to data from the Border Service.
Propagandist Vladimir Solovyov called her a third cousin of the ruler, but this is not true, an analysis by Project shows. This woman also owns his property. That is, she performs the functions that civil wives usually perform. This relationship, forbidden by Orthodox canons, has been going on for several decades.
On February 5, 2019, an Airbus A318-112 Elite jetliner converted to carry VIP passengers landed in Baku. Airplanes of this class are used by high-ranking officials or very rich people, but this time Patriarch Kirill flew with it. Following him, a woman - Lydia Leonova - got off the business jet.
She spent nine days with Kirill in Baku, where he celebrated the tenth anniversary of his enthronement and hardly ever appeared in public.
Leonova's name first hit the press in 2012. Then a scandal broke out around the patriarch's elite apartment in Moscow's House on the Embankment overlooking the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The neighbor from downstairs - ex-Minister of Health Yuri Shevchenko - started renovations and caused damage to the patriarch's property with construction dust. As a result, a lawsuit against Shevchenko was filed in court by Leonova, not the patriarch.
Canon law prohibits the patriarch from marrying. Solovyov was assigned to save the reputation of the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. He reported that the patriarch allegedly told him that he himself had not lived in the apartment, received as a gift from the authorities, even for a week, and that "his two third cousins" - Leonova and another woman - lived there permanently.
The biographies of the patriarch and Leonova show that they are not relatives. As religious scholar Alexander Soldatov wrote in Ogonyok magazine in 2004, Lidia Mikhailovna Leonova (maiden name Kholodova) is "the daughter of the cook of the Leningrad regional committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union," with whom Gundyaev "had the warmest relations."
According to Project, Kholodova married Ukrainian Mikhail Leonova in 1971. But the marriage probably fell apart in the first few years, though it was never officially dissolved. Her further fate is almost unknown. It is only known that when in 1984 Gundyaev was sent to serve in Smolensk, she followed him.
Author of the book "By Good Intentions" about the modern history of the Russian Orthodox Church Kseniya Luchenko quotes a person who often visited Gundyaev when he was still a metropolitan: "Lydia Mikhailovna is very immersed in his affairs. She knows how to dispose of things in the house, she is included in his relations with different people, she keeps track of who needs help, who needs to send a gift to. Luchenko's interlocutor concludes that "it is somewhat naive to believe that this is a third cousin."
A couple of years ago, Archimandrite Tikhon (Zatekin) published the book "Confessor of the Faith of Christ, Priest Vasily Gundyaev," in which, with the help of employees of state archives collected detailed information about the patriarch's family down to his great-grandfather. The patriarchal biographer does not mention anyone by the surname Kholodov.
Leonova has a family company with the colloquial name "Vladolid" (probably from the names Vladimir and Lydia). Its main activity is the management of own or rented real estate. As "Project" found out, this company has a 200-meter commercial premise in a St. Petersburg profitable house built in 1874 on the embankment of the Kryukov Canal at the corner of the Trade Bridge.
In the same house, a 120-meter apartment is also personally registered to Leonova - it was given to the patriarch's civilian wife by the Swiss Alexander Dimitrievich.
Leonova also registered plots and a cottage in the village of Sivkovo across the road from the Moscow suburban park "Patriot", where the main church of the Armed Forces of Russia, and an apartment worth about 60 million rubles in the house opposite the Church of the Holy Martyr Vlasius in the Old Stables in Moscow.
All cars in the family are also registered to Leonova: 15 years ago - Lexus RX450H, in 2013 - BMW X3, and in 2021 - BMW X5.