Eight years ago our mission marked the centennial of the killing of the Holy Royal Martyrs by the Christ-hating Communists in Russia. That service was held in Rooke Chapel at Bucknell. Today we have a Russian Orthodox Christian temple here, where year-round icons of the holy martyrs of Russia hang, including the royal martyrs, both in the worship area here, and in the altar area. Glory to God. Here is a revised version of the remarks I gave at the centennial at Bucknell in 2018, to which I have appended some remarks by our beloved patron St. John.

July 17 marks the centennial of the killing of the Russian royal family. On that day a hundred years ago, the last tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, his wife the Tsarina Alexandra, their five children, and four retainers were ushered into a basement in the city of Yekaterinburg in the early hours of the morning. Their execution would mark a turning point in history.

The family, by all accounts pious and loving and known for personal works of charity, had suffered months of humiliation at the hands of communists who had taken over the Russian government in the wake of the Tsar’s forced abdication in March 1917. Walls of their prison house, which they would have passed on the way to the room of their execution, were bedecked with obscenities, and guards had engaged in immoral acts in the basement where they were killed. Outside that night, trucks ran their engines to muffle the sound of gunshots. It took 20 minutes for the inept, alcohol-impaired shooters to kill the family, as the room filled with smoke from the guns and their cries of pain. The two youngest girls and the Tsarevich survived the fusillade — only to be brutally bayoneted. Meanwhile their maid, who was not initially hit, vainly tried to fight back.

When the children’s English tutor Charles Sydney Gibbes, who later became an Orthodox priest taking the name Nicholas after the Tzar, arrived soon after with White Army forces, he was told that the blood had to be swept away with brooms. A gruesomely torturous burial followed across two days, in which corpses were placed temporarily in a water-filled mineshaft, desecrated, and doused with acid and grenades. The bodies were scattered to hide the number in the group and prevent them from being recovered. Even a family dog was slain to stop its mournful barking. The killer displayed it on a bayonet outside after the murders. Historians recently concluded the killings of the family and their retainers occurred on direct orders from Lenin — the evil mastermind of modern totalitarianism, as has been documented by his biographer the historian Stéphane Courtois following the opening of the Soviet archives.

The carnage marked the end of centuries of Orthodox Christian imperial monarchy that traced its roots back to the Byzantine Empire, across some 1,500 years, and was the end of the last such major Christian monarchical empire in the world. In her introduction to her English translation of “The Romanovs Under House Arrest: From the 1917 Diary of a Palace Priest,” American historian Marilyn Pfeifer Swezy notes:

Nicholas’s own understanding of his role which was more religious than political. He understood that he had inherited a profound responsibility before God for the welfare of his people. In keeping with the concept of the Byzantine emperors and Old Testament kings inherited with Orthodoxy in the tenth century, the sovereign was more than a political ruler. He was the anointed of God. The power of the autocracy was defined as a “selfless burden of service” to the Russian people.

Many of the popular impressions of the Tsar and that regime in the West today remain heavily shaped by Marxist-Leninist propaganda that contributed to the revolution and subsequent historiography. At best, the autocratic Tsarist regime is often equated with communism, the latter being offered praise nonetheless for supposed high ideals of equity and social justice. Yet historical facts tell another story.

Tens of millions of people were killed under the communist regime, with a total of up to 100 million worldwide, including regimes inspired directly and helped by the Bolshevik regime that killed the tsar and his family, according to The Black Book of Communism, the work of a consortium of European scholars. As Nicholas Werth notes there, between 1825 and 1917, Tsarism carried out 6,321 political executions, most in the revolutionary period of 1905-1907. A good number of these were commuted to forced labor. By contrast, almost 20,000 government officials were assassinated by revolutionaries during the last 25 years of imperial rule in Russia alone; from the fall of 1905 to the fall of 1906, 3,611. In 1918, following the brutal execution of the Romanovs and an assassination attempt on Lenin from his “socialist right,” a surging campaign of Red Terror claimed 15,000 lives in two months alone.

Earlier, horrible anti-Semitic pogroms were used to justify hatred of the Tsarist regime, and such anti-Semitic violence was a major enduring sin of Russian culture. But Stanford historian Steven J. Zipperstein notes in his book Pogrom that the imperial government’s policy was to stop pogroms as endangering public order, not to engender them. Zipperstein notes that largest mass killings of Jews, an estimated 100,000 or more, came after the Bolshevik takeover and the breakdown of imperial order, during the Russian Civil War. The 1905-1906 revolutionary era’s peak pre-communist pogroms by contrast resulted in perhaps 800 deaths. Key pre-revolutionary Russian Church leaders in the early twentieth century, such as Father (later Saint) John of Kronstadt and Bishop Antony Khrapovitsky (later the leader of the anticommunist Russian Church in exile) did denounce the pogroms at the time, with even the Tsar discouraging circulation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with its accusations of Jewish conspiracy. That is not to excuse the brutalities of Tsarist society, but it highlights the hugely greater evils unleashed under atheistic communism, which felt it had to strike first against the Christian emperor and his family.

Indeed, the communist gulag or system of labor camps became a model for Nazi concentration camps. By contrast, when Lenin was exiled to Siberia under the Tsarist regime, he was allowed a rifle for hunting and the companionship of his wife, could work on his writing, and enjoyed a daily allowance from the state equal to double the pay of the average peasant, from which he paid a housekeeper. Trotsky, even in the brutal anti-revolutionary crackdown of 1906, was allowed visits from his wife and wrote most of his history of the St. Petersburg Soviet while imprisoned.

Bard historian Sean McMeekin documents that the tsarist regime had not been the failure that it was portrayed in Marxist-Leninist propaganda, either: “Russia in the early twentieth century was a substantial net importer of both people and capital: a telling fact that, since the revolution, has never been true again.” His history, accessing old Soviet archives, notes that far more crucial to the Revolution were elite Russian conspiracies against the Tsar (including largely engineered scandal over Rasputin). To which other factors can be added, notably huge Russian casualties in World War I, German subsidies of Lenin’s party of more than $1 billion in today’s currency, and what Alexander Solzhenitsyn decried as a lack of decisive response to initial revolution. Nonetheless, McMeekin writes in his recent book The Russian Revolution that in 1917, “the tsar’s complacency … accorded better with Russia’s real military and strategic situation than did liberal and Allied hysteria. Morale in the Russian high command on the eve of spring campaigning was high, and for good reason.” S.S. Oldenburg, a respected Russian historian, who wrote an history of the last tsar’s reign in multi-volumes that appeared in the 1930s and 1940s from exile (The Last Tsar), also detailed the considerable successes and basic competence of the tsar’s regime.

But disloyal subversion in decadent high levels of Russian society leading to the tsar’s abdication, revolutionary networks feeding on legitimate grievances among sectors of the sprawling empire’s public, and ultimately a relatively small force of about 10,000 dedicated Red guards enabling the communist takeover of the capital Petrograd, all contributed to the collapse of the tsarist state across 1917. This resulted in the “red terror” of which the 1918 royal executions became the central historical marker.

 “Bloody Nicholas” (as the revolutionaries unjustly smeared Nicholas II), and his pious and loving family, later were declared “holy martyrs” and “passion-bearers” by Russian Orthodox Churches in exile and later in post-communist Russia, respectively, because of their own sacrifice of blood as martyrs. They became venerated for living their faith through suffering to death, as seen in the Tzar’s calls for forgiveness of their enemies amid those trials, and his expressed willingness to take on the sins of his country to his death. Our Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad first glorified them as holy martyrs, then later the Moscow Patriarchate as Holy Psssion Bearers. The latter means saints who met their deaths with outstanding faith. However ROCOR to this day fully recognizes them as martyrs for their lives of faith at large.

As Metropolitan Hilarion Kapral of blessed memory, the New York-based head of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad at the time of the centennial, wrote:  … the more the Church endured persecution, the brighter the lanterns of faith and piety shone in the Russian land. From the Tsar and the members of the Royal Family close to him in spirit, from archpastors and simple monastics, priests, and deacons to laypersons came forth a powerful spiritual army of the Church Militant … Thank God, today we see how the blood of many millions of the host of martyrs and confessors who turned the Russian land scarlet became the seeds of salvation for the spiritual rebirth of our people, in the Fatherland and in the Diaspora.

As churches and monasteries continue to reopen and sprout anew in a resurgent Christian culture in Russia, and Orthodox Christian missions open in the West,  including one in our small Pennsylvania town, candles glow in front of icons of the Holy Royal Martyrs this week at memorial services around the world. They are a reminder of the light of faith that the darkness of communism could not put out — and a warning to a West increasingly enamored with that darkness again today.

Let me end with our parish patron St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco’s words in 1957, before the collapse of the communist Soviet Union in Russia. He was especially instrumental in the ultimate glorification of the royal martyrs as saints in the Church Abraod. He wrote: 

Forty Years Ago, a single day saw the collapse of the greatness and glory of the Russian State, a bulwark of peace throughout the whole world. The signature of the Sovereign, the Emperor Nicholas II, on the act of abdication from the Throne, is a historical boundary separating Russia’s great and glorious past from her present dark and cruel circumstances.

The entire weight of the present regime’s evil and its reordering of life is aimed at honest, well-intentioned and devout people, and the whole nation lies in oppression and constant fear. People are afraid of their own thoughts, thoughts they have not expressed aloud; they are afraid that what they are thinking might be reflected in their facial expressions.

What happened that day, forty years ago?

Apostasy from God’s Anointed, apostasy from an authority submissive to God, apostasy from the oath of fidelity to the Anointed Sovereign, given before God, and the giving over of him to death.

He who had devoted all his strength in God’s name to the service of Russia was deprived of authority, and then also of freedom.

For decades the dark forces of evil carried on a struggle against God’s Anointed, against the ruling authority faithful to God. These same forces also killed the Emperor Alexander II, the Tsar-Liberator.

This crime sobered the people, it shook the entire country, and that moral upsurge gave Emperor Alexander III, the Peacemaker, the opportunity to rule Russia with a strong arm.

Russia enjoyed two decades of peaceful life and development. Then a new conspiracy arose for the overthrow of the Royal Throne.

It was a conspiracy of Russia’s enemies.

Within Russia itself there was a struggle against her very essence, and, having destroyed the Throne, Russia’s enemies even obliterated her name.

Now the whole world can see the close connection between the Royal authority, faithful to God, and Russia. When the Tsar ceased to be — Russia ceased to be.

The struggle against the Tsar and Russia was carried out by concealed godlessness, which later revealed itself openly.

Such was the essence of the struggle against the Tsar and Russia, against the foundation of her life and historical development.

Such are the meaning and aim of that struggle, which perhaps not everyone realized — those who were its accomplices.

Everything filthy and paltry and sinful which could be found in the human soul was summoned against the Tsar and Russia. All of this, with all its might, rose up in struggle against the Royal Crown, which was crowned by a cross, for Royal service is a bearing of the Cross.

People always rise up against the Cross by means of slander and falsehood, doing the devil’s work, for, according to the word of the Lord Jesus Christ, When he speaketh a He, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it (John 8:44).

Everything was roused up against the most meek, pure and abundantly-loving Tsar, so that at the terrible hour of the struggle against him he would remain alone. Filthy slanders were spread beforehand against the Tsar and his family, so that the people would grow cool towards him.

Faithless allies took part in the conspiracy. When the Sovereign was in need of moral support, his closest associates did not provide it and violated their oath. Some took part in the conspiracy; others, out of weakness, counseled abdication. The Tsar remained completely alone, surrounded by [what he called in his journal] “treachery, baseness and cowardice.”

From the day of the abdication, everything began to collapse. It could not have been otherwise. The one who united everything, who stood guard for the Truth, was overthrown. A sin was committed, and now sin had easy access. In vain do some wish to separate February from October; the one was a direct consequence of the other.

In those March days, Pskov became the Tsar’s Gethsemane, and Ekaterinburg — his Golgotha.

Tsar Nicholas died as a martyr, with unshakable faith and patience, having drunk the cup of suffering to the dregs.

The sin against him and against Russia was perpetrated by all who in one way or another acted against him, who did not oppose, or who merely by sympathizing participated in those events which took place forty years ago. That sin lies upon everyone until it is washed away by sincere repentance….

We must pray for the forgiveness of our sins and for mercy on our homeland, just as the Lord God freed Israel from the Babylonian captivity and restored the ruined city of Jerusalem.

Brothers and sisters, following our patron St. John’s example, let us remember the Holy Royal Martyrs. Let us take their faith, courage, and love as our model. Let us take their earthly destiny as a warning for what can happen in our own American land when the forces of anti-Christian atheism are unleashed.  And let us ask for their intercession for our lives and work as missionaries in America today. Holy Royal Martyrs pray to God for us!