Konstantin Hetschinof is watching women enter the church to make sure they are not wearing pants, not wearing lipstick and have their hair covered with a shawl or scarf. He watches solemnly while he sells candles to those who are going to light them for someone’s life or for the peace of someone’s soul.
Tatyana Plionskovsky is helping in the kitchen with cooking for the post-liturgy meal. She wears her green apron, and her arm is swathed in bandages. She burned it today when she was cooking soup. She offers a visitor the remains of the coffee and doesn’t accept no for an answer.
The Rev. Lawrence Girard is reading his part of this week’s sermon in English. As usual, he is doing it for free.
They come from different parts of the world and different backgrounds, and they have different reasons for being here. But each Sunday they gather under the blue domes of the white church at 4668 15th Ave. S in Gulfport, Fla., drawn by something essential to each of them.
St. Andrew’s Russian Orthodox Church will celebrate its 60th anniversary this September. It spent its early days in a garage and in the early 1950s moved into its current building. Today it includes the sanctuary, the dining room – where congregants gather after liturgies and for religious holidays — and the lilac-laden courtyard, carefully maintained by Hetschinof, the church custodian. It also includes a school that used to offer classes for children interested in Russian language, culture and choral singing. Today the school is closed because there are no students.
The church has about 100 congregants, most of whom are originally from Russia. An estimated 15 are American-born who converted to Russian Orthodoxy from other religions.
The caretaker
Hetschinof, 79, left the city of Odessa, which used to be a part of Russia (it is now in Ukraine), when he was just 16. His family fled the oppression of postwar communism to Poland, Germany, France and Venezuela before settling in New York, where Hetschinof worked as a dentist. Nothing in the United States reminds him of the place he grew up. Although he still speaks Russian, he no longer considers Russia home, and he has no nostalgia for it — there is nothing there for him, he says.
Yet, when he retired to Florida, one of the first things he did was join St. Andrew’s.
“Any country you go to, if there is a Russian Orthodox Church, you will find Russians there,” he says, laughing. “It’s a part of how we think, a part of our roots. If you look at the history, you will see that the church has always united Russians. It was a truly Russian phenomenon.”
Russian Orthodox churches are part of the Eastern Orthodoxy, which traces it roots to Christianity but split from papal control in the Great Schism of 1054. Orthodox churches and monasteries had become the center of educational and spiritual life in Russia. But when the communists came to power and formed the Soviet Union in 1917, the church was seen as a threat to state rule. Thousands of clergymen, nuns and bishops were executed or sentenced to concentration camps. Some managed to escape and opened Russian Orthodox parishes around the world.
The Russian immigrant
Even in Soviet bloc countries, where the communists tried to make the church a tool of the state, many Russians clung to their spiritual roots. Clergymen kept the church alive through compromises with the communist government. Plionskovsky says women traditionally sustained the faith in Russia.
“The church is not only the building,” she says. “It’s within us. No one can kill the faith in a human being.”
Plionskovsky was among those Russians who lived under communist rule but remained faithful to the church. She came to America from Moscow in 1990 to join her husband. He had immigrated to the United States in 1976 to escape communist repression. Plionskovsky couldn’t go with him that year because she was pregnant. She hoped to follow him after she gave birth, but the Soviet government didn’t let her out of the country. Plionskovsky and her daughter waited 12 years, not knowing if they would ever be reunited with Plionskovsky’s husband. She was constantly interrogated by the KGB and threatened with detention in a psychiatric hospital. While her husband was juggling several jobs in the United States and struggling to learn English, Plionskovsky worked as a state archivist in Russia.
The fall of communism brought Plionskovsky’s husband to Russia in 1988 for two years, and in 1990, the whole family immigrated to the United States. The family settled first in the Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, N.Y. Being around other Russians helped Plionskovsky adjust to a new culture and survive without knowing English.
“That was the only place for us poor immigrants to go,” she says. “We could live only by the church, because I couldn’t understand a single word in English.”
In 1995, Plionskovsky was diagnosed with heart problems and told to move to a warmer climate for her health. Choosing a city with a Russian Orthodox Church was essential, as it represents a part of her homeland.
“Life can make me go somewhere from here, because you have to support your family,” she says. “It can be hard sometimes, and then you’ll go wherever God wants you to go. And you’ll go where there is no church. It happens.
“But that’s not my will.”
She now works at the Eckerd College’s Peter H. Armacost Library and at the YWCA, and she volunteers at St. Andrew’s and often cooks for Sunday liturgies.
Although surrounded by Russians every day, Plionskovsky remains nostalgic for the homeland she left 18 years ago. Life was often hard there, but she misses the discarded piles of cut wood, the pots and bottles that would be overturned on top of fence posts, the shabby villages and old women sitting by the window in flower-patterned shawls.
“Nostalgia is a disease,” she says. “It doesn’t matter how many Russians are around. I am yearning for Russian culture, for Russian personality, for Russian everyday life, for the Russian outlook on life. This yearning is huge.”
The American priest
Girard, 68, an assistant priest at St. Andrew’s, converted to Orthodoxy in 1969 from the Roman Catholicism. He felt the social changes of the late 1960s had altered Catholicism too much, making it as liberal as the world in which it functioned. Catholicism focused more on raising money than saving souls, he says. When a friend in New Jersey invited him to a service at St. Anne’s Russian Orthodox Church, it proved a life-changing experience.
“It’s something you feel. In Catholic Church, you feel nothing. In Orthodox church, there is warmth,” says Girard.
He started attending the Russian Orthodox Church regularly and, within a year, was asked by the priest to help with services. He became a subdean and later met the deacon and archbishop of Vladimir’s Cathedral in New Jersey. He was impressed by their devotion and warmth and wanted to be a part of that life.
“If you ever met a person in whose presence you felt so comfortable that you didn’t want to leave, then you will understand what I mean,” he remembers. “There was just something warm about them, something holy. They were truly men of God.”
He became a priest in New Jersey, where he served for years before he retired to St. Petersburg. That’s when he found St. Andrew’s and offered his services there. Church officials had no money to pay him, but Girard — known as Father Lawrence — said it didn’t matter. He just wanted to serve.
“I don’t think you ever retire from the Russian priesthood,” Girard says. “I earned my own money. I’m not interested in making money from the church.”
Unlike most of his congregants, Father Lawrence has no roots or family in Russian. He has learned Old Church Slavonic and some conversational Russian, but he lacks the same geographic, cultural or nostalgic connection to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Still, he says, the church has become his family.
“Wherever we’ve been, the church is our primary family,” he says. “It’s a part of us, and we want to be a part of that.”