Martyrs of Alapayevsk

The Martyrs of Alapayevsk were eight people killed by Bolshevik forces on 18 July 1918 near Alapayevsk in the Urals, in what had been the Perm Governorate of the Russian Empire. The murders took place one day after the shooting of Emperor Nicholas II and his immediate family at Yekaterinburg. The victims were Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, widow of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich and elder sister of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna; Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, a grandson of Emperor Nicholas I; Princes Ioann, Konstantin, and Igor Konstantinovich, three sons of Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich; Prince Vladimir Paley, a morganatic son of Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich; Sister Varvara (Barbara) Yakovleva, a monastic companion of the grand duchess; and Fyodor Remez, secretary to Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich. After the October Revolution they had been arrested, removed from Petrograd and Moscow, and confined under Cheka guard in the Urals as the civil war spread.

Grand Duchess Elizabeth, born Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine in the mid-nineteenth century, had after the 1905 assassination of her husband turned to religious life and charitable work and founded the Martha and Mary Convent of Mercy in Moscow. She and Sister Varvara were taken from that community and sent into exile. The Romanov princes and Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich were likewise transported east and were eventually held together with the two women in a school building at Alapayevsk. In the night of 17–18 July 1918 they were driven into the countryside, beaten, and thrown into an abandoned mine shaft some distance from the town. Explosives were used against those who had survived the fall. Later White investigations indicated that at least some of the victims lived for a time at the bottom of the shaft; Orthodox memory of the event includes reports that hymns were heard from below, often associated with Grand Duchess Elizabeth.

White Army units occupying the district in the autumn of 1918 recovered the remains from the mine. The bodies were identified as far as conditions allowed and were carried eastward as the Whites retreated during the Russian Civil War. The relics of Grand Duchess Elizabeth and Sister Varvara were taken via China to Jerusalem and interred in 1921 at the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives, where they remain. The remains of the other six were buried at the cemetery of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Beijing; their later fate after the destruction of that cemetery in the twentieth century is not securely established.

The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia glorified the Alapayevsk victims as new martyrs in 1981. The Moscow Patriarchate canonized Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna and Nun Barbara as martyrs in 1992; they are widely venerated in the Russian Orthodox Church and in other Orthodox jurisdictions. Commemoration of the Alapayevsk martyrs is kept on 18 July (5 July on the Julian calendar). Their deaths, together with those of the imperial family at Yekaterinburg, became a central episode in Orthodox memory of the New Martyrs and Confessors who suffered under Soviet rule.