Honoring the Bolsheviks’ successors at Kyiv Lavra

Dumenko congratulates Ostapenko on the 100th anniversary of the Lavra Reserve. Photo: Reserve’s Facebook page

Serhiy Dumenko held a “prayer service” at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra to celebrate the centenary of the Soviet-created Reserve – and handed out awards to its current leadership.

According to him,

in the 1920s and 1930s, “by God’s providence, the Reserve played an important role in preserving the Lavra’s unique spiritual and cultural heritage and contributed to its restoration in modern times.”

Dumenko claims that museum workers saved the monastery “from complete destruction during the Bolshevik persecutions.”

Now let’s try something radical: logic.

Before the Bolsheviks drove the monks and faithful out of the Lavra, there was no “Lavra heritage” in need of rescue. For centuries, the brethren had cared for the monastery grounds, kept its functioning churches in splendor, built new ones, and welcomed pilgrims.

So what exactly happened 100 years ago?

All of that was brought to an end – and the “All-Ukrainian Museum Town,” later renamed the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra Reserve, appeared in its place. 

The monks were thrown out. Some were exiled. Others were shot.

And the Reserve staff were hardly heroic museum workers saving holy sites from the Bolsheviks.

They were the Bolsheviks.

It was under the Reserve that the relics of the saints were desecrated, Lavra churches were turned into an atheism museum, and toilets were installed in sanctuaries.

Of course, not every employee was a desecrator. But throughout the Soviet era, the Reserve remained part of an atheistic totalitarian system.

One need only look at the appalling condition of the Lavra churches when the state returned them to the Church in 1988.

It was not the Reserve that brought the Lavra back from ruin. It was the monks and faithful of the UOC who restored and preserved the holy sites that Serhiy Dumenko’s organization now enjoys using.

Against that history, awarding the Reserve’s current leadership looks less like a celebration than a cruel joke. Like their predecessors, today’s museum officials are taking over churches and driving out monks – only the slogans have changed.

After a centenary like this, perhaps the next step will be for Dumenko to thank the Bolsheviks themselves for “saving” the monastery. After all, they were the ones who cleared the Lavra of those troublesome “Russian World” churchmen in the first place.

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