They spent a day in Kolomenskoye, a former royal estate now open to Muscovites and tourists alike. Here the churches within the estate, that of Our Lady of Kazan, St. John the Baptist, and the Ascension, are open to worshippers. Religion was reviled by Marx as ‘the opiate of the masses’ and believers and priests were once persecuted by the Soviet state, but Christian faith is too deeply ingrained in the Russian soul to be eradicated, too resilient to be crushed. In church, daughter watched father: “I was deeply moved as my father prayed. He stood for a long time by himself in a dark corner of the sanctuary, holding a candle in one hand and wiping tears with the other. He did not notice my furtive glance. I felt his prayer and I knew that this was to be our only time together on this earth…”
Her parting, in a tunnel under a wide street, in a station of the Metro, was difficult. They waved to each other at a bend in the tunnel, and Olga caught one last glimpse of him as they both emerged on opposite sides of busy streams of Moscow traffic. She returned home the next day. Her father’s last letter to her arrived on September 16, 1992. Soon thereafter, she received word that he was very ill, and a month later, on November 21, he died after a stroke at the age of 81.
“When he died, I felt his presence. I held the tiny old icon of St. Nicholas that he had managed to take with him from Mukden, and that he had given me on our last day in Moscow. I gave thanks to God from both of us for His unconditional love. Yes, we shall be together again, dear Papa, ‘in the blink of an eye,’ as the Bible promises.”
Olga Kiriloff lives with her husband in their home in a suburb of Ottawa where she is an active churchwarden at the Russian Orthodox church near her. Her daughters have their own lives today, and their parents are now proud grandparents. Olga was a good friend to her former teaching colleague, my late wife Sheila, especially during her last illness. She has been a loving godmother to my son Kit ever since his difficult birth in 1981. My wife Louise and I are blessed to know her today, and I am grateful to her for her support in writing this account.
The Arbat, pedestrian street in Moscou.
Photo taken by Alex ‘Florstein’ Fedorov.
