Archbishop Amvrosii (Sertis-Kamenskii) was killed in Moscow on this day in 1771. On September 12, I wrote about the mob that pillaged Constantinople in 1183. The psychology of the mob is the same everywhere. People, filled with adrenaline, believe whatever they please and act as if they had a license to do anything and everything. Russia and the Ottoman Empire fought twelve (unnecessary) wars with each other from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. During one such campaign in 1770, a plague spread by prisoners of war infected Russian troops stationed in Moldova. The necessity of constant communication between the frontlines and the rest of the country meant that the spread of the disease, even to the old capital of Moscow, could not be prevented. Just as Emperor Constantine the Great had needed a break from old Roman elites and built a new capital, Constantinople, so Peter the Great had sought to divorce himself from “backward Rus” as represented by Moscow by founding Saint Petersburg. For Catherine the Great, the unplanned, fetid, mostly wooden city of Moscow epitomized all that she hated about Russia. And Moscow “loved” the Empress right back. It is understandable why, under such social and sanitary conditions, the aforementioned plague started to claim the lives of a thousand Muscovites a day when it reached the city from the front in 1771 (the total number of victims is estimated at around 50,000). Governor Saltykov, fearing for his life, moved to his “second home” in the country, and the police chief followed suit. The industrious Muscovite Old Believers used this situation to improve their status as “second-class citizens.” They offered services to bury the dead. As a result, to this day, Rogozhskoe Cemetry in Moscow remains a stronghold of those Old Believers who recognized the priesthood, and Preobrazhenskoe that of those who only have lay ministers. At some point in 1771, people began assembling at the chapel of Our Lady of Bogoliubovo, within a ten-minute walk from the Kremlin. However, Archbishop Amvrosii (Sertis-Kamenskii) prohibited them from carrying on their public worship there. The people became furious and turned into a mob. Archbishop Amvrosii had grown up in Moldavia and lived in Ukraine. Ever since his appointment to the See of Moscow by Catherine the Great in 1768, the locals had not accepted him. On this day, he had been serving a liturgy in Donskoi Monastery when he was informed that a crowd was moving toward the monastery from the city center. Amvrosii took refuge in the upper choir loft, but a boy told the crowd where the Archbishop was hiding. A trial by “kangaroo court” and lynching ensued. Interestingly, Amvrosii was one of the hierarchs who had defrocked St. Arsenii (Matsievich) – and “un-consecrated” him by stripping him of his liturgical vestments – for charges of lèse-majesté and his opposition to state confiscation of church property in 1764. Source A.V. Kartashov, Ocherki po istorrii Russkoi Tserkvi [Essays on the History of the Russian Church] (Moscow, 1992) |
