The Imperial Passion-Bearers

The Emperor Nicholas II, the Empress Alexandra, and their five children — the Tsarevich Alexei and the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia — murdered at Ekaterinburg on the night of 16/17 July 1918, and their place within the category of the New Martyrs. This file summarizes their standing in the Sobor and, above all, the contested question of the category under which they are venerated — passion-bearers in Moscow’s reckoning, martyrs in the Church Abroad’s — while deferring the full account of their lives and deaths to their own collection.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

The Most Famous of the New Martyrs

No members of the Sobor of New Martyrs are more widely known, or more contested, than the imperial family. The Emperor Nicholas II, having abdicated in March 1917, was held with his wife and children through the revolution and the first year of Bolshevik rule and finally shot, together with the Empress Alexandra, the thirteen-year-old heir Alexei, the four Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, and four attendants, in the cellar of the Ipatiev House at Ekaterinburg on the night of 16/17 July 1918 (the standard account of the Ekaterinburg killings; the full narrative and its sources are treated in the dedicated collection The Royal Martyrs of Russia). Their story — the abdication, the captivity at Tsarskoe Selo, Tobolsk, and Ekaterinburg, the killing, the concealment and later discovery and identification of the remains, and the vast popular veneration that grew up around them — belongs to that collection and is not retold here. This file concerns only their place in the category of the New Martyrs, and the theological dispute that place involves.

Martyrs or Passion-Bearers?

The imperial family present the category question in its sharpest form, because the ground of their killing was manifestly dynastic and political rather than religious. They were not shot because they confessed Christ or refused to deny Him; they were shot because they were the deposed imperial family, whose survival the Bolsheviks judged a danger. On the strict classical criterion of martyrdom — death for the faith, in refusal of a demand to apostatize — they are not martyrs in the way a priest shot for refusing to renounce his orders is a martyr (on the criterion, see What a New Martyr Is). This is precisely why the Russian Church, in glorifying them, reached for the distinctive Slavic category of the passion-bearer (strastoterpets): one who accepts an unjust and violent death in a spirit of Christ-like meekness, forgiveness, and non-resistance, after the pattern of the first Russian saints, the princes Boris and Gleb (on the passion-bearer type, Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, Harvard University Press, 1946). The warrant for their veneration, on this reckoning, is not a confession extracted at the point of death but the manner of their captivity and dying — the piety, patience, and absence of vengefulness recorded in Nicholas’s and Alexandra’s letters and diaries and in the testimony of those who guarded them (the documentary basis is treated in The Royal Martyrs of Russia).

But the two great glorifications did not agree on the category, and this is a genuine and load-bearing difference that the collection reports from both sides. [Disputed: the category under which the imperial family are venerated. (a) The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, glorifying them in 1981 within its Synaxis of the New Martyrs, venerated them as martyrs (muchenikí) — reading their deaths, in the context of the whole anti-Christian persecution, as a martyrdom of the Orthodox monarch and his family at the hands of the God-fighting revolution (ROCOR glorification of 1981; see The Glorifications: Methodology). (b) The Moscow Patriarchate, glorifying them at the Jubilee Council of August 2000, deliberately chose the lesser and more precise category of passion-bearers (strastoterptsy), on the ground that their killing was not, strictly, “for the faith,” and that what the Church venerates is their Christ-like acceptance of suffering and death (Moscow Patriarchate, Jubilee Bishops’ Council, August 2000; the choice of strastoterptsy is documented in the Council’s acts and discussed in Christensen, The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia, Routledge, 2018, ch. 5). The difference is not about the facts of the killing, on which both agree, but about the theological description of it; it also reflects the fact that the imperial family’s canonization was itself controversial within the Moscow Patriarchate, resisted by some as risking a political or monarchist reading (see below). The collection reports both categories and does not adjudicate which is the more fitting.]

The Controversy Within the Church

The glorification of the imperial family was one of the most debated canonizations of the whole New Martyr enterprise, and honesty requires naming the debate. The Church Abroad’s glorification of 1981 was itself, for some, bound up with a monarchist and anti-Soviet politics; and when the question came before the Moscow Patriarchate in the 1990s, there was serious internal resistance. Critics within the Russian Church objected that Nicholas’s reign — Bloody Sunday of 1905, the conduct of the war, the association with Rasputin — was not obviously saintly, and warned that glorifying the tsar risked canonizing an autocracy and lending the Church to a monarchist political cause rather than honouring a holy death (Christensen, The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia, 2018, ch. 5, on the debate over the imperial canonization and the objections raised; see also Memory and Controversy). The Patriarchate’s eventual solution — to glorify the family precisely and only as passion-bearers, honouring the manner of their death and not the policies of the reign — was in part an answer to these objections, drawing the narrowest defensible line: the Church venerates how they died, not how Nicholas governed (Christensen, 2018, ch. 5). This is the resolution the Moscow Patriarchate reached; the Church Abroad’s broader “martyr” designation and the popular cult that in some quarters venerates the tsar in frankly political and even extreme terms (the “tsar-redeemer” current) remain a separate and continuing matter, treated as part of the contested memory (see Memory and Controversy).

Their Place in the Sobor

Within the category of the New Martyrs, then, the imperial passion-bearers occupy a distinct and carefully bounded place. They are venerated as members of the Sobor, but under a category — passion-bearers — that marks off their case from that of the hierarch-, priest-, and lay-martyrs who died confessing the faith as such. They are the most famous of the New Martyrs and, in the strict sense, among the least typical: where the parish priest of Butovo was shot for being a priest who would not renounce Christ, the tsar was shot for having been the tsar. The Church has honoured both, but with a precision of category that this collection preserves. For the full account of the imperial family’s lives, captivity, deaths, remains, and cult, and of the parallel Alapaevsk killings, the reader is directed to the dedicated collections (see The Royal Martyrs of Russia and St. Elizabeth and the Alapaevsk Martyrs).

References

Christensen, Karin Hyldal. The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia: Soviet Repression in Orthodox Memory. London: Routledge, 2018. (The debate over the imperial canonization; the choice of the passion-bearer category by the Moscow Patriarchate in 2000; the objections raised within the Russian Church.)
Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (The passion-bearer type of Russian sanctity; Boris and Gleb as the prototype.)
The full documentary sourcing on the Ekaterinburg killings, the captivity, and the remains is carried in the dedicated collection The Royal Martyrs of Russia.