This is the first of the Russia blogs I’ve actually written and I’m still in Ekaterinburg right now. In the giant jacuzzi in my own apartment, actually. For context, I have my own 17th floor apartment overlooking the city and it has a huge jacuzzi and I even have my own private sauna in my bathroom. You’ll see them in my Murmansk vs Ekaterinburg apartments post whenever that one happens.
I don’t know why I chose Ekaterinburg. I think it was partly an accident – I remember seeing a “small but lovely Kremlin” mentioned in my guidebook but when I’d booked the flights and accommodation and went back to the book, that was in neither Ekaterinburg or Perm, my next stop.
Nevertheless, I’m glad I ended up here. Ekaterinburg is a former stone processing town and its one big draw for visitors is that it’s home to a major piece of recent history – the Romanov death site.
The Romanovs were a dynasty of Russian Tsars, starting with Michael Romanov in 1613, right up until Nikolai II and his heir, thirteen-year-old Alexei who probably wouldn’t have lived to be Tsar anyway, in 1918. Nikolai abdicated in 1917, after the February Revolution, he and his family were hidden away in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains and they were executed in the early hours of July 17th 1918 by Bolsheviks in the basement of Ipatiev House, the House of Special Purpose, which was formerly the home of a local engineer in Ekaterinburg.
When unexpectedly faced with a firing squad, not everyone stands quietly against a wall and accepts their fate. And the Romanovs didn’t know they were going to be executed. They thought they were going to escape, vanish again. Nikolai’s wife Alix and their four daughters had hidden jewellery and valuables inside their clothes in case of need in the next place.
It was chaos. The Romanovs tried to duck the bullets, the executors were barely competent and kind of scared, it was dark, the guns were flashing, people were screaming and as Netflix’s Last Czars series phrased it, “they were basically wearing the most expensive bulletproof vests in the world”. It took nearly half an hour to kill the six Romanovs and four servants/friends and in the end, anyone who had survived the bullets was finished off with a good old-fashioned stabbing with a bayonet.
Royalist or Republican, it was a bloodbath. The bodies were disposed of in pits in the woods, not to be rediscovered until the 1980s and not exhumed and identified until the 1990s, when the Soviet Union had come to an end. Some of the bodies were taken to the Catherine Chapel in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg, where their ancestors lay. Alexei and one of the younger girls, possibly Anastasia, probably Maria, weren’t found until this century and remain to be properly reburied.
The Ipatiev House was demolished to be sure it didn’t become a focal point for Royalist sympathisers and in the 70s, presumably when any idea of restoring the Tsardom was long gone, a church was built on the vacant site, the Church on the Blood.
It’s well and truly a monument to the Romanovs. The basement is low and dark, it has drawings of them that look like they were done by children, memorial stones, mosaics depicting them as saints in gold and finery, paintings everywhere. Upstairs, in the main body of the cathedral, there are more paintings depicting scenes from their lives. I would recognise Nikolai Romanov in the street now.
What really sticks in my mind is how recent all this is. It was 101 years ago. There are photos and videos of these people. There are people alive, maybe even in Ekaterinburg, who were alive that night. Their ancestor, Peter the Great, he’s a legendary figure from the mists of history. Nicky and Alix and Anastasia and Alexei and of course, the other three girls, Olga, Tatiana and Maria, they were murdered right here in this city just a few years ago. I have a photo of me with DeeDee, my great-grandmother, who would have been alive at the time. Not aware of it, I’m sure, especially if she was anything like her daughter, who lives in a bubble of bowls, ITV and friends she actually can’t stand, but she was alive and a youngish adult at the time.
I went into the church. I always go in churches. Unlike the ones in Moscow and St Petersburg, this is a working consecrated church. There are rules. Some are written on the door. No photos or videos. No ice cream. No dogs. No swimwear. Others are not – women must cover their hair. Silence. No sketching a quick map.
I am a generic English atheist. Christened into the Church of England by atheist-in-all-but-name parents. We went to church a handful of times in school. Reverend Cardale, the local vicar, did some assemblies. I went – under protest – to a few church parades at Brownies. I sometimes take my girls to Remembrance Parade. I – under strong protest – go to the Division Christingle service most years (not this year! I’ll be in York that weekend!). But I do not, cannot, believe. And I’m not interested.
But CofE is the church I’m familiar with. It has no major rules or rituals. More and more, it’s becoming interested in just being part of the community, having people in there, rather than really caring whether they believe. It’s friendly and welcoming. It just cares that you’re there.
The Russian Orthodox church is not friendly and it’s not welcoming. I’m not sure I’ve left a church yet without feeling or being told that I’ve done something wrong. That’s partly down to language and culture gap but it’s mostly down to it being a much stricter rules-based religion. And I don’t like it. If I had a god, it would not be this one. This one is not a loving father. This one is a tyrant.
I see people bowing before the church, even when all they’re doing is walking down the street. I see them kneeling before crucifixes and kissing icons. Hundreds of candles. So much ritual. I see gold. So much gold. Why does faith, why does a deity, require gold? The CofE god doesn’t require gold or decoration or elaborate ritual.
But then I’m what they’d probably consider a foreign pagan. How could I understand?
Next time on Juliet’s Russian Odyssey: Trans-Siberian Railway 101