Centenary of the Royal Passion-Bearers

One hundred years ago today, the lives of seven members of the Russian royal family – Tsar Nikolai II, his wife Aleksandra, and their five children Olga, Tatyana, Maria, Anastasia and Aleksei were murdered by the Bolsheviks, along with their servants. All of the members of the royal family are accounted as saints today by the Russian Church (although their status as martyrs is still slightly disputed). In addition, a number of the murdered servants of the royal saints of Russia were canonised: Evgeny Botkin; Aloysius von Trupp; Ivan Kharitonov; Anna Demidova; Anastasia Hendrikova and Catherine Schneider. A good historical case can be made, that the murder of the royal family and their servants marked definitively the beginning of the twentieth century and its attendant ideologically-driven evils.

Whether one calls him a passion-bearer or a martyr, though, the memory of the murdered Tsar is therefore important, not only to the Rodina and not only to the Russians in diaspora, but to the Orthodox Christians on the North American continent as well. The commemoration of the saintly Tsar and his family is not simply a ‘Russian thing’.

One highly noteworthy thing about Tsar Nikolai II, in life and in death, is how driven practically all of the contemporary North American saints of what was then the Metropolia (now the OCA) were driven to defend him both personally and politically. They all seem to have been impressed by his genuine goodwill and his robust and active support of the Church in its North American mission. Father Saint Alexis (Tovt) publicly commemorated the Tsar among his working-class Rusin congregants. Patriarch Saint Tikhon (Bellavin) was a defender, both of Nikolai II and of his office, being particularly cognisant of the unpopularity of both in American culture. Bishop Saint Raphael (Hawaweeny) served the Syrian Arab community – at the time consisting mostly of poor street pedlars and wage-workers – in New York at the Tsar’s personal request; his bishop’s robes were a gift from the autocrat himself. Archbishop Saint John (Maksimovich) gave a stirring sermon rousing the Russian people to repentance on the fortieth anniversary of the Tsar’s abdication.

Devotion to the Tsar among Russian and Rusin Orthodox Christians in America in particular is quite noteworthy. Fr Peter (Kohanik), a Rusin priest from Bekheriv (in the Bardejov District in current-day Slovakia) said this about the Tsar, quoting a few passages from another sermon delivered by the pastor of the Broadway Tabernacle in New York:

Study the face of Nicholas II, Czar of Russia. It is not the face of a warrior. It is the face, rather, of an artist or a poet. Remember that it was he who, first impressed by the arguments of Jean de Bloch, called the first Hague Conference, some fifteen years ago, hoping that the nations might agree on a reduction in armaments. Read his telegram to his cousin, the King of England, in which he declared that he had done everything in his power to avert the war. Surely this is not a man who wanted to deluge Europe in blood, or who is to be held responsible for what is going on in Europe.

The biased critic will sneer at this, of course, and say there was a motive for him in proposing the universal peace, but it was ever thus—one can’t please everybody!

Even one hundred years on, Tsar Nikolai’s place in history is still ‘up for grabs’. Indeed, as Romanovs go, Tsar Nikolai II hearkened back in a number of ways to the first of his royal line, Mikhail I, who was elected to office by the zemsky sobor of 1613 – or indeed, before Mikhail, to the Royal Passion-Bearers Boris and Gleb. Like Mikhail, Tsar Saint Nikolai II was meek, gentle, kindly and self-effacing in public, and his devotion to the Church only served to accentuate this mild character. Like Mikhail, Nikolai II did accept the responsibilities of the Tsardom, but with great reluctance. And like Mikhail, Nikolai II took the throne at a ‘time of troubles’: the difference, however, was that the troubles which afflicted Mikhail were largely external (invasions from Poland and Sweden), and the troubles afflicting the reign of Nikolai II were largely internal. His reign was plagued by internal problems from the very beginning, but he insisted on sharing in the pains of his people. He personally visited those injured in the Khodynka tragedy; during the Great War he went himself to the front, to be present with the troops who were suffering and dying in his allegiance.

Russia is still coming to grips with its own history. Russians under Soviet rule had been taught to despise the last tsar as a cruel and unfeeling tyrant, but even this ‘official’ line of ham-fisted propaganda had started to come under revisionist scrutiny while the Soviet Union was still standing. Even as early as Brezhnev’s leadership, Soviet historians began to portray Nikolai II with a greater degree of sympathy – although their opposition to the Tsarist system was still absolute. Today, the popular caricature of Nikolai II that still holds some currency – and which is, in some ways, more insidious – is that of Nikolai II as an inept, dithering weakling, hen-pecked by his shrewish wife and brought down by his poor judgement and his reliance on malicious and self-seeking charlatans like Grigory Rasputin.

This caricature is not of Soviet origin; it owes its existence instead to liberal-conservative ‘White’ historiography. It can be traced to the popular English-language histories of Russia written by George Vernadsky (whose liberal-conservative politics can be traced to the Kadet party) and Nicolas Riasanovsky (a scholarly zapadnik whose political views can be characterised as ‘liberal nationalist’). Vernadsky and Riasanovsky did not set out to defame the Tsar, of course. But ultimately a large portion of the pop-cultural image of the royal family owes itself to their work. That work did all possible to accentuate their political tendency’s contributions in the post-1905 ‘constitutional’ era, and to downplay the positive contributions the Tsar himself had to the same period. The beneficial aspects of the reforms of Russian society under Tsar Nikolai II were to be attributed to advisers like Sergei Witte and Pyotr Stolypin, whereas the failures were to be laid at the feet of the Tsar himself. And these ‘Whites’ bore the typical resentment of the Russian nobility against the German ‘foreigner’ Aleksandra, whose very closeness to the seat of political power and her support for autocracy engendered suspicion and misogynistic speculation about her relationship to the Tsar. We must not forget that the Kadets were no true friends of the Tsar, and their bile has had a longer shelf-life than that of the Bolsheviks.

According to KH King, the Tsar was neither coldly aloof from public life nor was he ignorant of its demands. Going from archival accounts and drawing from a broad array of historical data, she shows that Tsar Nikolai II had a personal hand in bringing about, not only in the Hague Peace Conference referenced above by Fr Peter (Kohanik), but also in the industrial modernisations, the Factory Law of 1897 mandating a maximum 10-hour workday, the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth ending the war with Japan, the post-1907 land reforms and the public health insurance system of 1912. His sum-total impact on Russian public life simply was not one of ineptitude and indifference, still less one of cruelty; many of the reforms that he not only put pen to but supported or originated. It will not do to politically ‘rationalise’ the death of the Tsar, or to make of it a vulgar kind of morality play for ideological purposes. The Tsar was, all-around, a good and kind man who stood in the way, and was killed for it.

Regarding Nikolai II’s personal life, there is of course nothing in the historical record to indicate that he was anything other than a devoted family man, or that his relationship with the Tsarina Aleksandra was anything less than loving, even passionate. He doted on his children, and the only reason Grigory Rasputin was allowed anywhere near the family lay in Tsar Nikolai’s belief that his faith could heal his hæmophiliac son.

The last of the Russian Tsars and his family were the victims of cruel, brutal, senseless politically-motivated violence at the hands of the Bolsheviks. It cannot be emphasised enough, however, how much both the ‘Red’ and the ‘White’ ideological contortions of the history of the last Tsar must be overcome, for the repentance that Saint John (Maksimovich) called for to be completely embraced. And this repentance is not only for the Russian people, but for those of us in other nations who have been touched by his generosity and example, and who are still (as evidenced by the incivility and bad manners of our elected leadership) hostile to the very concept of civic monarchism. One hundred years on – let us try to learn, in some small degree, the lessons of this tragic history. Holy Royal Passion-Bearers Nikolai, Aleksandra, Olga, Tatyana, Maria, Anastasia, Aleksei – pray to God for us sinners!

Most noble and sublime was your life and death, O Sovereigns;
Wise Nicholas and blest Alexandra, we praise you,
Acclaiming your piety, meekness, faith, and humility,
Whereby you attained to crowns of glory in Christ our God,
With your five renowned and godly children of blessed fame.
O passion-bearers decked in purple, intercede for us.