Background
Levitsky was born in Kiev Province, and trained at the Kiev Spiritual School (uchilishche), the Kiev Seminary and the Kiev Spiritual Academy, completing a doctorate (kandidatura) in theology before being ordained a priest on 30 March 1879, his twenty-sixth birthday.
Career
The exact date of his death is unclear, with dates ranging from 1918 to 1920 or even to "not later than April 1921" in various sources, and he is sometimes said merely to have "died at the hands of unknown bandits". Se
In 1880 he was sent to teach at the Riga Seminary. At that same time, he was named rector of the Riga Seminary.
On 14 January 1896, he was consecrated bishop in Saint Isaac"s Cathedral in Saint St. Petersburg as vicarial bishop of the Baltic dicastery for the Kamenets-Podol eparchy.
The following year he was named Bishop of Brest, vicarial bishop of the Lithuanian eparchy. In 1900 he was made ordinary Bishop of Grodno and Brest.
In 1903 he was transferred to the eparchy of Orenburg and the Urals and in 1910, was named bishop of Nizhny Novgorod and Azama. Three years later, he was elevated to archiepiscopal dignity.
He traveled to Moscow and never returned to Nizhny Novgorod, but retired from his archiepiscopate and was named administrator of the New Jerusalem Monastery on 22 March 1918.
He was again arrested, this time by the Bolsheviks, in 1918, but later that year, was released and allowed to travel to Crimea where he lived in his son"s dacha near Sevastopol. Sevastopol was seized by the White forces in the ensuing civil war and was not taken by the Red Army until November 1920. He was killed by unidentified bandits some time after his arrival in the city in 1918, as late as 1921 according to one source.
A version of his death alleges he was crucified upside down by local bolsheviks but most sources attribute his death to "unknown bandits" and make no reference to any crucifixion.
A contemporary report from other Orthodox clergy at the time supports the idea that he was killed during a robbery, perhaps of the cathedral, although details are still scant. Joachim is one of the New Martyrs of Russia (those who died for their faith in the Soviet Period), with his feast day observed on April 1.