Saint Tsar Nicholas II and His Family. What Russia Lost on the Night of 17 July 1918

On the night of 16–17 July 1918, in the cellar of a merchant's house in Ekaterinburg, the last Orthodox tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, was put to death, together with the Empress Alexandra, their four daughters — Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia — the thirteen-year-old Tsarevich Alexei, and four servants who had freely chosen to share the fate of their masters. They had been woken after midnight on the pretext that the town was no longer safe and that they had to be taken down to shelter. They came down calmly, dressed, the girls carrying their pillows in their arms. They were not to come back up.

The Church commemorates them on 17 July as Passion-bearers — the ancient name for those saints who receive an unjust death without resistance, with the meekness of Christ, as it was received at the beginnings of Christian Russia by the princes Boris and Gleb. Of their last life, of the sixteen months of captivity in which an imperial family was transformed, under the eyes of its jailers, into a household church, most of this article will speak. But before entering upon it, the question the feast itself carries must be put — the question that hurried piety passes over: what exactly was taken out of the world on that night?

For in the cellar of the Ipatiev house it was not only a family that died, nor only a dynasty three hundred years old, reaching back to Michael Feodorovich, that came to an end. An unbroken succession was severed, one that rose through Moscow to Constantinople and through Constantinople to Constantine the Great: the succession of anointed emperors, of that Christian dominion which the Holy Fathers understood, in their reading of a word of the Apostle Paul, as the barrier appointed by God in the path of the last evil — the power which, so long as it stands, restrains the unleashing of lawlessness and the manifestation of antichrist. From that night Russia has remained, to this very day, without her anointed one. And what followed — the most extensive persecution Christianity has ever known — cannot be understood apart from this loss. The Holy Fathers left us the key; this article does no more than use it.

The Lord's Anointed: What the Tsar Was in the Orthodox Order

To understand what was lost, we must first understand what it was. And here the reader of today, accustomed to see in any king a mere political ruler more or less worthy, must take a step back, all the way to Scripture.

The anointing of kings does not begin at Byzantium but in the Old Testament. Saul and David do not become kings by the will of the people but by the anointing of the prophet Samuel, who pours the sanctified oil upon their heads at the command of God. From that moment the anointed man is no longer his own: he is "the Lord's anointed," and his person becomes untouchable — and remains untouchable even when the man shows himself unworthy of the anointing.

No one lived this truth more deeply than David. Hunted unjustly by Saul, driven through the wilderness like a beast, David twice has the king within his power, and twice he holds back: "The Lord forbid that I should stretch out my hand against the Lord's anointed!" (cf. 1 Kingdoms 26:11). To whom, then, does he leave the judgment? He says it himself, that same night: the Lord will strike him, or his day will come and he will die, or he will fall in battle — but his own hand will not be raised against the anointed one (cf. 1 Kingdoms 26:10). It is not Saul's worthiness that holds him back — Saul had long fallen from worthiness, had even been rejected by God through the mouth of the very Samuel who had anointed him — but the anointing, whose removal David leaves wholly in the hands of the One who gave it. And when an Amalekite comes to David boasting that he has killed the wounded Saul, David does not reward him but puts him to death: "How is it you were not afraid to lift your hand to destroy the Lord's anointed?" (2 Kingdoms 1:14). The Psalmist will set down this law in a short command: "Touch not My anointed ones" (Psalm 104:15) — a word spoken first of the patriarchs and prophets whom God carried among the nations, in which the tradition of the Church later heard the law of every anointed one of the Lord.

This is the foundation upon which the Christian empire will be built, a thousand years later. When Constantine the Great brings the persecutions to an end and places the power of the empire in the service of the Church, the Fathers see in this not a mere stroke of political fortune but a mystery of the divine economy: the dominion of the world, which until then had shed the blood of the martyrs, bows before Christ and receives a ministry within God's plan. Constantine himself understood his place in these terms: Eusebius of Caesarea preserves the word by which the emperor called himself a bishop appointed by God over those outside the Church (Life of Constantine IV, 24). And Justinian, in the sixth century, will give this relation its classic form, in the preface to the Sixth Novella: the priesthood and the imperial power are the two great gifts that the mercy from on high has given to mankind — the one ministers to things divine, the other governs things human, and both proceed from one and the same source. When there is good accord between them — "symphony" — every good thing pours out upon the human race. The emperor does not stand above the Church, nor does he stand outside it: he stands within it, as the appointed protector of the true faith, the first of her lay sons and her armed defender.

After the fall of Constantinople, this ministry passes to Moscow. The Elder Philotheus of Pskov writes to the Grand Prince, around 1523, the words that were to weigh three centuries upon the Russian conscience: two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and a fourth there shall not be. It was not imperial pride, as it is often read today, but a burden: Moscow had remained the only free Orthodox empire in the world, the last that could still uphold the ministry of Constantine. And the rite of the coronation of the tsars preserved to the end the meaning of this ministry. At his coronation in May 1896, in the Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God in the Kremlin, Nicholas II himself recited aloud, before the whole assembly, the Creed — the confession of faith that the rite requires also of a bishop before ordination. He was anointed with Holy Chrism at the royal doors. Then — a thing permitted to a layman once only in his life, at his coronation — he entered through the royal doors into the sanctuary and communicated at the Holy Table, receiving the Body apart and the Blood apart, as the clergy commune. He remained a layman — the anointing was not a degree of ordination, and the emperor did not serve the Mysteries — yet he was the layman whom the Church set, in that hour, nearer to the altar than any other. Hence the name the Russian people always gave the tsar, and which the documents of the age use as a matter of course: the Lord's Anointed — Pomazannik Bozhy.

"He Who Restrains"

But the Fathers saw in the Christian empire more than a protection of the Church: they saw in it a function within the history of salvation itself. The ground lies in one of the most mysterious passages of the Pauline epistles. Writing to the Thessalonians of the coming of antichrist — "the man of lawlessness, the son of perdition" — the Apostle adds:

"And now you know what restrains him, so that he may be revealed only in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains will do so until he is taken out of the way." (2 Thessalonians 2:6-7)

Something — and someone — restrains the manifestation of the son of perdition. The mystery of lawlessness is already at work in the world, yet it cannot show itself openly so long as "he who restrains" stands in the midst. Who is this? Tertullian, at the beginning of the third century, bears witness that Christians pray for the emperors and for the endurance of the empire precisely because they know that the fearful end of the world is delayed by the continuance of the Roman dominion (Apologeticum 32). And Saint John Chrysostom, in his Fourth Homily on the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, examines the interpretations one by one: some say that "he who restrains" is the grace of the Holy Spirit, others that it is the Roman dominion — and Chrysostom sets himself plainly on the side of the latter. Had the Apostle meant the Spirit, he would have said so openly; of the empire, however, he speaks covertly and with caution, so as not to draw the wrath of the authorities upon the Church. When the Roman dominion is taken out of the midst — says the saint — then the lawless one will come; so long as the fear of that dominion holds the world, no one will readily submit to antichrist; but once it is dissolved, lawlessness will break in (Homily IV on 2 Thessalonians, PG 62, cols. 485–486).

The Roman dominion — not as an ethnic name but as a principle: the lawful, anointed power that upholds order and restrains lawlessness. Byzantium understood itself as the continuation of this dominion; Moscow, after 1453, likewise. And the one who traced, with dreadful clarity, the thread from Chrysostom to the threshold of the twentieth century was Saint Theophan the Recluse. In his commentary on the same passage of the Epistle to the Thessalonians, written some decades before the revolution, Saint Theophan writes that the imperial power, holding in its hands the image of order and the strength to restrain the impulses of the peoples, is that which gives no room for the working of the spirit of antichrist; but when the peoples everywhere establish self-rule — republics and democracies — then a free field of action will be opened to antichrist, for there will no longer be anyone to restrain him.

Let us weigh well what is said here by a canonized saint, a teacher of the Church, who died in 1894: so long as the anointed one stands, antichrist has no place; when the anointed one falls, the way is opened. This is no cell-prophecy, floating and without source, of the kind that fill today's compilations. It is a commentary on Scripture, grounded upon Chrysostom, written and printed, with a text one can find and a page one can cite. Twenty-three years after the death of its author, the first part of the commentary — the part about the breaking-in of lawlessness — was fulfilled before the eyes of the world.

This, then, was the tsar in the eyes of the Church: God's anointed after the image of David, the protector of the true faith after the image of Constantine, and — so long as God held him in the midst — the wall against which the mystery of lawlessness still broke. It was not the man Nicholas Alexandrovich, with his virtues and his human weaknesses, who bore this ministry, but the anointing that was upon him. For this very reason the question "was he a good ruler or a weak one?" — the question with which historiography has begun and ended its judgment for a hundred years — passes by the heart of the matter. David did not spare Saul because Saul ruled well. He spared him because he was anointed. And a people that kills its anointed one does not overthrow a government: it lays hands upon an ordinance of God, and the consequences are measured not in electoral terms but in centuries.

A word of caution, before we go further, that none may understand it wrongly: the Church does not hang upon this wall. She had lived three centuries before Constantine, under the sword, and she would live, under the sword again, after Ekaterinburg — the gates of hell do not prevail against her even when empires fall. It is the world that hangs upon the wall: its order, its peace, the restraint of the lawlessness within it. When the wall falls, the Church does not perish — she descends into the catacombs; it is the world that is left uncovered before the mystery of lawlessness. This was to be seen, point by point, in what followed.

February 1917: How He Was Let Fall

The winter of 1917 found Russia in the third year of the war. The front held, but the country behind the front was crumbling: the cities were starving, the railways were choking, and in Petrograd, at the end of February, the bread queues turned into riot and the riot into overthrow, when the capital's garrison — hundreds of thousands of reservists who did not want to go to the front — went over to the side of the street. The tsar was at Mogilev, at General Headquarters. He set out by train for the capital; the train was diverted from its course and stopped at Pskov. There, in the imperial carriage, on the evening of 2 March (15 March, new style), the abdication took place.

It must be said plainly how it took place, for here one sees the "consent" of which we shall speak. It was not the crowd that wrested the abdication but the elite: General Alekseev, the chief of staff, telegraphed the front commanders asking whether they judged abdication necessary, and all of them, one after another, answered yes. The commanders of the army — the men who had sworn on the Gospel their loyalty to the Anointed — asked the anointed one to go. Nicholas read the telegrams, was silent, and signed. First in favor of the Tsarevich Alexei; then, after the physician assured him that the boy's illness was without cure and that he would be parted from him, he changed the act in favor of his brother, the Grand Duke Michael. The next day Michael, in his turn, deferred acceptance of the crown until the decision of a future Constituent Assembly which would never decide the fate of the monarchy at all. In two days the Orthodox monarchy that had endured for nearly a thousand years came undone without anyone's drawing a sword for it.

On the evening of the abdication Nicholas wrote in his diary: "All around, treason, and cowardice, and deceit!" (diary, 2/15 March 1917). The words have often been read as the bitterness of a defeated man. They are, in fact, an exact observation: it was not the common people who brought down the tsar in those days, but the broken oaths of those above — generals, ministers, grand dukes of his own family who for weeks had been carrying on negotiations behind his back.

But the people? The people were silent. And not only the people. Here one must look without indulgence upon a fact that Church historiography long avoided and that more recent documentary research has brought to light: the conduct of the Synod. In the days of 6–9 March 1917 — less than a week after the abdication, while the Anointed was still alive and still not under arrest — the Holy Synod of the Russian Church resolved to remove the commemoration of the tsar and the imperial house from all the services and to replace it with the commemoration of "the right-believing Provisional Government." The commemoration that had risen for a thousand years for the Lord's Anointed fell silent within a few days, without a council, without inquiry, without a single liturgical tear. The clergy were released from their oath of loyalty and made to swear to the new authority; in the churches the act of abdication was read from the ambo as one piece of news among others.

Let us not be hasty to cast the stone from the comfortable distance of a century: those hierarchs bore also the real wounds of the synodal period, of a Church held for two hundred years under the tutelage of imperial procurators, and many sincerely believed that an age of ecclesiastical freedom was opening. But the fact remains a fact: in the hour when the Anointed was abandoned by his generals, the institutional Church did not rise to defend him, but quickened its step to order its relations with the new power. And the faithful people, those who had filled the cathedrals at the coronation, looked on. Soldiers tore the imperial monograms from their epaulettes; the peasants awaited the land; the cities celebrated. No one went out to die for the tsar — and this very silence is the people's share in what followed. In ancient Israel, David put to death even the messenger who boasted of the killing of the anointed one. In Russia in 1917, the killing was prepared by a silent consent, stretching from the general staff to the last village lane: we will not raise a hand for him.

On 8 March, General Kornilov presented himself at Tsarskoe Selo and announced her arrest to the Empress. On that same day, at Mogilev, the tsar took his leave of the army. From that moment Nicholas II was no longer emperor even in name. His other life was beginning — the one for which the Church would number him among the saints.

The Sixteen Months: Tsarskoe Selo, Tobolsk, Ekaterinburg

What follows is no longer political history but the life of saints, and must be told as such — all the more since the sources are unusually rich: the diaries of the tsar and the empress, the letters of the daughters, the testimony of Pierre Gilliard, the Swiss who had been the children's tutor in French for twelve years and who would remain beside them to the very gates of Ekaterinburg, the depositions taken under oath by the Sokolov investigation. From all of them rises the same face: a family that, having lost everything, gathered around the one thing that could not be taken from it.

At Tsarskoe Selo, from March to July 1917, they lived under arrest in their own palace. The guard was made up of soldiers of the revolutionary garrison, many of them eager to display their power over the fallen: they followed the former tsar step by step through the park, turned their backs when he offered his hand, and one of the officers took from the tsarevich his toy rifle, as a "weapon" forbidden to prisoners — a scene Gilliard recounts with the cold indignation of a witness. The family's answer to all this remained the same, recorded by all who saw them: quietness. Nicholas cut wood and dug; in the spring the family planted with their own hands a vegetable garden in the imperial park, and the soldiers who had come to guard them found themselves more than once digging beside them. The children's lessons went on as if nothing had happened: their father taught them history and geography, their mother the Law of God, Gilliard French. And every Sunday, in the palace chapel, the family stood at the Liturgy — now under guard.

In August 1917 the Kerensky government sent them to Siberia, to Tobolsk, into the former governor's house. They were to spend eight months there, the most serene of the whole captivity. The little town, far from the railways and from the ferment of the revolution, had kept its old piety: the local people took off their caps as they passed the house, crossed themselves, sent in secret eggs and sweets "for the children." At first they were allowed to go, under escort, to the nearby Church of the Annunciation; then, after a deacon at a service in December dared to sing the "Many Years" for the tsar, as for a tsar, the church was closed to them, and the services were held thenceforth in the house. The Siberian winter passed over them with a cold of forty degrees, with sparing stoves, with ever less money, for the new power had cut off their maintenance. And from that beleaguered house came the letters that are perhaps the purest spiritual fruit of the whole passion.

The Empress Alexandra — the woman whom propaganda had painted as the proud and cold "German" — writes to her friends in Petrograd letters of a clarity that only the Philokalia still has: that God is nearer to them now than ever, that they are not to be pitied, that the suffering sent is for cleansing, that Russia is to be loved even now, above all now. And through his eldest daughter, the Grand Duchess Olga, who was twenty-two years old, the tsar sent from a letter in Tobolsk his word to those who had remained faithful to him — a word that is, in the end, the testament of the last tsar. He asks all who have remained faithful to him — and all upon whom these might have any influence — not to avenge him, for he has forgiven all and prays for all; that they seek no revenge themselves, and that they remember that the evil now in the world will grow yet greater, but that it is not evil that overcomes evil, only love.

Let the circumstance be weighed well: these words are written not by a magnanimous victor but by a man kept under sentries, who sees his wife slandered in the newspapers and his children imprisoned, and who has every human ground to desire at least revenge. He, who for a whole lifetime had commanded, now asks that he not be avenged. Here, not in any virtue of a ruler, lies the holiness for which he wears a crown: in the hour when he could have cursed, he forgave — and he left forgiveness as his last will.

In April 1918 the Bolshevik power, now master, sent to Tobolsk a commissar, Yakovlev, with orders to take away the former tsar — to Moscow, it was said, for trial. Alexei lay in bed after the gravest attack of his blood-illness; travel with the child was impossible. And then there took place in the governor's house a night that Gilliard described as the most heartrending he had ever seen: the empress, torn between the bed of her sick son and the husband being led away into the unknown, chose to go with her husband: she feared, by the testimony of those present, that they meant to force him there to some unworthy signature, and held that in that hour her place was beside him. She took Maria with her; Olga, Tatiana, and Anastasia remained to care for Alexei. But the commissar's train never reached Moscow: the Ural soviet stopped it, and on 30 April the three were brought down at Ekaterinburg and taken to the house of the merchant Ipatiev, requisitioned a few days before and hastily surrounded by a high stockade of boards. In the records of the new power the house had been given a name that said everything: "the house of special purpose." On 23 May the children — Alexei barely recovered — reached their parents. At the station in Ekaterinburg, Gilliard and the other companions were parted from them; the Swiss tutor saw them for the last time through the carriage window: Tatiana carrying her little dog and her suitcase through the mud, and a sailor carrying Alexei in his arms. This parting saved the lives of those parted — and gave us the witness who would later depose, point by point, before the investigation.

Four people refused to leave them, though they could have chosen otherwise: Dr Eugene Botkin, the family's physician; Anna Demidova, the empress's maid; Ivan Kharitonov, the cook; Alexei Trupp, the footman. They entered of their own will into the house of special purpose, knowing what might happen to those within. The Russian Church Abroad numbered all four among the saints together with their masters, as early as 1981; the Moscow Patriarchate canonized in the year 2000 only the family, and glorified Dr Botkin separately, in 2016. Their ecclesiastical standing differs from one jurisdiction to another; the truth remains the same: the martyrdom of the faithful servant is no less than that of the emperor.

The regime of the Ipatiev house was, from the first, that of a prison meant to humiliate. The windows were whitewashed, so that those within could see the sky only through a small fanlight; the walk in the little garden was cut to half an hour a day; the sentries accompanied the prisoners as far as the bathroom door; the walls filled with obscene inscriptions about the empress, while the first commandant, Avdeev, together with his men, stole from the family's little store and drank. And here there took place the thing that the depositions of the investigation record with a kind of bewilderment: the guards — workmen brought in from the factories of Ekaterinburg, fed on years of hatred — began, one by one, to soften. They saw the girls washing linen, baking bread with the cook, and bidding them good day; they saw a former emperor who complained of nothing; they heard in the evening, through the closed doors, church singing — the family keeping their own prayer rule, chanting the Cherubic Hymn and troparia. One of the guards, Yakimov, would declare before the investigation that, after he had seen them close at hand, it became impossible for him to hate them any longer. The power took note of the danger. On 4 July, Avdeev and his men were replaced: command of the house was handed to the Chekist Yakov Yurovsky, and the inner guard to strangers brought in for the purpose, among them Austro-Hungarian prisoners, many with no common tongue and no common past with those they guarded. The replacement of the softened guards is perhaps the most eloquent testimony to what was taking place in that house: holiness had become contagious, and had to be isolated before it could be killed.

On Sunday, 14 July, at the family's request, the commandant permitted a service. The archpriest John Storozhev came, with a deacon, and served the Typika — a short service without the full Liturgy. The priest had served once before in the house, a month earlier, and found them now changed: worn, silent, like people who no longer awaited anything from the earth. When the deacon chanted "With the Saints give rest" — the hymn sung at the panikhida, for the dead — the whole family, unexpectedly and without any prior sign, knelt. Storozhev testified before the investigation that he left the house with the feeling that he had served not a Typika but their own funeral. It was three days before the end.

On Tuesday, 16 July, the empress's diary — kept without interruption to the last evening — records a day like any other: in the morning Tatiana read to her from the prophets — the book of Amos and of Obadiah, the prophets of judgment; in the evening a game of cards with Nicholas; "10:30, to bed. 15 degrees." These are the last words written in the Ipatiev house. Three hours later, they would be woken.

The Night

What took place on the night of 16–17 July is known today in detail, from two sources that confirm each other: the judicial investigation conducted by Nikolai Sokolov, the investigator appointed by Admiral Kolchak, who examined the site, heard dozens of witnesses under oath, and printed his conclusions at Berlin in 1925; and the notes of the perpetrators themselves, foremost among them Yurovsky's report, which came to light from the archives decades later. We shall follow them soberly, without dwelling on the details that piety has no need to look upon closely.

Shortly after midnight, Yurovsky woke Dr Botkin and told him to rouse the family: there was unrest in the town, the prisoners had to be taken down to shelter. They dressed without haste — they had long grown used to being surprised at nothing. They came down the inner stairs and crossed the courtyard into the room in the basement. Nicholas carried Alexei, who could not walk, in his arms; behind them came the empress, the four girls, Botkin, Demidova with a pillow in her arms, Kharitonov, and Trupp. Eleven people. The empress asked for chairs; two were brought — for her and for the tsarevich. They then sat quietly, arranged as if for waiting, in the bare room with its single barred window. Then Yurovsky entered with the firing squad and read from a paper the decision of the Ural soviet. Nicholas did not understand and turned toward his own, then toward the commandant: "What? What?" — by Yurovsky's own note, these were his last words. Yurovsky repeated the decision and fired first.

What followed lasted, by the perpetrators' accounts, nearly twenty minutes — for death did not come easily. The girls carried sewn into their corsets, since the days of Tobolsk, the family's diamonds — their last wealth, kept for a future life that was never to be — and some of the bullets ricocheted off the stones. They were finished with the bayonet and with shots fired at close range. Then the bodies were loaded onto a truck and taken to the forest of Koptyaki, to an abandoned mine the local people called Ganina Yama. On the following night, for fear of discovery, they were moved and buried under logs, in a pit at Porosenkov Log, and two of them burned. The Sokolov investigation, working in 1919 on tracks still fresh, gathered from Ganina Yama burned remains and belongings of the family; the pit at Porosenkov Log would be found only decades later, and the remains, examined genetically after 1991, were received by the Church with a caution that holds to this day — a sign that the wound has not closed in this matter either.

One single detail from the examination of the site must nonetheless be mentioned, for it pronounces the judgment more clearly than any commentary. On the wall of the basement room the investigators found written in pencil, in German, two verses from Heine's poem about the emperor Belshazzar, who mocked the vessels of the temple and saw the writing on the wall:

"Belsatzar ward in selbiger Nacht / Von seinen Knechten umgebracht" — "Belshazzar, that very night, was slain by his own servants."

One of the murderers, a man of some learning, felt the need to clothe his deed in a verse of biblical echo, turned inside out: the tsar killed like a Belshazzar punished. But whoever writes "mene, tekel" upon the wall against another forgets that the true writing on the wall is not put there by the hand of man. In the book of Daniel those words — "numbered, weighed, divided" (Daniel 5:25-28) — appear of themselves, and not above the one slain, but above the kingdom that believed itself victorious on the very night of its feast. The Soviet kingdom too was to be, in its own time, numbered, weighed, and divided. But between the night of the Ipatiev house and that last night of its own seventy years intervened — and what those years held is the second part of the answer to the question of this article.

What Followed: When the Restrainer Was Taken Out of the Way

The first sign that the night at Ekaterinburg was not a political settling of scores but the opening of a persecution came without delay: on the very next night, at Alapaevsk, a hundred and fifty kilometers away, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna — the empress's sister, who after the killing of her husband had become a nun and devoted her life to the poor of Moscow — was thrown alive down a mine shaft, together with the nun Barbara and five princes of the imperial house. The peasants of those parts would testify before the investigation that from the depths of the shaft there were heard, until the next day, church hymns, among them the Cherubic Hymn, raised by those who were dying, according to hagiographic tradition. Saint Elizabeth died blessing, as she had lived.

Then the persecution poured out over the whole Church, and here the figures must be left to speak for themselves, for no rhetoric is equal to them. Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev had already been killed in January 1918 — the first hierarch-martyr of the new age. Metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd was shot in 1922, after a mockery of a trial. Solovki, the fortress-monastery of the North, was turned into a camp — the first camp of the archipelago that was to cover the land. In the years of the Great Terror, at the Butovo firing range near Moscow, 20,761 people were shot between August 1937 and October 1938, of whom nearly a thousand were clergy and faithful killed for their faith; more than three hundred of them are canonized today. The database of St Tikhon's University in Moscow, which gathers names with documents, contains more than thirty-five thousand people of the Church persecuted for the faith — bishops, priests, monastics, laity — documented by name. Scholars reckon that the total number of those struck down runs into the hundreds of thousands. On the eve of the Second World War, of the more than fifty thousand churches of the Russia of 1917, only a few hundred still stood open, and in freedom there remained, by some accounts, only four bishops. By any honest reckoning, this persecution surpassed in extent everything the Church had known since Diocletian — and it did not stop at the borders of Russia, but spread, after 1945, over all the Orthodox lands fallen under the same power, as far as the prisons of Aiud and Piteşti.

Here we must pause and put the comparative question, for it lights up the heart of the matter. Europe had killed its kings too. England beheaded Charles I in 1649; France sent Louis XVI to the scaffold in 1793. Both regicides, both followed by turmoil and blood. And yet: in England, eleven years after the execution, the monarchy returned, and the Church life of the country went on; in France, the regicide was followed, it is true, by a real persecution — churches closed and profaned, priests killed or driven out, the cult of Reason set up upon the altars. But the wave passed in a few years: the cathedrals reopened, and the people returned to their altars. Nowhere in the West, however, did the persecution become the foundation of the state — a work devised on purpose, extended over generations, to tear from the people the very faith in God. In Russia, it was precisely this that followed: the Soviet state was the first state in the history of the world to make of atheism the very foundation of its building, with leagues of militant atheists, with five-year plans of unbelief, with the demolition of churches as state policy. Whence this difference of nature, and not merely of degree?

Read in the key of the Fathers, the difference pronounces itself: in the West crowns fell; at Ekaterinburg the dominion that restrained was taken out of the way. The Western crowns had long ceased to be what the empire of the East had been, in which the emperor stood under the anointing of the undivided Church: severed from that anointing, caught in the spirit of the age of the Enlightenment, they had died inwardly before they fell outwardly. The Russian empire, with all its sins and infirmities — and they were many, from the synodal tutelage over the Church to the deafness before the cry of the poor — had remained the last dominion in the world that stood under anointing and understood its ministry as the defense of the true faith. So long as it stood, the mystery of lawlessness worked in secret, as it had worked in Russia too, through all her societies and circles; when it was taken out of the midst, lawlessness came forth into the open — just as the Apostle had said, just as Chrysostom had interpreted, just as Theophan had foretold. No speculation is needed: it is enough to set the texts beside the course of events.

And if anyone asks what all this means "to this very day," the answer must be given with the same patristic measure, guarding us alike from two errors. The first is forgetfulness: to hold that the wound has closed, that the Soviet age was an unhappy parenthesis and that life has gone on. It has not. The throne of the Anointed has remained empty; none of the powers that followed — neither the Soviet nor those after it — has stood under anointing, and none has borne the ministry of the restrainer; and the people that renounced its anointed one still bears, unhealed, the consequence of that renunciation. Saint John Maximovitch, speaking in 1938, at the Council of Sremski Karlovci, of the spiritual state of the Russian people, named things without evasion: the whole people committed grave sins, which lie at the root of the present misfortunes — the breaking of the oath and the killing of the Anointed; and this sin weighs not only upon those who committed it with their own hands, but upon all: upon those who consented to it, who rejoiced in it, or who did not resist it — and it is not lifted except by the repentance of the whole people.

The second error is the turning of piety into heresy, and of this a clear word must be said, precisely because we keep the feast. There has arisen, in certain circles, a teaching that makes of the murdered tsar a "redeemer" of the sins of Russia, and of his blood a second saving sacrifice. The Church has rejected it, and rightly: the Redeemer of the world is Christ alone, once and for all, and to set the blood of any man, be he even a saint, beside His Blood is to forsake the Gospel. The Royal Saints do not redeem us — they call us. They ask for no cult of their own persons and no restoration whatever as a program of salvation; they ask what the Anointed himself asked from Tobolsk: that we not answer evil with evil, and that we repent. Whoever turns this call into an ideology betrays it a second time.

The Word of Tikhon: The Blood Falls Also upon Those Who Keep Silent

It remains to tell how there answered, in those very days, the voice that could still answer for the whole Church. By one of those coincidences in which the hand of Providence is read, the Russian Church had regained her patriarch — after two hundred years of synodal widowhood — in the very weeks in which she was losing her emperor: Saint Tikhon had been raised to the patriarchal throne in November 1917, between two volleys of the revolution. The empire was losing its anointed one just as the Church was regaining her first hierarch; and the voice that remained spoke.

On 21 July 1918, two days after the Soviet newspapers had curtly announced "the execution of Nicholas Romanov," Patriarch Tikhon ascended the ambo of the Kazan Cathedral in Moscow — in the very heart of the power that had killed — and spoke the word that remains the Church's judgment upon that night: the deed must be condemned openly, according to the word of God, whatever it may cost us; for if we keep silent, the blood of the slain will fall also upon us, not only upon those who committed the killing. Let it be noted what the holy patriarch does here: he pronounces not only a condemnation upon the murderers — he discloses a spiritual law of silence. The blood of the Anointed falls not only upon the hand that fired; it falls also upon the mouth that keeps silent. With these words Tikhon laid his finger exactly upon the wound we have traced throughout this article: upon the silent consent of February 1917, upon the generals who asked, upon the members of the Synod who quickened their step, upon the people who looked on. And with these same words he signed, as it were, his own fate: he was to die in 1925, worn out by arrests and persecution, a confessor himself.

So the circle of this feast closes, and only now is its full meaning seen. Christian Russia entered history, at her beginnings, under the image of two Passion-bearers — Boris and Gleb, the princes who received death from their brother without raising the sword, so that no blood might be shed in a newly baptized land. The age of the Russian empire ended under the same image: a family that received death forgiving. Between the two thresholds stand nine centuries of Christian dominion; beyond the last, the age without an anointed one, with all that it has brought. And the feast of 17 July is given to us not that we may weep for a dynasty, still less that we may dream of restorations: it is given to us that we may not be, in our hours of trial, among those who keep silent — and that we may learn from those who stand in the icon, with white crosses in their hands and crowns above their brows, the one answer the Gospel gives to the night: "It is not evil that overcomes evil, only love."

For the Romanian answer to the question of the wall, anointing, and confession without a wall, see also What Service Did Romania Bear in Orthodoxy?.

Frequently Asked Questions

When are the Royal Passion-bearers commemorated?

The Royal Passion-bearers are commemorated on 17 July, the day of their killing at Ekaterinburg in 1918.

Why are they called Passion-bearers?

They are called Passion-bearers because they received an unjust death without resistance and without revenge, in the meekness of Christ.

Who was killed with Saint Tsar Nicholas II?

He was killed together with Empress Alexandra, their children Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexei, and four faithful servants: Dr Eugene Botkin, Anna Demidova, Ivan Kharitonov and Alexei Trupp.

Why is 17 July 1918 important in Orthodox history?

For Orthodox memory, that night marks not only the death of the last Russian tsar, but also the removal of the last Orthodox anointed monarchy and the opening of the Soviet persecution of the Church.