 Following his education in Saint Petersburg Theological Seminary in 1892, Dolganyov accepted the name Hermogenes.In 1893 he became the inspector of the Tiflis Theological Seminary in Tbilisi, and in 1898 became its dean.In 1899, Hermogenes was responsible for expelling one of seminary's most famous students, Joseph Dzhugashvili (Joseph Stalin), who had been reading "Ninety-Three" (a book on the French Revolution by Victor Hugo) and lecturing students on Marxism.