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The Case of the Kiev Apostolic Orthodox Church

On 24 October 1924, by personal decree, Patriarch Tikhon granted the Kiev Monastery of the Caves independent status (stavropigia), freeing it from supervision by the provincial ecclesiastical authorities and subordinating it directly to the Moscow Patriarchate. The scope of the decree embraced the convents of Feodosiya and the Resurrection (Feodosiyevskoye podvor'ye, Voskresenskoye podvor'ye), affiliated to the monastery and headed by the abbess in schema (skhiigumen 'ya) Mikhaila (Yelizaveta Fedorovna Shchelkina). On 30 October, by decree of Bishop Makari, administering the diocese of Kiev, the Feodosiya and Resurrection houses were renamed the Kiev Stavropigial Convent (Kiyevsky Stavropigial'ny Monastyr'). This community would have an eventful history, ultimately succumbing to Soviet persecution of religion and figuring in one of the group cases brought by the security organ, the GPU. This article is based largely on the criminal case records (Case No. 149511967) and most quotations are from testimony by witnesses during the investigation. The name Stavropigial'ny Monastyr' (independent monastery or convent) is used in the official files. However, by the time of the indictment the convent had, through force of circumstances, evolved far from its origins; its leader at that time insisted on calling his organisation the Apostolic Orthodox Church (Apostol'skaya Pravoslavnaya Tserkov'), deriving authority from the Local Church Council (Pomestny Sobor) of 1917, an authority he denied to any rival (prosoviet) church. This title appropriately describes the organisation ultimately targeted by the GPU. Not too much is known about the abbess Mikhaila. She was born in 1862 in a peasant family in Vyazha, a village in Novovasil'yevsk uyezd of Tula oblast'. Orphaned in infancy, she was raised until the age of 16 in the family of a priest, Petr Kedrov. At 17 she became a novice at the Antoleptov convent, some 8 km from Dvinsk. Having completed a course at the school of nursing and midwifery in Rovno, she took over management of the hospital attached to her convent. In 1889 she became a nun, taking the name Mariya. From 1900 to 1904 she served as a nurse with the Russian army stationed in China and worked in a military hospital during the Russo-Japanese war. In 1905, at the end of the war, she took up duties as head of the Antoleptov convent, but moved a year later to become abbess of the Feodosiya Stavropigial Convent attached to the Kiev Monastery of the Caves. In 1917 she adopted the rigid and austere monastic regime known as schema (skhima) and took