In the 19th and early 20th centuries it was a major spiritual center of the Russian Orthodox Church, and many of its elders have been recently canonized as saints.

[3][4] The first official documentation of the existence of the monastery appeared in the late 17th century; decrees from Patriarch Joachim and Tsars Peter the Great and Ivan V confirmed the right of the monks from Putivl to live at the hermitage.

However, a 1787 decree of Paul I dispossessed the monastery of nearly all its territory, leaving it with a tiny fraction of its wealth and a subsidy of 300 rubles a year.

[9] Some members of the monastic brotherhood later became spiritual fathers of their own monasteries as well as missionaries such as Makarii (Glukharev), who in the early 19th century served as the main transmitter of Orthodox Christianity to the people of the Altai region.

[10] After the Russian Revolution the new atheist government sought to eradicate religion, and the local Soviet closed the monastery in September 1922.

[14] After Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in support of freedom of conscience and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the monastery was finally able to be reopened in 1994.

After the monastery reopened in 1994, the brotherhood offered to make him their superior, but he refused, wanting to stay with the parish he had been leading for over twenty years.