Royal Martyrs of Russia

The persons

• Nicholas Alexandrovich (b. 1868), emperor from 1894, the last of the Romanov sovereigns.
• Alexandra Feodorovna (b. 1872), born Alix, princess of Hesse and by Rhine, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, received into Orthodoxy at her marriage in 1894 and, by all testimony, a convert of unusual intensity.
• Olga (b. 1895), Tatiana (b. 1897), Maria (b. 1899) and Anastasia (b. 1901), the grand duchesses; the two eldest served as nurses in the military hospitals through the war.
• Alexis (b. 1904), the tsarevich, a haemophiliac whose illness governed the private life of the family and much of its public misfortune.

Killed with them in the cellar were the physician Eugene Botkin, the maid Anna Demidova, the cook Ivan Kharitonov and the footman Alexei Trupp. Botkin — who had been offered his liberty and answered that he would not leave his patients — was glorified by the Church Abroad in 1981 and by the Moscow Patriarchate in 2016 as the righteous passion-bearer Eugene the physician. The three servants were glorified by the Church Abroad in 1981; the Moscow Patriarchate has not canonised them, on the ground (among others) that Trupp was a Roman Catholic and Demidova a Lutheran.

Abdication and captivity

Nicholas abdicated on 2/15 March 1917, in the collapse of the war effort and of his government, and abdicated also on behalf of his son. What follows is the substance of the Church's case, and it is not political but ascetical. From that moment the family were prisoners: first under house arrest at Tsarskoye Selo, then, from August 1917, in exile at Tobolsk in Siberia, and from April–May 1918 at Yekaterinburg in the Ipatiev house, which their guards called "the house of special purpose."

The regime tightened month by month: the windows whitewashed and barred, the garden walk cut to half an hour, letters read, the guards insolent and frequently drunk, obscenities scratched on the walls. The witnesses to this period — including hostile ones — describe a family that prayed the daily offices together, read the Scriptures aloud, taught the younger children, mended their own clothes, and did not complain. A letter of the Grand Duchess Olga from Tobolsk, written at her father's request, asks that their friends should not attempt to avenge them, "for evil which is now in the world will be yet stronger, but that evil will not conquer evil, only love." A poem copied out in the empress's hand and found among her books at Yekaterinburg ends with the prayer that God would give them strength to forgive their enemies. On 14 July 1918, three days before the end, a priest was allowed in to serve the obednitsa for them; he reported that the deacon, by accident or premonition, sang the prayer "Give rest with the saints" for the departed, and that the whole family fell to their knees.

The night of 16–17 July

Late on the night of 16 July the family were woken, told they were to be moved for their safety, and taken down to a semi-basement room. Chairs were brought for the empress and for Alexis. A detachment under Yakov Yurovsky entered, a paper was read, and they were shot at close quarters; the killing was prolonged and botched, and was finished with bayonets. The bodies were taken by lorry into the forest at Ganina Yama, mutilated, burned and finally buried in a pit at a place called Porosenkov Log.

The Julian date of that night is 3–4 July, and the Church's commemoration is July 4.

Nine days later, on 18 July, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna — the empress's sister, a widow and the foundress of the Martha and Mary convent — was thrown alive down a mineshaft at Alapaevsk with the nun Barbara and other members of the family; her commemoration is July 5, and the two days are read together.

Glorification

Veneration began at once among the Russian emigration and, more quietly, inside Russia. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia glorified the family in 1981 among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, together with their four attendants. The Moscow Patriarchate, after long and public deliberation in which the theological objections were fully aired, glorified them at the Jubilee Council of August 2000 — deliberately as passion-bearers and not as martyrs, precisely in order to make clear that the canonisation was of their Christian death and not an endorsement of the reign. The commission's report stated that Nicholas's political acts were not the subject of the act, and that the ground of glorification was the meekness, patience and forgiveness shown in captivity.

The Church on the Blood was built over the site of the Ipatiev house (demolished in 1977) and consecrated in 2003; the monastery of the Holy Royal Passion-bearers stands at Ganina Yama. On the night of the feast a procession of many tens of thousands walks the twenty-one kilometres from the church to Ganina Yama.