Barbara wrote: No one else but the First Hierarch was otherwise granted this title [of Metropolitan]. Only when Met Anastassy passed the 'torch' to Metropolitan Philaret were there 2 Metropolitans of the Church alive at the same time.
This is historically incorrect. ROCOR had several metropolitans who were never first-hierarchs, sometimes at the same time:
Mefodii (Gerasimov), Metropolitan of Harbin and Manchuria (15/28 March 1931)
Innokentii (Figurovskii), Metropolitan of Peking and China (15/28 June 1931)
Serafim (Lade), Metropolitan of Berlin and Germany (1/14 September 1950)
Panteleimon (Rozhnovskii), ret. Metropolitan of Minsk and Byelorussia (17/30 December 1950)
Avgustin (Peterson), ret. Metropolitan of Riga and Latvia (4 October 1955)
Platon (Rozhdestvenskii), Metropolitan of America, went into schism in 1924
Evlogii (Georgievskii), Metropolitan of Paris, went into schism in 1926
In theory, early ROCOR was supposed to have at least four metropolitans at one time: in Sremski Karlovci (for the Balkans), Paris, America, and China and/or Japanese-occupied areas of China called "Manchuria."
These are important facts to keep in mind when Archimandrite Nilos asserts that ROCOR was ecumenist from the beginning and that Saint John Maximovitch is not a saint. ROCOR inherited a lot of diversity in the 1920s. ROCOR, correctly, clamped down on ecumenist deviations and issued the Anathema Against Ecumenism in 1983. Archimandrite Nilos should be aware that both the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Church of Greece entered into some forms of ecumenism several years before 1924 (even in the late 1800s). Think: Patriarch Joachim III. This does not invalidate the Greek True Orthodox. Neither do mistakes in early ROCOR invalidate the ROCOR of Saint Philaret. ROCOR produced many saints and holy men and women. It was a grace-bearing church as is the Florinite-Akkakian-Auxentian succession in Greece that Saint Philaret fully recognized. God forbid that we would blaspheme against the grace of the Holy Trinity that sanctified these holy people.