Lilya Subbotina suffers from high blood pressure and painful headaches. Doctors haven’t been able to help, so now she’s pinning her hopes for a cure on Russia’s last czar.
And she isn’t alone.
Three-quarters of a century after Nicholas II and his family were executed by Bolsheviks in this Ural Mountain city, people are flocking to the site of the killings, drawn by reports of miraculous cures.
“They say this is a holy place,” said Subbotina, a 52-year-old elementary school teacher, as she knelt before the large, white, wooden cross that marks the spot where the hapless royal family was shot and stabbed to death.
“I heard about people who came here with sickness and went away completely healed. I’m hoping that happens to me too.”
All day long, people walk reverently up to the cross, just off a busy street, then briefly press one hand against it, the posture that is said to activate its healing powers. Many visitors leave flowers.
“When you touch the cross, you feel an explosion of positive energy,” said Vladimir Moskvin of Vladivostok, who traveled more than 3,000 miles seeking to halt a progressive weakness in his legs.
“After three days at this sacred place, my legs are strong again,” Moskvin, 59, insisted, reinforcing the assertion with a series of graceful deep knee bends. “God blessed this cross because our czar was murdered here.”
The legend growing up around the cross, which was erected last fall, is just one sign of the deep fascination here with the most famous event in the city’s history-after decades in which communist officials discouraged any interest in the three harrowing months when the czar was held prisoner in Yekaterinburg.
A drive is under way to build an imposing cathedral in an empty field near the execution site, where a second cross and a small wooden chapel have already been constructed. An exhibition on the last of the Romanov rulers has opened in the city’s historical museum.
And local officials are hoping that the bones of the royal family-believed to have been discovered under railroad ties in a deep pit outside of town and now kept under lock and key in the city morgue-will someday be the centerpiece of a lavish monument that could attract foreign tourists.
“Today we take pride in the fact that the czar was killed in our city, and we hope something good will come of this tragedy,” said Oleg Kazakov, a college student.
Visiting the cross, upon which pictures of the czar and his family have been tacked, is also becoming a tradition among local newlyweds, who believe it might make their marriages happier.
“It started a few months ago,” said Igor Soluyanov, who recently came to the site with his bride, Lyudmila, after they exchanged vows at the municipal wedding palace.
“Newlyweds want to have their pictures taken in front of the cross,” said Soluyanov, a 25-year-old gold miner. “We hope for good luck, but we also come because it makes us feel more Russian. It’s all part of the revival of real Russia that is taking place today.”
A visit from the princess
Interest in the czar and his unhappy fate got a big boost when the woman generally recognized as the legitimate claimant to the throne, Grand Princess Maria Vladimirovna, took part in a memorial ceremony at the cross July 17, the 75th anniversary of Nicholas’ death.
Vladimirovna, granddaughter of one of the last czar’s cousins, came to Yekaterinburg with her 12-year-old son as part of an extensive tour of Russia that began in the spring.
It was about the time of the grand princess’ visit that reports of the cross’ healing power began, people say. Local newspapers and TV stations have interviewed people who say they were helped.
Nicholas, who abdicated in 1917, his wife, Alexandra, and their four daughters and hemophiliac son were brought to the city from Siberia in April 1918. The Russian civil war was raging at the time, and royalist forces had overrun the area around Tobolsk, where the family had previously been held prisoner.
Bolshevik leaders, determined to keep the deposed royals from being rescued and used as a rallying cause by their supporters, brought them to Yekaterinburg and installed them in a former merchant’s house. The Bolsheviks believed it would be easier to maintain custody of the Romanovs in Yekaterinburg because revolutionary sentiment was running high among the city’s coal and iron miners.
But the war continued to go badly for the Bolsheviks, and, by the middle of July, anti-communist forces were preparing to occupy the city. In the early hours of July 17, the members of the royal family-along with their doctor and three servants-were taken to the basement of the merchant’s house and brutally killed.
Jewels couldn’t save them
According to accounts provided by some of the executioners, Nicholas and his son were killed immediately by gunfire. But bullets bounced off the females because the lining of their clothing was stuffed with jewels they had secretly carried into captivity. The executioners finished them off with knives and bayonets.
It remains unclear who ordered the executions-officials in Moscow or in Yekaterinburg. Some historians argue that Lenin personally ordered the killings. Others say the decision was made by Yakov Sverdlov, the Bolshevik commander in the area for whom the city was soon renamed, to Sverdlovsk.
(Two years ago, as communism and the Soviet Union were collapsing, the name Yekaterinburg was reinstated. The city, when founded in 1723, was named in honor of Peter the Great’s second wife, who later succeeded him as Empress Yekaterina I.)
The two-story house where the Romanovs died remained standing for almost 50 years. Journalist Natalia Zyenova remembers being taken there on a class trip in the 1950s.
“They took us down in the basement and showed us the bullet holes in the walls,” she said. “They told us this was part of our revolutionary glory. This was where the bloody czar and his bloody family were killed.”
The house was destroyed in 1976 when current Russian President Boris Yeltsin was the Communist Party boss in the area. In his autobiography, “Against the Grain,” Yeltsin wrote that the decision had been made by top officials in Moscow.
“Our local authorities had been annoyed for a long time because flowers and old Russian flags would appear outside the house or at the nearby Voznesenski Church each anniversary of the killings,” said Tamara Belova, a research fellow at the historical museum.
“When we heard the building was going to be destroyed, we were outraged. People from the historical society and the museum picketed, but to no avail. The authorities said the house was of no historic value.”
For a few nights before the building was blown up, Belova said, the protesters secretly removed several items from the house and drew a floor plan so it could be reconstructed some day.
But despite the new interest in the czar’s past, there are no plans to rebuild the house, Belova said.
`Finally learning the truth’
Bones believed to be those of the Romanovs were unearthed in 1989 about 10 miles outside of town. Remarkable similarities between the DNA of one of the female victims and that of Prince Philip of England, a distant relative of the czarina’s, led scientists to conclude that the bones could indeed be those of Alexandra.
And a sample of Nicholas’ blood preserved in Japan for more than a century could help authenticate the czar’s remains.
While visiting Japan as crown prince in 1891, Nicholas was struck in the head with a sword by a would-be assassin. The saber and a handkerchief used to stanch the blood have been kept since then in a museum in Japan.
“It’s good we’re finally learning the truth about these things,” Alexander Polukhin said one recent evening while visiting the czar’s cross with his 4-year-old son, Maxim. “The killing of the czar was a great tragedy for our country, and we should know all the details.”
As a teenager, the 27-year-old computer assembler said, he passed by the execution site several times a week en route to the youth center across the street.
“I had no idea what happened here,” he said. “I only learned the truth a few years ago. Now I bring my son here and tell him about our history.”
As he spoke, a woman and her three young children were pressing their palms against the cross. Several other people were walking up to join them. It would go on like that until the dwindling sun finally slipped out of sight.
