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A Shrine to the Czar of the Pogroms
Frank Brown Yekaterinburg
 (Frank Brown) |
Yekaterinburg, an industrial city of 1.4 million people set in the Ural Mountains, is hardly a leading destination for Russian tourists. Yet it does have one attraction with a draw like no other: the black cross marking the site where the last Russian czar and his family were shot dead 82 years ago this summer.
Visiting mid-level apparatchiks bound out of black Volga sedans for a couple of quick snaps next to the marble cross. Young couples with point-and-shoot cameras get off at a nearby trolley bus stop and make their way to the scraggly lot with the cross and a small wooden chapel.
After the planned mid-August canonization of Nicholas II and his family by a bishops� council of the Russian Orthodox Church, casual tourists may well be outnumbered by religious pilgrims coming two time zones east of Moscow to visit what is already known as �Russia�s Golgotha.�
They will be paying homage to an emperor whose reign included anti-Jewish pogroms, who took the Protocols of the Elders of Zion at face value until told that the notorious forgery was the work of his own secret police, and who used the hate term �zhid� when referring to Jews in letters to his mother. And they will find that the primitive anti-Semitism that stained his regime did not die with the royal family in Yekaterinburg.
For now, most of the hundreds of daily visitors stay no longer than it takes to document their presence on film. But for anyone with a deeper interest in the �significance� of the Bolshevik execution of the seven Romanovs one night in July of 1918, a small knot of men bearing leaflets and selling souvenirs are ready to help.
Most of them are monarchists. All of them blame Jews for the �ritual murder� of the Romanovs. All of them describe themselves as members of the Russian Orthodox Church which, with the local government, has plans to build a $12-million church complex on the site.
�For us monarchists, this is a holy place. In the Urals, this is like a magnet for us,� says Vadim Ignatiev, 45, a bearded unemployed construction worker who is deputy chairman of the local Committee of Russian-Serbian Friendship, an ultra-nationalist group which invokes Orthodox solidarity with the Serbs. Listen long enough to Ignatiev and you�ll hear about hasidic Jews� �plans� to build a synagogue on a nearby cemetery and, so they tell you, to use the synagogue basement for drinking Christian blood and eating children �like shish kebab.�
When he is not caring for his ailing mother, Ignatiev says he comes here daily, to post notices about upcoming demonstrations sponsored by the Committee of Russian-Serbian Friendship, to chat up potential recruits among the visitors and to hang out with a half dozen friends from Cossack, monarchist and neo-fascist groups. They gather in the green construction trailer that overlooks the site where archaeologists are sifting through the remains of the house in which the Romanovs were killed.
Alexander, 37, is a regular, too. An earnest man in a rumpled suit jacket who declines to give his last name, Alexander has tremendous faith in Nicholas II�s canonization. �As soon as they canonize the czar, everything will change, in a spiritual way and, God willing, in a government way, too,� says Alexander, a monarchist who makes a living selling small metal trays with the Romanovs� portrait for 50 rubles ($1.80) each.
Alexander grows indignant at the suggestion that Nicholas II�s bloody reign from 1894 to 1917 makes him unworthy of sainthood. Rather than debate details, Alexander denies wholesale, for example, the deadly pogroms between 1903 and 1906, or the czarist secret police�s publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, detailing an alleged Jewish plot to dominate the world.
The men who gather here daily are by no means representatives of mainstream thought within the 80 million-member Russian Orthodox Church, whose hierarchy is quick to condemn anti-Semitic vio-lence like synagogue bombings and last year�s stabbing of a Jewish leader. But the Yekaterinburg monarchists function as de facto tour guides and the local Bishop Vikenty, who has jurisdiction over the property, tolerates the posting of their anti-Semitic placards.
On an official level, the Russian Orthodox church commission charged with considering the worthiness of Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra and their five children is recommending that they be canonized not for the lives they led, nor as martyrs for the faith, but simply for the humility with which they met death. Thus, there is no need to deal with less-than-saintly aspects of the last czar, including his anti-Semitism, about which there is little question. �He personally hated Jews,� says Alexander Lakshin, a Jewish historian in Moscow who special-izes in turn-of-the-century Russian history. �By upbringing and by thought he was an anti-Semite.�
Despite the Russian Orthodox church�s dodge of the czar�s behavior toward Jews, the canonization issue is still beset with the �Jewish question,� as it is known in Russian. In 1997, the church�s ruling holy synod demanded that a top-level government commission investigate whether the Romanovs� execution was part of a Jewish ritual. Allegations to that effect were fueled in popular Russian imagination by the fact that top Bolsheviks like Trotsky were Jews, as was Yakov Sverdlov, the regional party chief in Yekaterinburg, and at least one of the killers, Yakov Yurovsky. Unsubstantiated tales also spread of kabbalistic signs found in the basement where the Romanovs were killed, as well as an excerpt from a work by the German Jewish-born poet, Heinrich Heine.
The commission duly looked into the matter and concluded in 1998 that because the executioners were mostly ethnic Russians and Latvians with only one Jew, the killings could not have been connected to any kabbalistic ritual. Nonetheless, the myth lives on. According to Alexander Verkhovksy, a Moscow scholar of Russian nationalism and the church: �For most of the supporters of the canonization, there is a Jewish motif. They see the czarist family as having been martyred by Jews, just as some of the very first Christian saints were.�
In Yekaterinburg, Father Vladimir Zyazev, 54, the man in charge of building the Orthodox memorial complex on the site of the Romanovs� execution, agrees, �I can say that many people, Russian Orthodox people, figure it that way � that it was a ritual murder.� Zyazev himself has no opinion on the issue, explaining, �I can�t say whether it was a ritual murder or not. I know very little about ritual murders and the rituals of other faiths generally.�
The danger, says Moscow�s chief rabbi, Pinchas Goldschmidt, is that the hierarchy�s hairsplitting will be lost on most believers. �We are afraid that a simple person who goes to a parish church in Siberia will not understand,� he says. �People may say that if a person was a saint then he can do nothing wrong, so if he was persecuting Jews then he must have been right to do that.�
Jewish World
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