AT PRELATE'S GRAVE, ALL THE OGRES COME OUT by Joseph R. Gregory, New York Times, 20 August 1996

KIEV, Ukraine -- Every few days, Zoya Gorpeniuk, a 44-year-old former secretary to Patriarch Volodymyr of Kiev, visits his grave in the sidewalk just outside the walls of the Cathedral of St. Sofia.

She often talks there with his admirers and arranges the flowers they offer in his memory and for the two teen-age militiamen said to have been beaten to death by the police at his funeral.

"Life was a challenge for him," she said, recalling how Patriarch Volodymyr spent 20 years in Soviet labor camps and endured years of poverty and exile. "Poor man," she added, "his death has become a challenge for him as well."

Perhaps nothing in Patriarch Volodymyr's life was more contentious than the leaving of it. His funeral on July 18, 1995, turned into a melee when riot policemen blocked a procession of some 1,000 mourners from interring him in the cathedral, which has been a state museum since Soviet times.

The government feared that if it allowed the funeral to proceed, it would be perceived as taking sides among the three main factions of the Orthodox church that are wrapped in a bitter quarrel for leadership here.

Enraged, the patriarch's followers ripped up the pavement outside the cathedral and buried him under the sidewalk as mourners battled police.

Videotapes of the riot were broadcast repeatedly on television, and supporters and critics of the patriarch's church still come to his grave to argue, carrying on a dangerous quarrel that goes beyond religious factionalism to reflect Ukraine's historical grievances with Russia and the new nation's anxiety about its future.

Kiev was the birthplace of Slavic Christianity in 988, when Volodymyr the Great ordered his people to convert, but the czars placed Ukrainian churches under the control of the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church.

After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Ukraine won a brief independence and many Ukrainian believers abandoned the Russian church to join the Ukrainian Autocephalous (or self-ruling) Orthodox Church. But that church was suppressed in the early 1930s. Stalin permitted only the Russian church to survive, partly because it was easier to control one church than to try to stamp out all organized religion.

As the Soviet Union began to fray, so did unity under the Moscow patriarchate. By the time Ukraine gained independence in 1991, many Ukrainian believers and even some ethnic Russians had joined the revived Autocephalous Church or the rival Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kiev Patriarchate, which also appealed to Ukrainian nationalists. Patriarch Volodymyr headed the latter group.

"He was the first patriarch of an independent Ukraine," said Maria Nikolayevna Sliozko, a 51-year-old pensioner who was at the funeral. "It's unbelievable to have such a site for the burial."

In July 1996, a conciliatory government paid to replace the scarred sidewalk with a marble sarcophagus. Now a white stone box stands incongruously at the edge of the vast open square, seemingly misplaced under the cross-topped golden domes of St. Sofia, a cathedral that is as sacred to Slavic Orthodoxy as St. Peter's is to Roman Catholicism.

"It's a sign that God did not accept that the patriarch is not buried in holy ground," Maria Akimovna, 72, said of the marble sepulcher. She declined to give her last name but spoke of "evil forces" that denied him a decent burial.

Several hard-line nationalists were present during the funeral riot. Among them, witnesses say, were members of the militant far-right militia known as Una-Unso.

In an interview, Patriarch Filaret, Volodymyr's successor, acknowledged that Una-Unso members were present and "were helpful," but denied that they had been recruited to force the burial. As government officials negotiated with church representatives who said canon law demanded that the body be buried before sundown, the standoff grew more tense.

"Unfortunately, the people who were conducting the negotiations were amateurs," said Anatoly D. Koval, head of a government commission charged with easing the frictions among the 70 denominations that have sprouted here since independence.

As sundown approached, the frustrated mourners began to bury the coffin in the sidewalk. Seeing this, the riot police attacked.

"It was a total mess," Maria Akimovna said. "Suddenly, there was tear gas and we couldn't see what was happening." The next morning, she recalled, "the square was covered with people's shoes, torn trousers and spots of blood."

Patriarch Filaret said the Kiev patriarchate has won a victory because, technically, the grave is within the original grounds of St. Sofia. "Everyone who passes by sees it," he added, "so now it is a source of propaganda. It should make people think that Ukraine needs this local and independent church."

That view infuriates his rivals.

"The entire incident was a humiliation of a person's memory," said Volodymyr Sabodan, who as Metropolitan of Kiev is the representative here of Patriarch Aleksy II of Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. He said Patriarch Volodymyr should have been buried in the cathedral.

"It was a bad thing to bury him in the sidewalk," said Patriarch Dimitri Jarema of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, which briefly united, then broke with, the Kiev patriarchate. But Patriarch Dimitri argued that his rival should have been buried in the cemetery, not St. Sofia. "Only those who commit suicide are buried outside the cemetery," he said.

Zoya Gorpeniuk dismisses the notion that the grave is a victory for Ukrainian nationalists. "Many Russian people come here," she said. "They are very loyal to him."

She said people come because Volodymyr was a holy man who did not take money from the state during Soviet times, or work with the KGB the way the other church leaders did. "He had no official residence, or a refrigerator or a television," she said. "Only books." Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company