The Mine Shaft: The Night of July 5/18, 1918

The martyrdom of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna and the nun Barbara at the Nizhnyaya Selimskaya mine outside Alapaevsk, on the night after the Yekaterinburg executions: the staged “abduction” cover story, the documented method of killing, the survivor-witness chain behind the famous account of hymns sung from the shaft, the recovery of the bodies by the Whites in the autumn of 1918, and the evidentiary source for the most-quoted detail — that even in the shaft Elizabeth bound the wound of a fellow prisoner.

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

The Night After Yekaterinburg

The Tsar and his family were shot in the basement of the Ipatiev House at Yekaterinburg in the early hours of July 17, 1918 (July 4 Old Style). The very next night — July 5/18, 1918 — the Alapaevsk prisoners were taken to their deaths (Orthodox Church in America, “Grand Duchess Elizabeth”). The closeness of the two killings was not coincidental: the Ural Bolshevik authorities cleared away the captive Romanovs in a single sweep, the Tsar’s family one night and the Alapaevsk group the next.

In the darkness, workers from the Nevyansk and Verkhne-Sinyachikhinsky plants, led by Pyotr Startsev, came to the Napolnaya School. The local Cheka and the regional Soviet authorities had decided the prisoners’ fate; the deed itself was given to plant workers and Red Guards rather than to a formal firing detail, the better to maintain the fiction that was prepared to accompany it. The prisoners were awakened and told they were being moved to a safer place, away from the danger of the approaching White and Czechoslovak forces. Their hands were bound and their eyes blindfolded, and they were carried by cart out of the town to an abandoned iron-ore working some twelve miles distant — the Nizhnyaya Selimskaya mine (Lower Selimskaya), a flooded shaft sixty or more feet deep (unofficialroyalty.com, “Execution of Grand Duchess Elisabeth Feodorovna and Five Other Romanovs”; Wikipedia, “Martyrs of Alapayevsk”).

The Staged “Abduction”

To conceal the killing, the authorities prepared a cover story. The official version, broadcast immediately afterward, was that an armed band — “Whites” or counter-revolutionaries — had attacked the school in the night and carried the prisoners off, leaving the Soviet powerless to prevent the “abduction.” To lend the fiction substance, shots were fired and a show of struggle was mounted at the school. The Soviet press accordingly reported the prisoners as having escaped or been seized, and a token “search” was announced (Wikipedia, “Martyrs of Alapayevsk”). The truth — that the same authorities had organized the murder — emerged only when the White Army took the town and opened an investigation.

The Method

The documented method is consistent with the account preserved in the wider repository: the prisoners were thrown living into the shaft, and grenades were used to finish them. According to the testimony of one of the participants, the peasant Vasily Ryabov, each prisoner was struck on the head and then cast down the mine; Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich alone resisted and was shot, his body bearing a bullet wound to the back of the skull found later at the autopsy (Wikipedia, “Martyrs of Alapayevsk”). When it became clear that the fall had not killed those below, the executioners threw hand-grenades into the shaft. The killers then heaped poles, logs, and brushwood over the opening, set fire to it, and sealed the mine with earth (unofficialroyalty.com; Wikipedia, “Martyrs of Alapayevsk”). Elizabeth and Barbara were among the eight thus killed: six men and the two nuns.

The Hymns from the Shaft

The most celebrated element of the Alapaevsk tradition is the account that, after the prisoners had been thrown down, hymns were heard rising from the depths of the mine. Here the methodology of attestation matters (METHODOLOGY §3.5): this is a hagiographical claim, and it must be pinned to its actual sources rather than asserted as bare historical fact.

The earliest written attestation lies in the testimonies gathered for the White investigation after Alapaevsk was retaken — the inquest begun by the court member Sergeyev in October 1918 and continued from February 1919 by the investigator Nikolai Sokolov, whose published enquiry into the murders of the imperial house remains the foundational source (Sokolov, Enquête judiciaire; Wikipedia, “Martyrs of Alapayevsk”). Within that body of testimony, Ryabov’s deposition and the statements of nearby peasants report that prayer and singing were heard from the shaft after the killing — by some accounts for a considerable time, the prisoners not having died at once. One participant recalled that after the first grenade the voices below took up a liturgical chant: the troparion “Save, O Lord, Thy people, and bless Thine inheritance” (Wikipedia, “Martyrs of Alapayevsk”). The lives commonly add that the singing was of the Cherubic Hymn and continued into the following day (holynewmartyrs.org, “Saint Elizabeth Feodorovna”; Orthodox Church in America, “Grand Duchess Elizabeth,” which records that “Saint Elizabeth lived for several hours, and could be heard singing hymns”).

Honesty requires noting the boundary of the evidence. Some historians treat the more elaborate versions — singing continuing over days — as devotional amplification of the peasant testimonies, and a strand of scholarship holds that the deaths were swifter than the tradition suggests (Wikipedia, “Martyrs of Alapayevsk,” noting that alternative sources characterize the longer accounts as “folk legends”). What the White-investigation testimonies do attest, and what the lives transmit from them, is that singing and prayer were heard from the shaft after the prisoners were cast in. The detail is reported as the inquest recorded it, with its source named.

The Recovery of the Bodies (October 1918)

The forces of Admiral Kolchak (the Whites) captured Alapaevsk on September 28, 1918, and at once opened an inquiry into the disappearance of the prisoners. The bodies were raised from the Nizhnyaya Selimskaya shaft in October — the recovery beginning on October 8 and the corpses extracted over the following days (unofficialroyalty.com; Wikipedia, “Martyrs of Alapayevsk,” giving October 21–24 for the full extraction). A medical examination and autopsy followed; the bodies were then washed, wrapped in white shrouds, and placed in wooden coffins.

The autopsy produced the detail that has become inseparable from St. Elizabeth’s memory. Among the dead, the body of Prince Ioann (John) Konstantinovich was found with his head bound up — his wound dressed with cloth from the Grand Duchess’s own apostolnik (the nun’s head-covering, or wimple). The investigation’s reading was unmistakable: Elizabeth, herself mortally injured and lying in the dark at the bottom of the shaft, had used what was at hand to bind the wound of a fellow prisoner before she died (Wikipedia, “Martyrs of Alapayevsk”; holynewmartyrs.org, “Saint Elizabeth Feodorovna,” reporting that the investigation found she had “dressed the wounds of Grand Duke John”). The evidentiary source for this famous detail is precisely the forensic record of the White inquest under Sergeyev and Sokolov — the autopsy of the recovered bodies — and not a later devotional embellishment; it is one of the rare cases where a saint’s reputed act of charity at the moment of martyrdom is attested not by pious memory alone but by a contemporary forensic record. The image is everywhere in her iconography and her veneration: the nurse and abbess of a convent of mercy, who had spent the last years of her life binding the wounds of Moscow’s poor, found at the last to have bound a wound in the dark of her own grave. The examiners also recorded that several of the victims, Prince Vladimir Paley and Sister Barbara among them, were found in half-seated positions, consistent with having survived the fall and lived for a time below — corroborating, on the forensic side, the peasant testimony that the prisoners had not died at once (Wikipedia, “Martyrs of Alapayevsk”).

The Perpetrators’ Later Fates

The killing was an act of the local Soviet apparatus, organized and carried out by named men. A 1998 review by the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office identified some twenty-two persons as organizers and executors of the Alapaevsk murders, among them Grigory Pavlovich Abramov, chairman of the local Soviet; Nikolai Pavlovich Govyrin, head of the local Cheka; and Pyotr Startsev, who led the party that took the prisoners to the mine (Wikipedia, “Martyrs of Alapayevsk”). Their subsequent careers ran with the fortunes of the regime they served: the principal organizers were Bolshevik functionaries who continued in Soviet service, and the killing was never the subject of any Soviet prosecution — it was, on the contrary, long concealed behind the fiction of the “abduction.” The factual record of who did the deed survived instead in the White investigation files and in the post-Soviet review that drew on them. No reliable evidence shows that any of the perpetrators was ever held to account for the Alapaevsk murders in his lifetime; the men who organized and carried out the killing simply passed back into the apparatus of the new state.

It is worth stating plainly what the Church does and does not assert here. The historical facts — the arrest, the confinement, the casting into the shaft, the grenades, the recovery of the bodies, the bandaged wound — rest on the documentary record of the White inquest and the published lives that depend on it. The hagiographical claims — above all the hymns heard from the shaft and the longer duration of the prisoners’ suffering — are pinned to their attestation in that same body of testimony, and reported as the witnesses gave them, with the boundary of the evidence marked. What is certain is the manner of the death: Grand Duchess Elizabeth and the nun Barbara were cast living into a mine and left to die, and the Church venerates them as New Martyrs who met that death in prayer.

References

Sokolov, N. A. Enquête judiciaire sur l’assassinat de la famille impériale russe. Paris: Payot, 1924 (the White investigation materials, as published) — the foundational inquest, begun by the court member Sergeyev in October 1918 and continued by Sokolov from February 1919.
Orthodox Church in America. “Grand Duchess Elizabeth.” Lives of the Saints, oca.org (commemorated July 5/18).
“Saint Elizabeth Feodorovna.” holynewmartyrs.org.
“Martyrs of Alapayevsk.” Wikipedia (used to locate the Russian Prosecutor General’s 1998 findings, Ryabov’s testimony, the autopsy details, and the named perpetrators; primary attribution traced to the Sokolov-era inquest).
“Execution of Grand Duchess Elisabeth Feodorovna and Five Other Romanovs.” unofficialroyalty.com (the night of July 17–18, the Lower Selimskaya mine, the method, and the body recovery from October 8).