Walking for the Tsar

In July 2008, 30,000 pilgrims commemorated the 90th anniversary

of the Romanov murders in Yekaterinburg. The ceremonies attract

increasing numbers of pilgrims with each passing year, as veneration

of the tsar and his family grows.

Shortly before midnight on the eve of July 17, the anniversary of the Romanov murders, thousands of pilgrims gather in Yekaterinburg. They are here to venerate the royal saints at the massive white and gold church built “on the blood” of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. Younger pilgrims sleep in their parents’ arms, or in tents erected on the grassy slopes around the cathedral. Older pilgrims sit on the steps outside, oblivious to the mosquitoes, watching the bishop celebrate the liturgy on huge screens. The mood is somber. One lay Sister of Mercy, who last year travelled for 36 hours from Krasnoyarsk for this event, explains that “although many of our own parents also suffered [under the Bolsheviks], we are all guilty of the tsar’s murder and therefore we must all repent.”

Nearly four hours later, a procession of clergy, icons and people leaves the cathedral almost at a run. A huge, wooden icon of the tsar, carried by Cossacks who stagger slightly beneath its weight, heads the procession. Deacons swing censers and clergy stride out in heavy, embroidered vestments of red and gold. The tail of the procession recedes into the morning mist. Some are on crutches or in wheelchairs, others push prams, a few resourceful teenagers join in on bicycles. Men in a variety of military uniforms jostle past elderly women with slipper-shod feet. Many are singing “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy upon us” in plaintive harmonies.

They push past nightclubs full of revelers, and surge out under Lenin’s arm – still raised aloft over Yekaterinburg’s central square. As dawn breaks, a great river of bodies floods along the motorway, as far as the eye can see. They sweep on past crumbling apartment blocks, into the grassy lanes of wooden houses, water pumps and chickens that fringe an oil-fed modern city. Early morning commuters huddle on the verges as the pilgrims rush past, still singing, still waving the imperial flag of black, yellow and white, still holding icons of the royal family aloft.

The pace barely slackens as the procession spills out into a Siberian forest of birch and pine, bright in the morning sun. As feet are patched up at the side of the road, and whimpering children are hoisted onto shoulders, the hypnotic singing carries the weary onward. Once in the woods, there is nowhere to rest until we reach the new Monastery of the Royal Passion-Bearers at Ganina Yama, built around the spot where, 90 years ago last July, Bolsheviks thugs attempted to crush and burn the bodies of the tsar and his entourage.

At around nine am, the procession arrives. Some pilgrims collapse immediately under trees or by kiosks selling monastery tea and pastries. The stoic celebrate another liturgy near the unused mineshaft where the bodies were cast, now a peaceful, lily-filled glade marked by a wooden cross.

The emotional intensity of the night walk dissipates amongst the wooden walls and shiny painted roofs of Ganina Yama’s seven churches, built early in our present century. The Archbishop of Yekaterinburg, Vikenty, explained in Pravoslavnaya gazeta the decision to build in wood: “in this place a new Russia is being created, that Russia which existed until the tsar’s abdication from the throne.” St Sergius of Radonezh’s famous monastery began with a wooden church, and so would the monastery at Ganina Yama, and “with this building begins the spiritual restoration of Russia.”

With piped-in church music and old-style buildings, the monastery has a surreal, almost theme park air, and the following day the pilgrims are replaced by wedding parties: stilettoed brides teeter under the pine trees, skimpily-dressed bridesmaids and bored young men talk on cellphones or flirt, smoking and drinking beer by the monastery gates. In Yekaterinburg, monuments to Tsar Nicholas have replaced statues of Lenin as the place to go for wedding snaps.

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Maria was one of the thousands of pilgrims marking the 90th anniversary of the Romanov murders. A cheerful pensioner, she travelled from northern Siberia to attend the all-night vigil and then walk 20 or more kilometers in five hours to the place where she believes the Romanov bodies were assailed with fire and acid. “How could we not come?” she says. “He’s the Tsar.” Maria, like most other pilgrims, has an icon of the royal family hanging round her neck. “We’d be glad if there were a tsar now, and we are waiting for one.” Her friends nudge her to shut up, but Maria is defiant. “Why shouldn’t I say it? It’s true.”

While the figure of Nicholas II is enjoying a post-Soviet rehabilitation, the question of reinstating the monarchy is still controversial for Russian Orthodox believers. But other pilgrims were equally outspoken: “The tsar was chosen by God, and those who rule now are chosen by people. That’s like saying we are greater than God.”

Sixteen years ago, veneration of the tsar was the preserve of the émigré Russian Orthodox Church Abroad – which canonized the family and their servants in 1981 – and was promoted within Russia mainly by radical nationalists and monarchists. This controversial campaign provoked enough sympathy, however, that by the late 1990s the Patriarchate could not ignore the strength of the pro-canonization lobby. The royal couple and their five children were eventually canonized in 2000 as “passion bearers” – a type of saint peculiar to Russian Christianity – despite the reluctance or opposition of some senior clerics and, notably, of the prominent émigré historian of the Orthodox Church, Dmitry Pospielovsky. It was, as a Yekaterinburg nun explains, a canonization “from below.”

Yekaterinburg’s development as a place of pilgrimage reflects this process. The Ipatiev House, where the family was imprisoned and then shot in 1918, was knocked down in the evening of July 27, 1977, on orders of Boris Yeltsin, then the city’s Communist Party boss (carrying out orders from Moscow). People had occasionally left candles and flowers at the site, and Soviet authorities feared that it might become a locus for commemorations during the 60th anniversary of the murders. Participants at the first openly-held prayer service on the murder site, in 1989, were arrested. The following year, over a thousand people gathered undisturbed, and a cross was erected with the eventual acquiescence of the town authorities. In 1993, the Patriarch gave his blessing to the construction of a church over the murder site.

While statues of Vladimir Lenin and Yakov Sverdlov (a communist leader born in the city) still stand in the centre of Yekaterinburg, Sverdlov is often showered with paint by those who hold him responsible for the Romanov executions. The city’s central monument is now the massive Church on the Blood. Planned, argued about, and built over a ten-year period, the church was finally consecrated in 2003.

Reflecting historical symmetry, the icons of the Romanovs that grace the iconostasis were painted by nuns from the Novo-Tikhvin convent. This is the same convent whose sisters brought daily baskets of food to the imprisoned tsar and his family, which the guards then passed on to the prisoners. As Alexandra recorded in her diary: “The kind nuns are now sending milk and eggs for Alexei and for us, as well as cream.”

On July 17, 1918, the nuns were told not to bring any more food. The convent – which housed over 1000 women – was later closed, its contents destroyed and buildings “redistributed.” Reopened in 1994, the convent’s icon painting and embroidery workshops are, once again, clothing the churches and clerics of the diocese.

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In 2004, five thousand pilgrims joined the dawn procession to Ganina Yama. In 2006, it was 15 thousand. Last year, double that number joined the krestny khod or “cross walk.” Irina, a native of Yekaterinburg, says she has never been on the krestny khod before, “for various reasons, sinner that I am.” She was inspired to join in after attending some of the events organized for the Tsar’s Days – a festival of Orthodox Culture held each year in Yekaterinburg from 12-24 July. She says she was particularly impressed by Russian Golgotha, a film that draws parallels between Christ and the tsar.

“My grandmother had an old prayer book with the face of the Tsar glued inside the cover,” Irina said. “When I opened it, as a child, I understood that this is a prayer book, and there is [a picture of] God. When I saw this film I understood why.”

Like many others here, Irina said she feels that mass action is needed to atone for the murder of the “Lord’s anointed one... The people’s repentance is needed, it’s essential, but this isn’t coming once and praying, lighting a little candle – this is a matter of mass conversion, and as a result it is basically everyone’s business, because what is Russia? Russia is me. Russia is this humble woman sitting next to me.”

During the Tsar’s Days, pilgrims also trace the route the royal family took on their arrival into Yekaterinburg, from the train station to the Ipatiev House, accompanied by miracle-working icons which are then erected outside the cathedral for believers to kiss and crawl beneath in passionate veneration. They may also visit the Orthodox exhibition-market, named “From the Repentance to the Resurrection of Russia,” that is staffed by monks and nuns from Russia and the “near abroad” and which advertises wonder-working places and objects from St. John of Kronstadt oil to the footprint of the Mother of God. In the square below the Church on the Blood, pilgrims listen to “Orthodox bards” delivering poems about the Romanovs from an open air stage.

While many of the participants are locals, others have crossed continents. One woman has travelled from Argentina almost every year since 1993, others – also of émigré stock – have come from the U.S. and Europe. Nadya and her daughter from Tyumen region are visiting for the first time as pilgrims: “We have finally found out the truth about the tsar, not what we were told earlier… For us he’s a saint, and we must pray for him here so that he will pray for us there.”

Nadya, like many others here, says she was baptized as a child and raised in a Christian family. “My mother always said she was for the tsar, and for believers, and that the people committed a big sin when they went against the tsar like that.”

Others are inveterate pilgrims, offering evidence of the rebirth of a venerable Russian tradition. Neonilla, a soft-spoken Sunday school teacher from Ukraine, has been to Yekaterinburg three times, and has visited many of Russia’s holy places. “God has no nationality, knows no borders...we thought all that up,” she says.

Neonilla said she sees pilgrimage as a necessary part of her life, as “food for the soul,” and she takes her Sunday school children to various shrines. She comes to Yekaterinburg because “the tsar is our little father [Batyushka], and we really revere him. He was anointed by God, a chosen person.” Neonilla also says she reveres the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna. “My whole life changed after I read a book about her,” Neonilla says. “I realized I lived all wrong. I tried to pray, I was baptized, but they were godless times and I didn’t understand this. I had a completely different style of life, secular, I sought joy in this world, and then – little by little – God opened me up.”

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The Romanovs encapsulate a wealth of meaning for the believers who attend Yekaterinburg’s festivities. An Orthodox journalist from Samara, like many others, responds emotionally to the huge photos displayed around the Church on the Blood: the baby Tsarevich, the four little girls in white frocks, the whole family portrayed with gentle, somber faces. “They went like lambs to the slaughter,” she says. “They felt it intuitively – look at their faces. They have the faces of angels. They felt their fates.” Their appeal, she says, is that they are “a symbol of family love. They suffered together, stayed together, unified throughout all. That’s why everyone loves them.”

Two twentysomethings, the children of an Orthodox priest in San Francisco, concur. Named after the tsar and his wife, Nick and Alix admit that the pilgrimage has had a special resonance for them, that they found themselves “transfigured by the experience.” They travel to Russia often, but had not visited Yekaterinburg before. “We were brought up very much in the émigré community, ‘on packed suitcases,’ as they say in Russian,” Nick says. “Our relatives always said, ‘as soon as the Tsar is restored, we can go home.’”

Nick and Alix say the Romanovs have been misrepresented by both Soviet and Western historians, and they are keen to see the tsar rehabilitated as a role-model for Russians. For them, the Romanovs were a loving but “disciplined, simple, strict family,” which “did not flaunt their wealth.” While Alix says she easily embraced her namesake as a role model, as someone who adopted Orthodoxy wholeheartedly and “had everything: beauty, grace, a strong family life,” Nick says he had difficulty at first understanding the relevance of his saint to his life. He now finds the tsar “someone to aspire to… a figure absolutely necessary for the moral regeneration of Russia.”  RL