A night in a cell of the last Kish otaman
This year’s October marks the end of the 25-year imprisonment of Petro Kalnyshevsky, the first Ukrainian prisoner of the Solovetsky Monastery.
After the victory over Turkey and practical surrender of the Crimean Khanate (the Crimea became an official part of the Russian Empire in 1783) Empress Catherine II decided to liquidate the Zaporozhian Sich, because this “island of freedom” was for Russia like a bur in the throat on its way to ultimate enslavement of Ukraine.
In the night of June 4 (16), 1775, a 100,000 Lieutenant General Pyotr Tekelia’s army surrounded Zaporozhian Sich with heavy artillery. The forces were too unequal: 100 Tsar soldiers to one Zaporozhian Cossack. However even under such circumstances the Cossacks were ready to fight. But what would await Ukraine after that? Would the Ukrainian cities and villages be burned down again, like after the Poltava Battle? Would rivers of human blood flow, like in Baturyn? Only this time it could happen to entire Ukraine. And the last Kish Otaman of Zaporozhian Sich, 84-year-old Petro Kalnyshevsky, as he was looking from the rampart of the Sich fortress at the Russian troops that were getting ready to hit the fortress with heavy artillery fire, ordered firmly for the first and the last time in his life: “Lay down arms.”
For this the Cossack leader, renowned for his participation in the battles against Tartars and Turks, a lieutenant general of the Russian army, cavalier of Saint Andrew’s Order, awarded with a golden medal with diamonds for personal courage in the Russo-Turkish War, was arrested, secretly put into irons, so that nobody in Ukraine knew about it, brought to an island in the White Sea and imprisoned in the Solovky Monastery.
“We can see a two-arshin high small door [arshin is 71 cm] with a tiny window in the middle: the door leads to the inmate’s cell,” researcher-historian Konchyn described Kalnyshevsky’s cell. “It has a shape of a lying cut cone made of four-arshin thick bricks. Its width is one sazhen [sazhen is 2.34 m], the height is three arshins at the entrance, and 1.5 arshins in the narrower end. There is a bench, the inmate’s bed, to the right from the entrance. The remains of a broken stove are to the left. The walls are wet and moldy, the air is stuffy. In the narrower end of the room there is a small window with an area of six square vershoks [vershok is 4.4 cm]. A ray of sun gives a dim stealthy light to this terrible casemate through three frames and three grates. Such light makes it possible to read only on brightest days, and you still will strain your eyes greatly. After half an hour in this stuffy atmosphere of the casemate, you begin to suffocate, the blood rushes to your head, and you feel boundless fear of something.”
Eyewitnesses told that the last Kish Otaman of the Zaporozhian Sich was brought out of the cell to the church only three times a year: on Easter, Transfiguration, and Christmas. Kalnyshevsky was guarded by four armed soldiers in summer and three soldiers – in winter.
Unfortunately, the exact location of Kalnyshevsky’s grave has been lost. But the gravestone has been preserved and is located in front of the cell near the bronze bust of the last Cossack otaman. The gravestone bears an engraved inscription: “The body of the Kish otaman of once formidable Zaporozhian Sich of Cossacks Otaman Petro Kalnyshevsky, who was exiled in 1776 to this abode for submission, rests in here. In 1801, at the highest order [of Russian Tsar Alexander I who took up the throne after Catherine II died. – Author] he was granted pardon, but he did not want to leave the abode where he acquired the spiritual calmness of a humble Christian, who sincerely recognized his guilt. He died a good and righteous death on October 31, 1803, on Saturday, at the age of 112.”
I laid my hand on the gravestone, it was cold as ice.
Kalnyshevsky spent almost 25 years in Solovky prison, from July 29, 1776, till April 2, 1801. I asked the guard of the monastery to close me in Kalnyshevsky’s cell in the evening without a mobile phone or watch.
After the door metal bolts clang and the locks clanked behind me, I stood for long in the middle of the cell, examining it. The first thought the person thrown to a prison has is to escape. I tried the metal-bound door and metal grates on the window: they cannot be broken, even with a crowbar. I touched the stones on the walls and on the ceiling and joins between them: it was impossible to break them even with a hammer. On the floor under red soil there was stone as well.
I laid down an old sheepskin on the Otaman’s bed and lied down on it on the place where his body tired in battles rested and grew old for nearly 25 years. The niche laid of stones in the side wall resembled a cut along sarcophagus.
I lied for long, but I could not get asleep. When my sides and back began to ache, I stood up, came up to the window, leaned my hands on the stone windowsill, hunched up, lowered my head, and looked through the grated window. It was almost on the ground level, like a gun-port in a fortress. My glance slid over the grass and stopped on the cemetery crosses. I could see only a small piece of sky above. The view was as scant as that.
All of a sudden I felt with my palms that they were lying very comfortably on the windowsill. I gave it a closer look: those were two cavities polished by the Cossack’s otaman’s hands. I wondered, how many times in long 25 years did Kalnyshevsky approach that place, lean his arms on the stone, lower his head and look into the window? Even when the window was covered with the snow in winter. The hollows were warm for some reason, as if the place has preserved the old-time warmth of the old Cossack’s hands until now.
What was Kalyshevsky thinking as he stood in this place? Maybe he recalled thousand times the wide Ukrainian steppe, beautiful Dnipro, and the wide sky above them. He seemed to hear the snort of combat horses, the cling of sabers, and the thunder of cannons during the cavalier attacks of the enemy posts. The smoke of field bonfires pleasantly tickled his nostrils, and his heart sank from girls’ songs, which were floating above pools and meadows in moonlit nights like fog.
All this was long time ago and will never repeat, because not only he, Petro Kalnyshevsky, but entire Ukraine was enslaved. How farsighted Vinnytsia Colonel Ivan Bohun was when he broke his saber, refusing to support Bohdan Khmelnytsky at the Treaty of Pereiaslav concerning the reuniting of Ukraine and Russia in 1654. Everything happened exactly like Bohun predicted. Year after year the Russian empire was swallowing Ukraine alive for centuries like a gluttonous crocodile, depriving it of statehood, driving it into a yoke of slavery, taking away its language and Ukrainian songs. Then the revolution broke out, Ukraine was occupied by Bolsheviks, there was collectivization, the Holodomor, repressions, the war, a new wave of repressions, building of the light future, and the collapse of the system. It was only too high a price to pay for that reunion.
It probably was after midnight when I laid a bright Ukrainian rushnyk embroidered with red threads on the windowsill, put an icon of the holy martyr Kalnyshevsky, lit a candle, and scattered a handful of Ukrainian soil, and prayed for long for the peace of the Cossack otaman’s soul. I had a physical feeling that the present day merged in me with the past.
When the piece of sky in the cell’s window got paler and the first sunrays sold on the black crosses of the cemetery after a white night, the guard clang with the heavy bolts and the cell’s door opened.
I tied the rushnyk from the windowsill to Kalnyshevsky’s bronze bust and scattered some Ukrainian soil on his gravestone.
