And the Kyiv Pecherska Lavra Monastery of the Caves

EVENT ONE

As the then written sources testify, the summer of 1706 happened to bring on quite a rich harvest in Ukraine, especially on the Left Bank. Russia, or, to be more exact, the then Muscovy, had been bleeding for seven years in the exhausting Great Northern War (1700- 1721) against Sweden with no end in sight. The continuation of this war required a great deal of money and, naturally, foodstuffs, above all, bread.

Impoverished Muscovy was unable to provide itself with all it needed. The Tsar, so free with other people’s property, turned his eyes to not quite completely subdued Little Russia (Ukraine), ruled by Hetman Ivan Mazepa, where the industrious people had bread. Surplus bread was sold on markets in the West, Crimea, and Black Sea coast, leaving Muscovy a chance to buy for cash what remained. Knowing this, Peter I and his numerous retinue dropped in at Kyiv Pecherska Lavra (Monastery of the Caves) on a July day of that year under the pretext of “bowing to the holy relics of Christian saints.”

Having performed impatiently the church rites, the Tsar turned to the Lavra’s Archimandrite Ioasaf Krokovsky and “all his brethren” with a royal request sounding more like a military order: to grant a certain amount of money and 20,000 poods (1 pood = 16.38 kg. or about 37 lb.) of wheat and rye for the needs of the Russian troops. No small amount. The monks, well aware of the Papa Tsar’s mercilessness, went to the Lavra-controlled villages to carry out the his will. After some time, Muscovy received finished flour and cereals with cattle to boot. It was more difficult to raise money because the Lavra had run up great expenses of its own on construction, repairs, printing, school education in its villages, buying household utensils, etc. So the monks managed to satisfy the Tsar’s henchmen with “small change,” knowing very well that their condescension was only temporary.

After the Tsar carried out his monetary reform in Muscovy and Ukraine in 1704 by introducing the decimal system, all old coins were withheld from circulation, while not enough new ones had been minted for Ukraine. Our eminent Cossack chronicler Samiylo Velychko, a witness to those events, wrote, quite aptly, “After the Battle of Poltava against the Swedes, the Tsar abolished and ordered melted down all the old Polish coins — levy, orlianky, chvertky, half-thalers, orti, timfi, chekhy, osmaky, and liadsly — throughout Little Russia.”

It is worth recalling that while the Tsar visited the Lavra, he managed to leave there his agent monks who secretly oversaw the life and contacts of the monastery’s Ukrainian monastic majority.

In view of the devaluation of Peter I’s new money and believing in the stability of foreign gold and silver coins which Velychko mentioned, the Lavra’s Holy Council thought it necessary to keep saving in secrecy a sort of “emergency reserve” composed of such coins as thalers, ducats, florins, as well as high-grade gold and precious-stone insignia. This secret bank was hidden in a vault niche under the church choirs of the Assumption Cathedral. In the ensuing years, to keep Peter’s agents away, only the three most loyal monks, in addition to the archimandrites, knew the secret of secrets. With every passing year, the monks would replenish the treasure of high-purity gold and silver coins in tin drums and wooden barrels, each time making a record for the archimandrites to see.

This ever-growing treasury bank was supposed to tide the Lavra over for a rainy day. But then something unforeseen happened. Somewhere in the mid-eighteenth century Kyiv and Lavra were struck with plague and the guardian monks suddenly died without divulging the secret. The treasure was left without an owner.

It was decided on November 26, 1898, to renovate the choirs floor in the Assumption Cathedral. Carpenters removed the old flooring and began to take out the unnecessary broken stone. What followed was a true sensation. The raised pig iron cover of the niche exposed five very heavy vessels brimming with gold and silver coins and gold jewelry dating back to the time of Peter I as well to earlier and later periods. First of all, the treasure was weighed: there were almost one and a half poods (20 kg.) of gold in coins and jewelry and 17 poods (275 kg.) of silver!

The treasure trove was of a huge historical, numismatic, and cultural value, especially the 10-ruble gold coins of the early Romanov dynasty and a unique gold medallion of Byzantine emperors Constantine the Great and Constantius II (306-361 AD), Christian believers, the coins of Polish kings, the gold ducats of thirteenth-century Venice, an so on. The telegraph and newspapers spread the news throughout the world, sending thrills to numismatists and European museum curators. Everybody wanted to buy everything or something. The Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church instructed the Lavra to sell the whole trove to the Hermitage at a comically small (for those times) price of 65,000 paper rubles, without even asking the opinion of historians studying Ukraine, then officially known as Little Russia. Thus the wealth from our soil again went to somebody else.

EVENT TWO

We have already noted in what situation Moscow’s agent monks found themselves in the Lavra when Peter I was on the throne. Finally, their hour in the sun came.

In 1708 the “reforming” Tsar instituted the civil script in his domain. This was followed by the mindless destruction of Ukrainian old printed books. Especially zealous was the Holy Synod of the then Russian Orthodox Church in its quest to “eliminate differences in the language and rites,” taking no account of the historical and religious value of Ukrainian printed books and manuscripts. There was a never-ending string of injunctions to Ukraine’s monasteries and churches, but the results were quite negligible, for the highly principled Ukrainian monks and clergy did their utmost to hide and keep from destruction the ancient history of their own people.

A new wave of pestilence fell on the monasteries and churches, the guardians of our historical and literary monuments, soon after the Baturyn and Poltava dramas of 1709. The largest collections of Ukrainian ancient monuments — chronicles, decrees, diaries, correspondence, deeds, fiction, theological works, etc. — had always been kept in what can now be called the Lavra archives perhaps since princely times. Moscow encroached more than once on those treasures of our spiritual life and history, only to be rebuffed by the adroitness and craft of Ukrainian monks who would send various junk or old Muscovite printed books to the Synod.

On the night of April 22, 1718, Kyivans were awakened by the alarming toll of church bells. An eerie glow was ablaze over the whole Lavra. Fire was consuming all the structures, even the Assumption Cathedral top which kept by far the oldest archive. In the morning, when the fire had died out, the wind was blowing around big heaps of ashes. The cathedral interior did not burn, for there were no papers there.

Nobody even tried to find what had caused the blaze or to trace the likely initiators of the tragedy. In April 1719, Archimandrite Ioannyky Seniutovych pleaded with Peter I to give money to renovate and restore the Lavra which had so much suffered from the devastating fire. On October 16, 1720, the Tsar allocated 5,000 rubles from government coffers, unaware of a huge treasure hidden under the cathedral’s choirs.

IN LIEU OF EPILOGUE

In 1948-1950 I had to serve a term at the Inta “special prison camp,” where political prisoners were about to organize a mass uprising.

A group of ringleaders, including me, was put under a new arrest and investigation in 1950. The jailers tried to beat a confession out of me about where our organization’s archive was kept, but I denied everything, saying: “I don’t know, I didn’t hear.” I was subjected to inhuman tortures and thrown into cell No. 2 of the Ministry of Security’s inner prison.

The cell contained only one inmate, Oleksiy Kyseliov (1903- 1951), who had held until September 1933 quite a high post, chief property manager of the Council of People’s Commissars in Kharkiv, the then capital of the Ukrainian SSR. He worked there from the 1920s onwards thanks to his close friendship with Mykola Skrypnyk who committed suicide in 1933. It is for this friendship that Kyseliov was at first given five years in the camps, then another five years later, and was put inside for the third time in 1950 as an American spy. A very experienced prisoner, he saw I could not be a stool pigeon, so we began to resort to various reminiscences and so on after arduous night interrogations (we were barred from sleeping during the day).

Kyseliov struck me with his cultural background, erudition, and, what is more, the knowledge of many events in Ukraine. An avid theatergoer himself, he seemed to know everything and everybody, including writers and actors.

Once, his reminiscences touched upon the Kyiv Pecherska Lavra. And he told me what I have just written. When I asked him where he had learned all this from, he told me what looks like a detective story. When the Union for the Liberation was being tried in 1930 in Kharkiv, Kyseliov said, Skrypnyk heard from somebody that the GPI (secret police) had found in Kyiv a very valuable archive from Petro Lebedyntsev (Lebedynets) (1819-1896), historian and priest, a close compatriot of Taras Shevchenko.

Skrypnyk did not need to be told much if the question was about Shevchenko, so he went to Kyiv. Taking advantage of his high political and governmental position, he wrested the archive from the GPU and brought it to Kharkiv. Kyseliov and Skrypnyk read the notebooks together. Among other things, there were notes by one of Lebenynets’s seventeenth-century ancestors, perhaps a priest, who performed the sacrament of confession for the monks who, under orders from Petersburg, had taken part in the arson of the Kyiv Pecherska Lavra in April 1718. The miscreants zealously repented of such an unpardonable sins. Lebedynets himself could not even dream of publishing the notes of penitence in contravention with church canons: he was in great danger. Hence, he closely guarded the notes until they fell into the hands of Skrypnyk and Kyseliov. As for Skrypnyk told Kyseliov, the papers from Lebedyntsev’s archive had been given to Mykhailo Hrushevsky and nobody new anything about their further fate, for more dangerous times had come for these three persons...

Incidentally, Lebedyntsev, then a priest at the Church of Christ’s Nativity in Podil, Kyiv, performed the requiem service for the late Taras Shevchenko in May 1861, when his body was sent from St. Petersburg.

Prison rumor had it that Kyseliov was executed by firing squad at Inta. I heard in the 1970s that a brother of his worked in Kyiv, at the Institute of Ukrainian Literature of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. I tried to make contact with him and even wrote letters to Mykola Zhulynsky in the early 1980s but never received an answer. I am not very much surprised at this.