Closing of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra and the salvation of the head of St. Sergius

On March 26, 1920, a resolution of the Presidium of the Moscow Gubernia Executive Committee “On the closure of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra and the transfer of the relics of the Lavra to the Moscow Museum” was issued.

The confiscation of property belonging to the Lavra began in the fall of 1918. Slanderous and blasphemous articles about the monastery, about the relics of St. Sergius of Radonezh and the possibility of opening them began to appear in the local newspaper Trudovaya Nedelya.

In the days of Great Lent in 1919, a large meeting of believers took place on this occasion in the Refectory Church of the Lavra. Archimandrite Kronid (Lubimov), the last abbot of the Lavra before its closure in 1920, delivered a speech in which he called on the faithful to protect the sacred place from desecration. Soon after that, in the temples of the Lavra, in the academic temple and in the town parish churches, they began to collect signatures under a petition to the Council of People’s Commissars not to open the relics of St. Sergius.

On February 16, 1919, the board of the People’s Commissariat of Justice adopted a resolution on organizing the opening of the relics of saints in Russia, and determined “the procedure for their inspection and confiscation by state bodies.” The opening of the relics (removal of covers and vestments from them) was to be carried out by the clergy in the presence of representatives of local Soviet authorities, the Cheka and medical experts. Based on the results of the autopsy, it was prescribed to draw up an act.

On March 4, 1919, the brethren of the monastery, headed by Father Kronid, appealed to Lenin, the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, with a request to prohibit the opening of the shrine with the relics of the saint. On March 20, His Holiness Patriarch Tikhon also addressed Vladimir Ilyich about the campaign to open the relics. Despite the petitions of the faithful, the decision to open the relics of St. Sergius was made at the plenum of the local city council on April 1, 1919, and on April 4 it was confirmed by the Moscow Provincial Executive Committee.

The autopsy itself took place on 11 April. It lasted for two hours and was filmed (subsequently a propaganda anti-religious film was released). At the end of the autopsy, a protocol was drawn up, the relics of St. Sergius were stripped of their covers and covered with glass. The authorities needed to convince believers not to worship the relics. However, the number of pilgrims who went to worship the monk only increased.

“From a small chapel, which stood on the square near the Red Trading Rows, to the Trinity Cathedral itself, there was a queue of 4 people who wanted to venerate the relics and look at them for the first time in their lives,” writes S. A. Volkov, a witness of those events, in the article “Last Trinity” (book “Near the monastery walls”, Moscow, 2000).

On November 10, 1919, the Sergievsky Executive Committee adopted a resolution on the liquidation of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra as a monastery. On the night of November 3, a search was unexpectedly carried out in the monastery, the brethren were expelled from the walls of the monastery.

Worrying about the fate of the relics of Sergius of Radonezh, priest Pavel Florensky, who was martyred on Solovki in 1937, and Count Yuri Olsufiev (shot in 1937 at the Butovo firing range), being members of the Commission for the Protection of Monuments of Art and Antiquities of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, with the blessing Patriarch Tikhon seized the honest head of the saint, replacing it with the head of one of the princes Trubetskoy, who was buried in the 17th century in the crypt of the Trinity Cathedral.

It is curious that they did this in front of almost everyone. Before being sent to Moscow, a special commission was supposed to “put the exhibit in order” – take it out of the shrine, shift it, “pack it”. Here Pavel Florensky and Yuri Olsufiev changed the head.

Everything that happened was kept in the strictest confidence. First, the shrine was hidden in the monastery sacristy, then it was transferred to the Olsufyevs’ house on Valovaya Street in Sergiev Posad. According to Yuri Olsufyev’s wife Sofya Vladimirovna, the chapter was kept “in a large square oak box from under some kind of silver things. There was a palm tree on the box, as if on a stand.

According to the decree of the Council of People’s Commissars of April 20, 1920, a historical and art museum was opened in the Lavra. By decision of the Sergievsky executive committee, on May 7, 1920, the Trinity Cathedral was locked and sealed, despite the fact that it had previously been transferred to the People’s Commissariat of Education for museum purposes. On May 10, 1920, Patriarch Tikhon condemned the closure of the Lavra churches and the intention to take out the relics from there as a violation of the decree “On the separation of the Church from the state.” As a result of the petitions of His Holiness, it was allowed to open the Trinity Cathedral only on the feast of the Holy Trinity. On May 30, 1920, the last divine service was performed in the Lavra and the bells rang for the last time. The monastery was finally closed to pilgrims. But the relics of St. Sergius still remained in the Lavra: as a museum exhibit, they were in the porch of the Refectory Church in a shrine with a glass lid. The guides unceremoniously tapped on the lid with a pointer.

In March 1928, another wave of arrests swept through Sergiev Posad. The Olsufievs, fearing that “uninvited guests” would visit their house, buried the head in the garden. At the end of the summer of the same year, it was dug up and handed over to Pavel Golubtsov (later Archbishop of Novgorod and Staraya Russian Sergius) – at that time still a very young man, who later recalled these events like this:

“When they dug it up, it was very scary. It was at night. Somewhere a dog was howling, and we were afraid that it might wake up the neighbors. We had to get there before dawn. I carried the chapter in a closed shopping bag so that there were no suspicions, and covered it with a newspaper on top, as if there was a head of cabbage in the bag. When I arrived at the station, it was dawning, and the trains to Moscow had not yet run. I walked to Abramtsevo or Khotkovo and there I already boarded a train. (Quoted from Prince Andronik (Trubachev), abbot. Closing of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra and the fate of the relics of St. Sergius of Radonezh in 1918–1946. Moscow: Publishing Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, 2008.)

Pavel Golubtsov moved the shrine to the Olsufyevs’ apartment in Lyubertsy.

In 1933 Pavel Florensky was arrested. In January 1938, Yuri Olsufiev was arrested, his wife Sofya Vladimirovna – November 1, 1941. Literally on the eve of her arrest, she managed to hand over the head of the monk again to Golubtsov, who delivered it to his elder, Schema-Archimandrite Hilarion (Udodov), who served in the Vladimir Church in the village of Vinogradovo (near Dolgoprudnaya station). At the same time, he again walked almost the entire way, and boarded the train only “in such places where it was impossible to pass.” In the Vladimir temple, the shrine was hidden under the throne, where it was secretly kept until the summer of 1945.

Only after the war, the shrine was handed over to the Locum Tenens of the Patriarchal Throne, later His Holiness Patriarch Alexy I (Simansky).

The head of St. Sergius was returned to his relics by Schema-Archimandrite Hilarion (Udodov). Vladyka Alexy sent him to the Lavra to prepare the relics of St. Sergius for the official return of the Moscow Patriarchate. A delegation of British allies was waiting for the Local Cathedral, their program included a visit to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, which had not yet been opened, and Schema-Archimandrite Hilarion was instructed to “dress the relics of St. Sergius, which they put in their place in the Trinity Cathedral, in schema attire.”

Thus, the reverse replacement of the head of Prince Trubetskoy with the head of St. Sergius also took place in the strictest secrecy, during the reclothing of the relics into a new schema. The authenticity of the head was evidenced by the fact that it preserved a trace from a copy, with which Father Pavel Florensky separated it from the upper vertebra. When the head of the monk returned, this trace coincided with the trace on the vertebra in cancer.

The official transfer of the relics of St. Sergius to the Lavra took place on the eve of Easter 1946. On April 20, Archimandrite Guriy (Egorov), the first abbot of the monastery being revived, received from the director of the Zagorsk Museum-Reserve V. K. Ryakhovsky the holy relics in a silver shrine of the 16th century.

The opening of the Lavra in 1946 is described by Protodeacon Sergei Boskin, a direct participant in this event:

“Holy Christ’s Resurrection April 21st. After 26 years of numbness in the monastery of St. Sergius on Easter night, the bells rang, immediately, unexpectedly. The people who filled the square stood with lighted candles. The procession freely bypassed the cathedral and went out to the porch. Matins began and the first “Christ is Risen”. (Boskin S., Protodeacon. Easter 1946: Opening of the Lavra of St. Sergius // Trinity Word: Sat. Spiritual and Moral Education. [Загорск, 1990]. #4.)

The first patriarchal service at the Trinity-Sergius Lavra took place on the feast of the Holy Trinity.

Sergei Ishkov.

Photo by the author and from the site https://stsl.ru