Heavenly flight of Father Ruf: the story of a pilot who became a Lavra monk
Having given up his career for God, he went through prisons and oblivion to become a prayer warrior of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra.
He did not become a famous artist or a renowned aviator, despite having all the qualifications for it, and having taken monastic vows, he did not accept ordination to the priesthood. He entered the modern history of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church as a courageous veteran and order bearer, a fighter pilot of World War II, a confessor of the Christian faith, a prayer warrior and ascetic of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra of the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries – monk Father Ruf.
"A kind little monk." Introduction
Due to his small stature, extraordinary friendliness, and almost childlike trustfulness, the tongue simply would not turn to call him a monk. “The kind little monk” – that’s how my wife and I nicknamed this energetic, not yet very old little old man.
And we met him at the Intercession Monastery of Kyiv a year before the opening of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra in 1988, where he bustled among the believers near the candle shop and approached people, mainly young people, with one single question: "Are you married in the church?" And if he received an affirmative answer, he would walk away satisfied, but if not, he would persistently explain that church marriage unites people in Heaven and the Lord gives strength to bear the family cross of life's trials, otherwise life without church marriage is "fornication and paganism."
In those distant days of our now even more distant youth, we ourselves were just taking our first steps in the Church and curiously looked around the crowded St. Nicholas Cathedral of the Intercession Monastery. On that Sunday we came to see our recently found spiritual father Father Fedor Sheremet (+1.05.2011), who served there, to arrange a private church wedding and baptism of our two-year-old son. We wanted to be married secretly, since we worked in the Soviet media, and for visiting a monastery – let alone getting married there – we could have paid dearly.
There we met the monk, in an old cassock and some kind of faded light cloak with a worn felt hat in his hand. This was Ruf, once a resident of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, closed by Khrushchev in 1961. We became acquainted and befriended, maintaining relations until his death in 2009, for more than 30 years...
Interrupted flight and broken career
A native of a picturesque Voronezh village, in love with nature and God's world, having felt an attraction to drawing from childhood, when the war began, he went to the front as a volunteer together with two brothers and fought in the Caucasus, defending Caspian oil from fascist raids in a "YAK-1" fighter.
The regiment commander, who knew him as a fearless, talented pilot and reliable combat comrade, suggested that the order bearer Junior Lieutenant Vasily Rezvykh (the secular name of Father Ruf) should enter a higher flight school after the war and dedicate his life to military aviation. He needed to join the party, but how? After all, he believed in God!..
And he refused, as he himself put it: "I interrupted my heavenly flight then..."
The next catastrophe awaited him at the I.E. Repin Art Academy, where he enrolled for study. Experienced professors prophesied a great future for him as a talented painter, but for the same reason he was forced to leave his studies and say goodbye to his dream of becoming a professional artist. Someone among his "friends" reported to the Rectorate that Vasily Rezvykh went to church and read in the choir.
So he found himself in Kharkiv, working as a laboratory assistant, again regularly attending God's temple. One shrewd matushka advised him to go to Kyiv, to the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra that had opened during the war, with the words: "You are needed there, although Golgotha awaits you. But the Lord will arrange everything..." she blessed the front-line soldier with the sign of the cross.
Fabricated case and closure of the lavra
Soon he became a novice at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, and then monk Ruf, named after the venerable Caves hermit Ruf, whose relics rest in the Far Caves. His favorite obedience became the restoration of icons, painting new ones, and making carved iconostases for the numerous newly opened churches of Ukraine.
Ruf was a strict ascetic, having front-line experience, he understood that now he was a warrior of Christ; and who, if not he, should fight with the enemy of the human race, "being obedient even unto death, and death of the cross" (Phil. 2:8).
But the time of persecution came. Churches and monasteries were closed everywhere, theological schools were abolished, believers were persecuted. The future schismatic Metropolitan Filaret (Denisenko), who was servile to party authorities, forced the Caves brotherhood to surrender property to the reserve, and to get out of there themselves. On the eve of the monastery's closure, a feuilleton was to appear in the newspaper about how "Lavra priests" drive around in black "Volgas," for which a photojournalist was sent from the central newspaper "Pravda Ukrainy" ("Truth of Ukraine") to photograph the Lavra's abbot getting out of an official car.
Several monks opposed this scheme, among whom was Father Ruf. He took the camera from the correspondent, removed the film and exposed it. But just around the corner a KGB “black maria” was already waiting: quick Chekists put handcuffs on the monks.
When the Lavra was closed, a dam burst at Kurenivka and huge streams of mud pulp crashed down on Podol, covering residential buildings, transport and thousands of people. This happened in March 1961. In March 2022, the Lavra was also closed by the authorities. A disturbing analogy, isn't it? But modern politicians and persecutors of Christ's Church hardly think about this...
Mother's letter to the Supreme Council of the USSR
then this happened. The People’s Court of the 2nd District of the Pechersk District of the city of Kyiv, composed of Judge Tkachenko and Prosecutor Yakovlev, sentenced him (verbatim):
“…taking into account the nature of the crimes committed with particular audacity, and guided by Articles 96 and 97 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Ukrainian SSR, Vasily Filimonovich Rezvykh, on the basis of Article 70, Part II, of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR, to be subjected to deprivation of liberty in a corrective labor colony, without deprivation of civil rights, for a term of five years.”
When Father Ruf was imprisoned, his mother appealed to the Supreme Council of the USSR with a petition. One cannot read without compassion and sorrow these maternal lines, soaked with tears, preserved by Father Ruf:
"As a mother, I ask for mercy for my son Rezvykh Vasily Filimonovich, born in 1922. For seven years, from 1941 to 1947, Vasily served in the ranks of the Soviet army as a junior lieutenant, fighter pilot; throughout the Patriotic War he took active part in combat operations. He has government orders and medals. I am 68 years old. After my husband's death, since 1934 I raised and brought up five children, three sons voluntarily went to the front. I earnestly ask you to pay attention to my maternal request and pardon my son. He is not a criminal, and I, his mother, can declare this with a clear conscience. He was always meek, obedient and kind, being my consolation. I am a 2nd group invalid, and this grief has completely broken me down. Dry my tears, return my son, so that he may be my support in old age. I very much hope for your sensitivity to a mother's request."
The godless Supreme Council of the USSR did not heed the mother's request. Monk Ruf served the full five years in the camp, from start to finish.
Only the Lord knows about the subsequent 18 years spent by Father Ruf after imprisonment in a basement room of a public toilet near the Lavra, where he worked and slept in a closet, since he had no housing of his own. He came to the Lavra daily for prayer. And only in the 1980s, after petitions from Father Ruf's spiritual children about providing him, as a front-line order bearer, with living space, he was allocated a one-room apartment in Obolon.
Monk Ruf reposed, after returning to his native monastery, on March 26, 2009, and is buried in the ancient monastic cemetery on the territory of the Far Caves of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra behind the Church of the Nativity of the Mother of God in a corner by the brick wall of the monastery, from where an amazing view opens onto the Dnieper and the boundless world of God, which the fighter pilot, artist and confessor monk Father Ruf so loved, defended and for which he prayed. Eternal memory to him!
