Martyrs of Alapaevsk
The Holy New Martyrs of Alapaevsk — the Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, the Princes John, Constantine and Igor Konstantinovich, the Prince Vladimir Paley, and Theodore Remez
New Martyr · Martyr · Prince · d. 18 July 1918 (5 July Old Style), at the Nizhnyaya Selimskaya mine near Alapaevsk
Commemorated 5 July — Martyrdom in the mine-shaft near Alapaevsk, 1918
On the night of 18 July 1918 — the night after the shooting of the imperial family at Ekaterinburg — eight prisoners held at the Urals factory town of Alapaevsk were driven into the forest, beaten, and thrown alive down the shaft of the abandoned Nizhnyaya Selimskaya iron-mine, with grenades flung after them. Two of the eight, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth and the nun Barbara, have their own entries. This entry is of the other six: the Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich; the Princes John, Constantine and Igor Konstantinovich, sons of the poet Grand Duke Constantine; the young poet Prince Vladimir Paley; and Theodore Remez, secretary to the Grand Duke, a layman of no rank who was killed because he would not leave his employer. They were glorified as new martyrs by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in 1981.
The prisoners
After the Bolshevik seizure of power the surviving male members of the imperial house were required to register, and in the spring of 1918 were deported from Petrograd to the Urals. Six of the eight prisoners brought to Alapaevsk in May 1918 were:
- Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich (1869–1918), son of Grand Duke Michael Nikolaevich and a great-grandson of the Emperor Nicholas I; Inspector-General of the Russian artillery through the war, a hard-working and unpopular soldier, and the eldest of the party.
- Prince John Konstantinovich (1886–1918), eldest son of the Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich — the poet who signed himself "K. R." — and married to Helen of Serbia, daughter of King Peter I. He was the most devout of the family, had served as a sub-deacon, sang in church, and had told his relations that when the war ended he meant to be ordained.
- Prince Constantine Konstantinovich the younger (1890–1918) and
- Prince Igor Konstantinovich (1894–1918), his brothers, both officers of the Guard.
- Prince Vladimir Pavlovich Paley (1897–1918), son of the Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich by his second, morganatic marriage; a lyric poet of real gift who had published a volume at nineteen. He was offered his release if he would renounce his father; he refused.
- Theodore (Fyodor) Semyonovich Remez, the Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich's secretary and man of business, who was not required to go into exile at all and went with his employer of his own choice.
With them were the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna and her cell-attendant the nun Barbara.
Alapaevsk
They were lodged in the Napolnaya school on the edge of Alapaevsk, at first under a mild regime — they were allowed to walk, to garden, to attend the town church — which was tightened abruptly in June, when their money, boots and clothing were taken and the doors were locked.
On the night of 17–18 July 1918 the local Cheka roused them on the pretext of a transfer to safety and drove them some twelve miles out to the disused Nizhnyaya Selimskaya mine. There they were beaten with rifle-butts and thrown down the shaft one by one, the Grand Duchess first. Only Sergei Mikhailovich resisted; he was shot in the head at the mouth of the shaft and his body thrown after the others — he alone of the eight died at once. Grenades were flung down and brushwood set alight above; and the killers reported to Ekaterinburg that the prisoners had been carried off by an unidentified band.
The peasants of the nearest village afterwards testified that for a long time singing was heard from below the ground. When the White forces took the town and the mine was opened in October 1918, the bodies were brought up: most of the party had survived the fall and had died slowly of their injuries, thirst and hunger. Prince John's head had been bandaged with the Grand Duchess's wimple; a partly eaten piece of bread was found in the shaft.
Afterwards
The eight coffins were carried east ahead of the retreating armies to Chita and then to Peking, where they were buried in the cemetery of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission. The coffins of Elizabeth and Barbara were taken on to Jerusalem in 1921; those of the six remained at Peking, and the cemetery was destroyed under the Chinese People's Republic in the 1950s and afterwards built over, so that their relics are lost. Prince John's widow, Helen of Serbia, survived and left an account of the last months.
The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia glorified the whole company of Alapaevsk in 1981, among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.
Feast and commemoration
July 5 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 18 — the anniversary of the killing), kept with Elizabeth and Barbara, and among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, whose synaxis is movable. The commemoration is proper to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia and to parishes of Russian tradition that follow its calendar.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of the New Martyrs of Russia)
Today the Church that is in Russia danceth in choir, honouring her new martyrs: the noble and the lowly, the prince and the servant, who together were cast into the pit and together received the crown. O holy martyrs of Alapaevsk, entreat Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
The company is written as a group standing before the black mouth of the mine-shaft, with the Grand Duchess Elizabeth and the nun Barbara at the head of them and the six behind: the Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich and the three Konstantinovichi in officers' uniform or in the cloak, Prince John sometimes vested as a sub-deacon with the orarion, Prince Vladimir Paley as a beardless youth with a scroll for his verses, and Theodore Remez in ordinary civil dress — the layman's coat among the princes being the point of the composition. Each holds the martyr's cross. They also appear as a small group within the great composite icons of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.
No pre-1900 or licence-clean image can exist of martyrs of 1918: every icon of them is a modern work in copyright. No image is stored for this entry.
Disputed questions
- The extent of the glorification. The Church Abroad in 1981 glorified all eight of the Alapaevsk victims. The Moscow Patriarchate, in 1992, canonised only Elizabeth and the nun Barbara, and its general glorification of the New Martyrs in 2000 did not add these six by name. They are therefore commemorated by name in the Church Abroad and its parishes, and prayed for rather than invoked in much Russian usage; this entry records the difference rather than resolving it, per the source policy.
- Whether they died for the faith. They were killed as members of a dynasty, not for a confession demanded of them — the classical objection to their veneration as martyrs. The case made for it in 1981 rests on the manner of their deaths, on the Christian bearing attested of them in captivity (Prince John's psalmody, Prince Vladimir's refusal to buy his life by renouncing his father, Remez's refusal to go free), and on the same reasoning by which the Church honours the passion-bearers Boris and Gleb: an unresisting death accepted in the likeness of Christ.
- The names and the number. Eight died. Some lists of "the Alapaevsk martyrs" give all eight, others the six treated here; the Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, killed at Perm in June 1918, is a separate case and is not of this company.