THE LAST TSAR DIES
July 17, 1918
INFORMAL MEMORIAL TO
TSAR NIKOLAI II (CZAR NICHOLAS II)
& HIS FAMILY, SVERDLOVSK
(YEKATERINBURG), RUSSIA (USSR), 1991
Out in the Urals, where Europe meets Asia, on the night of July 16-17, 1918, Nikolai II and his family and close retainers were killed ("murdered" or "executed") by "the Bolsheviks" in the Ipatiev House.
Almost sixty years later, in 1977, the Soviet regime, headed by the Politburo, decided to do away with the Ipatiev House, lest it become too much of a magnet. Its local instrument, the First Secretary of Sverdlovsk, Boris Yeltsin, a construction engineer by training, had the deed done. He was to regret this later, of course.
And now, Sverdlovsk is Yekaterinburg again, and this last imperial ruler of Russia, described in the history books when I was coming up as a good family man, but (at best) a poor excuse for a ruler, is deemed worthy of sainthood: Saint Nicholas the Passion-Bearer.
Similarly, modest informal memorials that appeared on the site of the former Ipatiev House (such as the one in the photograph above) have been replaced on that site by The Church on Blood in Honor of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land. Nicholas II's grandfather, Alexander II, has his Church on Spilled Blood, as we have seen; but I doubt anyone has ever mistaken Nicholas II for a Tsar-Liberator.
Two days ago, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and German Chancellor Angela Merkel came to pay their respects in this "Church of All Saints" as part of a Russo-German summit in Yekaterinburg [see photograph #14].
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