‘We pray for peace’
Russian churchgoers in Miami pained over war, family on both sides
I feel like I am with family here. The war is absurd. It is a horror. We don’t take a position here. We support everyone who is hurting. We emphasize love in your soul, love for each other.
When Andrew Andreyev walks through the white gate, peers up at the blue onion dome and opens the red door of St. Prince Vladimir Russian Orthodox Church, it’s as if he has entered a portal.
“Here, for a little while, we are outside the world,” he said on a recent Sunday morning after services had concluded. “This is a place of peace. We pray for peace. Our church emphasizes that if you can find peace in your heart, then thousands of people around you will be saved by that same spirit of peace.”
The prayers are urgent, perhaps more urgent than at any time in the 75-year history of the little church that sits in a working-class Miami neighborhood off Flagler Street, hidden by a grove of mango trees.
It’s been seven weeks since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine. The war consumes the thoughts of parishioners, many of whom are natives of Russia and Ukraine and are worried about relatives and friends back home.
At church, they share dispatches, offer comfort and raise money to send to relief centers.
“My father is Ukrainian, my mother is Russian, and I’m 50-50, born in Moscow,” said a member of the congregation who gave only his first name of Vlad because he is concerned about retaliation against family members in both countries. “I spoke to my cousin in Nizhyn [in northeast Ukraine]. She’s been hiding in the basement with her grandchildren for two weeks.
“One of my nephews is in the Ukrainian army. Here he is by a Russian tank they destroyed,”
Vlad said, showing a photo on his cellphone of a soldier holding a Ukrainian flag and standing next to a charred hulk.
‘I BLAME PUTIN’
Andreyev, whose father’s parents were from Odesa, describes the war as “Russians fighting Russians, when you consider that practically half the population of Ukraine is Russian.”
“Not to say we suffer the way they are suffering, but we sympathize greatly with the Ukrainians and the Russians under Putin’s regime,” Andreyev said. “I think the sanctions against Russia make the ordinary people suffer more than the wealthy oligarchs. People are fleeing from both countries.
“I blame Putin who sends Russian boys to fight not even knowing they were going to war. They thought it was training exercises, and they’re carrying 7-year-old crackers and a few bandages in their backpacks to the battlefield to bomb their brothers.”
Vlad, who lives in Bal Harbour, left Moscow in 1985. He fears Russia will revert to the repressive Soviet society he grew up in.
“When I think of Putin I see a combination of Stalin and Hitler, yet he is supported by 85 percent of the population,” he said. “I don’t watch Russian TV; it’s a lot of propaganda and militaristic spectacle putting madness into people’s heads, but the message is the same: Russians are superior; they should rule the world.
“And now you see the bodies in the streets and the mass graves. Let’s go back to 1936 and 1939. That’s how Hitler started. There is too much hatred.”
‘I FEEL LIKE I AM WITH FAMILY HERE’
Within the small, devoted and friendly congregation at St. Vladimir, Vlad finds hope. His four children were baptized at the church.
For Alona Tumasevska, attending services at St. Vladimir feels like a homecoming every Sunday, even after 22 years. Born in Latvia, raised in a village in Belarus, she moved to New
Alona Tumasevska, member of St. Vladimir Russian Orthodox Church
York 25 years ago “for love,” then to Miami Beach “for party.” She found out about the church at a Russian delicatessen in Sunny Isles Beach.
“I feel like I am with family here,” she said. “The war is absurd. It is a horror. We don’t take a position here. We support everyone who is hurting. We emphasize love in your soul, love for each other.”
Andreyev moved to the United States in 1991 “during Perestroika, when the curtain opened.”
“I told myself if I managed to escape the Soviet Union I would become a believer. Because my father was Jewish, I went to synagogue first but I couldn’t understand Hebrew. Then I went to an Orthodox church and talked to the priest. I felt closer to my culture and my language. The traditions have been preserved through thousands of years.”
Andreyev lives in Fort Lauderdale. Other Orthodox churches are located closer to his home — St. Luke in Pompano Beach, Three Hierarchs in Hollywood and Christ the Savior Cathedral in Northwest Miami-Dade County. There is also a Ukrainian Catholic Church, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, located 11 blocks from St. Vladimir on Northwest 57th Court.
Andreyev chose to attend St. Vladimir because his former priest in New York City recommended it.“It’s an all-encompassing community for all walks of life,” he said as the children who had finished singing in the choir played in the churchyard. “Everyone is encouraged to come and feel safe here.”
HISTORY DATES TO CZAR TROUPE
St. Vladimir — the oldest Russian Orthodox parish in Florida — has a fascinating history. Among its founders in 1947 was a troupe called the Royal Russian Midgets. They had been performers in the Czar of Russia’s imperial circus who were driven out of the country by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution in 1917.
They wound up traveling around the United States doing shows. One day in 1939, as the story goes, they were heading west from their winter headquarters in Miami when one of their cars broke down. They were smitten by land they observed along the Tamiami Trail.
They bought a 100-acre plot advertised as “Sweetwater Groves” from real estate developer Clyde H. Andrews and settled there with a vision of developing a tourist attraction. But they abandoned their plan when World War II began and decided to retire instead.
In 1941, Andrews and 25 of his friends — including 12 from the troupe — incorporated the town of Sweetwater. A photo in city hall recognizes the group as founders. The troupe’s business manager, 6-foot-tall Joseph Sanderlin, was elected as Sweetwater’s first mayor, and his wife, 4-foot-tall performer Anna Parfenova, became first lady.
Some of the troupe members built scaleddown houses in Sweetwater that were all demolished to make way for new development in the 1970s.
In its early days, St. Vladimir services were held under a circus tent in a field near its current location, 101 NW 46th Ave. The church was built in 1948.
The last surviving members of the troupe, Vasiliy Fillin and his sister Maria Fillina, bought houses adjacent to the church. He died in 1974 and she died in 1978. They, along with fellow performers and loyal church members
Ivan and Pelageya Velikanoff, are memorialized with a plaque in Cyrillic inside the church.
The church is named after Prince Vladimir the Great, patron saint of Russia and Ukraine. In the 10th century, he converted to Christianity and declared Orthodox Christianity the state religion of the Kievan Rus territories of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. He destroyed pagan temples and built churches. St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral, one of the largest in Kyiv, is dedicated to him.
The Russian Orthodox Church achieved independence from Orthodox Christian Constantinople’s rule in 1448 and established its capital in Moscow. When the Czarist government was overthrown in 1917, the Bolsheviks mandated separation of church and state. The new communist government discouraged organized religion and denounced the church as counter-revolutionary. Thousands of Orthodox priests and believers were tortured, executed or sent to prison camps.
Moscow Patriarch Tikhon was stripped of his priesthood and died under house arrest in 1925. Acting Patriarch Sergius took over what was left of the church and demanded loyalty to the Soviet state, precipitating a split with Russian Orthodox clergy who had escaped Russia.
They formed the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR), based in New York City. The two churches reconciled in 2007 with an agreement that made ROCOR a self-governing branch of the Russian Orthodox Church.
In the garden at St. Vladimir, a large, wooden cross — a copy of one at the Butovo mass burial site outside Moscow, stemming from Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge and the deaths of more than 20,000 — is dedicated to “the memory of the Russian Royal Martyrs and all the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, who gave their lives for the Orthodox faith during the time of the godless powers, from 1917 on.”
The plaque contains a picture of Czar Nicholas II and the royal family, who were executed in 1918.
Nicholas, the last emperor of Russia, was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000 as Saint Nicholas the PassionBearer.
Father Daniel McKenzie has been archpriest at St. Vladimir since 1989. Born in Boston in 1942, he became interested in the Russian Orthodox Church after meeting his wife, Sophia Alekseevna Ustinova, who is of Russian descent, while they were students at Florida Atlantic University. He was ordained to the priesthood at the Holy Trinity monastery in Jordanville, N.Y.
McKenzie, who conducts services in Russian and English, is head of the Haiti Orthodox Mission, which provides support to Orthodox parishes and families in various cities in Haiti. He also holds special services in San Jose, Costa Rica, and Nassau, Bahamas.
“Father McKenzie’s task is to teach understanding and compassion,” Andreyev said. “It’s not his role to get involved in politics. He always finds the words to calm people down. During this difficult time, he leads our prayers for peace.”