Canonization of the Romanovs

The Canonization of the Romanovs is the name given to the recognition as saints, by branches of the Russian Orthodox Church, of the last Russian imperial family: Emperor Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, and their five children, Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, and Tsarevich Alexei. The family was killed with several members of their household in the cellar of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg on the night of 16–17 July 1918, during the Russian Civil War. The Bolshevik authorities and later the Soviet state long concealed or distorted the circumstances of the killings. Among Orthodox Russians in exile, private veneration of the Imperial Family as victims of an atheistic revolutionary regime developed in the following decades, together with icons and liturgical texts, even while public discussion inside the Soviet Union remained suppressed.

The first formal ecclesiastical glorification was carried out by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). On 1 November 1981 ROCOR numbered Nicholas II, his wife and children, and the servants who died with them among the new martyrs of Russia. That act expressed the émigré Church’s judgment that the family had been put to death by a regime engaged in the persecution of Christianity and that their conduct in captivity constituted a religious witness. After the end of communist rule, the Moscow Patriarchate proceeded more slowly. In the 1990s a synodal commission associated with Metropolitan Yuvenaly of Krutitsy and Kolomna examined archival evidence, the family’s religious life, and the theological question of whether they should be ranked as martyrs in the strict sense or as passion-bearers. The commission also had to take account of long-standing political controversy over Nicholas II’s reign, including social conflict and the role of Grigori Rasputin, while treating those historical disputes as distinct from the question of Christian endurance during imprisonment.

In August 2000, at the Jubilee Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Moscow Patriarchate glorified the Emperor, the Empress, and their five children as passion-bearers. The council met in mid-August; a public rite of glorification was celebrated on 20 August 2000 in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, with Patriarch Alexy II taking part. In Russian Orthodox usage, passion-bearers are those who, like the eleventh-century princes Boris and Gleb, accepted violent death with patience and without resistance, imitating Christ in suffering rather than dying solely for a spoken confession of faith under direct religious interrogation. The same council glorified a large number of other new martyrs and confessors of the twentieth-century persecutions. ROCOR had already commemorated the Imperial Family as martyrs; after the 2007 restoration of communion between ROCOR and the Moscow Patriarchate, both jurisdictions kept the memory of the Royal Passion-Bearers, even where the precise title (martyr or passion-bearer) remained a matter of historical and pastoral nuance.

Remains found near Yekaterinburg in the late twentieth century, and further remains later identified as Alexei and one of the daughters, were the subject of state forensic investigation and of a separate, cautious church attitude toward relics. A state burial of the remains then identified as Nicholas, Alexandra, and three daughters took place in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg in 1998. The Moscow Patriarchate did not at that time treat the ceremony as a final liturgical authentication of the relics. Memorial churches were built at the killing site, above all the Church on Blood in Yekaterinburg, which became a major pilgrimage centre. The household members killed with the family—physician Yevgeny Botkin, maid Anna Demidova, footman Alexei Trupp, and cook Ivan Kharitonov—were glorified by ROCOR in 1981; in the Moscow Patriarchate their memory has generally been associated with the wider synaxis of new martyrs rather than always with the same formula used for the Imperial Family itself.

The feast of the Royal Passion-Bearers is observed on 17 July, the civil-calendar anniversary of the killings. Veneration includes icons of the family, liturgical services, and pilgrimages to Yekaterinburg and related sites. Historians and some church members have continued to debate Nicholas II’s political record, whether the murders were primarily political executions, and the place of the imperial cult in contemporary Russian religious life. The official acts of 1981 and 2000 rest on accounts of the family’s prayerfulness in confinement, reports of their refusal to curse their captors, and the location of their deaths within the larger persecution of Orthodox Christians after 1917. The canonization is therefore both a memorial of one household and, for many believers, a symbol of the suffering of the Russian Church in the twentieth century.