Why is the state celebrating the Bolsheviks’ destruction of the Lavra?

The Kyiv–Pechersk Lavra under Bolshevik occupation. Photo: open sources

Why is the state celebrating the Bolsheviks’ destruction of the Lavra?

Ukraine is set to mark the 100th anniversary of the Bolsheviks’ destruction of the Kyiv–Pechersk Lavra and the creation of the so-called “Museum Town” – the forerunner of today’s Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra Reserve. On September 29, the state will solemnly celebrate the jubilee of the relevant decree of the Council of People’s Commissars.

It sounds like a stupid slander invented by Russian propaganda – but it is true. In a country that has four separate decommunization laws, where every Soviet monument has been torn down and streets have been renamed, the authorities will, at the state level, celebrate a very real crime of the Soviet totalitarian regime. And that is not an exaggeration.

A hundred years ago the Bolsheviks did not merely seize the Lavra’s churches and cells. Some of the brotherhood were taken away and shot, while the rest were thrown into prisons or sent into exile. The churches were plundered, the altars turned into toilets, and the relics of the Venerable Fathers put on display as museum exhibits.

How can this be celebrated today – and celebrated by the state? Where are all those loudly advertised “anti-totalitarian” laws now? Or do they only apply to composers and writers?

There are other questions, too, about the state’s “church” anniversaries. This year Ukraine will also commemorate the 350th anniversary of the birth of Metropolitan Rafail Zaborovskyi, who lived in the eighteenth century. And that would be wonderful – if not for one “but”. Today both the authorities and the OCU insist that the Church in Ukraine spent the last 300 years under “Moscow’s occupation”. Dumenko’s people have even meticulously tallied which saints in the Lavra caves are “Constantinopolitan” and which are “Muscovite”.

So, by the logic of our “patriots”, Zaborovskyi was the very definition of a “collaborator” and an “occupier”. He was ordained in Moscow. He served as an ober-hieromonk on a warship of the Russian fleet. He was an assessor and then a counsellor of the Synod of the ROC. He served as an archimandrite in a monastery in Tver, and later as the ruling bishop in Pskov. And only after this entire ROC “background” was he sent to serve in Kyiv.

Did that make the metropolitan pro-Russian? No. He was of Christ – and he brought immense benefit to the Church on Ukrainian lands.

But were all the other Ukrainian hierarchs of the last 300 years “pro-Russian”? Why are they “spiritual occupiers”, while Rafail Zaborovskyi is not? Why is the current Metropolitan of Kyiv, Onuphry, “Moscow’s”?

Because there is no logic in the words and actions of our current authorities. There is only propaganda – crude and malicious. Propaganda which, under the mask of “patriotism”, can do nothing but persecute and whip up hatred against those who are unwelcome.

Just like the people who ruled here 100 years ago.

By the way, take a look at the inscriptions in the “Museum Town” – they are all in Ukrainian. It seems the Orthodox Church was not being destroyed here by Moscow at all. It was destroyed by the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of those in power today. Which is why it is perfectly “logical” that they are celebrating the glorious deeds of their ancestors.

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