Arrest and Exile: From the Obitel to Alapaevsk

The path that carried Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna from the Convent of Sts. Martha and Mary in Moscow to a schoolhouse in the Urals: the revolutions of 1917 reaching her door, her repeated and documented refusals of foreign rescue, the Cheka arrest on the third day of Pascha 1918, the two convent sisters who followed her, and the regime of confinement at Alapaevsk alongside the princes of the Romanov house.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (New Martyr; glorified ROCOR 1981, Moscow 1992)

1917: The Revolution Reaches the Obitel

When the February Revolution of 1917 toppled the monarchy and the October Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power, the Convent of Sts. Martha and Mary (the Marfo-Mariinskaya Obitel’) that Elizabeth had founded in 1909 stood in the heart of a Moscow convulsed by upheaval. The convent, devoted to nursing the sick and the care of the poor, was for a time left largely undisturbed; the new authorities even continued to provide it with some food supplies, and the sisters were permitted to continue their work of mercy (Orthodox Church in America, “Grand Duchess Elizabeth”).

That uneasy tolerance did not mean safety. The standard lives record that armed men searched the obitel more than once, suspicious that the widow of an assassinated grand duke and the sister-in-law of the deposed Empress might be concealing weapons, royalist conspirators, or hidden valuables. Elizabeth met these intrusions with the same composure she had shown at her husband’s deathbed, receiving the search parties calmly and offering them tea — a detail preserved in the convent’s own tradition of these months (holynewmartyrs.org, “Saint Elizabeth Feodorovna”). Her membership in the German house of Hesse and her kinship with both the Russian and the German thrones made her, in the eyes of the revolutionary government, a person of particular sensitivity.

The Rescue Offers Refused

That sensitivity produced, on the German side, an effort to extract her from Russia altogether. The diplomatic record is consistent on the substance, if not always on every detail. Elizabeth’s cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II — once, in their youth, an admirer of the celebrated beauty of Princess Elisabeth of Hesse — sought to secure her safe passage to Germany. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) gave the German embassy standing in Moscow, the offer was conveyed to her, according to the lives, through the Swedish minister, who came to the convent at the request of the German government to arrange her departure (Orthodox Church in America, “Grand Duchess Elizabeth”; holynewmartyrs.org, “Saint Elizabeth Feodorovna”). The same lives note that approaches were made more than once, and the sources sometimes describe the intermediary as a Swedish minister and sometimes as the German embassy acting directly; what they agree upon is that a real and serious channel of escape was opened to her, with the backing of a foreign government, and that she declined it deliberately and with full knowledge of what her refusal meant.

She refused. The lives preserve her reply in close to these words: she acknowledged that terrible times lay ahead, but said that she wished to share the fate of her adopted country and of its people, and that she would not abandon the sisters of her convent and the orphans and sick in her care (Orthodox Church in America, “Grand Duchess Elizabeth”). The tradition also records her conviction that she had done nothing wrong and therefore had nothing to flee — a sentiment of the same shape as the words she had spoken since the murder of her husband in 1905, when she had visited his assassin in prison and asked for his pardon. She had become Orthodox by free choice in 1891 and had given herself wholly to Russia; she would not now leave it at the hour of its agony. This refusal, the lives observe, was in effect the acceptance of her own death sentence (holynewmartyrs.org, “Saint Elizabeth Feodorovna”).

The refusal is of a piece with everything in her life since 1905. After her husband’s assassination she had withdrawn from court, sold her jewels, and founded a convent of mercy whose sisters nursed the poorest of Moscow; she had given away her wealth and her station to bind herself to the suffering of others. To flee now, on the strength of a foreign passport and a German name, would have been to undo that whole self-offering — to claim a privilege of birth she had spent thirteen years renouncing. Seen in that light her decision was not recklessness but consistency: the same surrender that had built the obitel now kept her in it. The Church reads her refusal of rescue as the threshold of her martyrdom — the free act by which she accepted, in advance, whatever was to come.

The Arrest: The Third Day of Pascha, 1918

The arrest came in the brightness of Paschal week. On the third day of Pascha — Bright Tuesday, May 7, 1918 (New Style) — Patriarch Tikhon himself had come to the obitel to serve a moleben (a service of supplication). Shortly after he departed, agents of the Cheka arrived to take the Grand Duchess away (Orthodox Church in America, “Grand Duchess Elizabeth”; cf. the chronology in Wikipedia, “Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine,” locating the standard sources). She was given scarcely any time. The sisters of the convent gathered in grief; Elizabeth blessed them, asked them not to weep, and committed the obitel to God’s keeping, departing as she had lived — without protest and without panic.

Two of her sisters in the obitel insisted on going with her: Barbara (Varvara Alekseyevna Yakovleva), who had come to the convent in 1910 and served as the Grand Duchess’s cell-attendant, and Catherine (Yekaterina) Yanysheva. Both followed voluntarily, refusing to be parted from their abbess (Wikipedia, “Barbara (Yakovleva)”; Orthodox Church in America, “Grand Duchess Elizabeth”). The guards did not compel them; they came of their own will, choosing the uncertainty of their abbess’s captivity over the safety of remaining behind. The party was taken first toward Perm and then to Yekaterinburg in the Urals, the same city where Tsar Nicholas II and his family were already held under guard in the Ipatiev House. There, for some weeks, the Grand Duchess and her companions were lodged before being moved on again.

Barbara’s Insistence at Yekaterinburg

At Yekaterinburg the authorities attempted to separate the Grand Duchess from her two companions, offering the sisters their freedom. The tradition records that the choice was put to them directly, and that Barbara would not take it: she refused her release and insisted on remaining with Elizabeth, whatever the cost, declaring her readiness to die with her (Wikipedia, “Barbara (Yakovleva)”). Catherine Yanysheva, by the accounts, was made to leave — and so survived — while Barbara was permitted, after her insistence, to share her abbess’s fate. It is this free and informed choice to stay, made when escape was offered, that the Church afterward weighed in glorifying Barbara as a martyr in her own right.

Alapaevsk: The Napolnaya School

On May 20, 1918, the Grand Duchess, Sister Barbara, and a group of Romanov princes were transferred from Yekaterinburg to the small Ural factory town of Alapaevsk. There they were housed on the edge of town in a brick building known as the Napolnaya School (the “Field School,” so named for its position at the edge of the open ground), which served as their prison (tsarnicholas.org, “Napolnaya School Museum dedicated to the Alapaevsk Martyrs”; Wikipedia, “Martyrs of Alapayevsk”).

The other Alapaevsk prisoners were members of the imperial house:

Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, arrested in March 1918, and his secretary Fyodor Semyonovich Remez;
Prince Ioann (John) Konstantinovich, Prince Konstantin (Constantine) Konstantinovich, and Prince Igor Konstantinovich — three sons of Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich (the poet “K.R.”); and
Prince Vladimir Pavlovich Paley, son of Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich (Wikipedia, “Martyrs of Alapayevsk”; unofficialroyalty.com, “Execution of Grand Duchess Elisabeth Feodorovna and Five Other Romanovs”).

At first the conditions were comparatively mild. The prisoners were allowed to write letters, to attend church, to keep a small garden, and to walk in the adjacent field. Elizabeth, by the accounts, spent these weeks much as she had at the obitel — in prayer, in needlework, in tending the garden. The princes, young men in the prime of life, bore their confinement with a fortitude the local accounts remembered; Prince Vladimir Paley, a gifted poet, is said to have continued writing verse in captivity. The little community of prisoners kept what they could of the rhythm of Orthodox life, and the presence of a nun-abbess and her cell-sister gave it something of the character of a domestic monastery in exile.

Then, on June 21, 1918, the regime was abruptly tightened. The pretext was the reported escape of Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich from arrest at Perm on the night of June 12–13 — the first of the imprisoned Romanovs to be killed, in fact, though his death was at first passed off as a flight. The Alapaevsk prisoners were stripped of their remaining personal belongings, left with only a single change of clothes, forbidden to leave the school grounds, the garden walks ended, and the guard placed under the local Cheka rather than the ordinary militia (unofficialroyalty.com, “Execution of Grand Duchess Elisabeth Feodorovna and Five Other Romanovs”; Wikipedia, “Martyrs of Alapayevsk”). The change of guard was, in retrospect, the decisive sign: the prisoners had passed from administrative detention into the hands of the organ that would kill them. The walls were closing. Within a month the prisoners would be taken from the Napolnaya School for the last time — on the night after the murder of the Tsar’s family at Yekaterinburg. What the Grand Duchess made of these final weeks the sources do not fully record, but the lives are unanimous that she met the tightening of her captivity as she had met every earlier trial: without complaint, in prayer, and in care for those imprisoned with her.

References

Orthodox Church in America. “Grand Duchess Elizabeth.” Lives of the Saints, oca.org (commemorated July 5/18).
“Saint Elizabeth Feodorovna.” holynewmartyrs.org (The Orthodox Church of the Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia).
“Martyrs of Alapayevsk.” Wikipedia (used to locate the Russian Prosecutor General’s 1998 findings and the standard chronology; arrests, the May 20 transfer, the June 21 tightening of the regime).
“Barbara (Yakovleva).” Wikipedia (Barbara’s arrival at the convent in 1910, her voluntary accompaniment, and her refusal of release).
“Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine.” Wikipedia (chronology cross-checked; the Swedish-minister rescue offer and the Brest-Litovsk context).
“Execution of Grand Duchess Elisabeth Feodorovna and Five Other Romanovs.” unofficialroyalty.com (the Napolnaya School confinement and the conditions of imprisonment).
“Napolnaya School Museum dedicated to the Alapaevsk Martyrs.” tsarnicholas.org, September 12, 2021.
Sokolov, N. A. Enquête judiciaire sur l’assassinat de la famille impériale russe (the White investigation materials, as published) — underlying source for the Alapaevsk inquest used by the lives above.