Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fedorovna in 1887, aged 23, three years after she married the Grand Duke, Sergei in 1884. She was born in Germany, but after her mother Alice, daughter of Queen Victoria, died in 1878, Elizabeth, her brother and her sisters spent their holidays in England; and English, rather than German, was Elizabeth’s first language.
Part 1 of 2
AFTER Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich was assassinated by Marxist revolutionary Ivan Kalyayev on 18th February 1905, his widow Elizabeth, a grand-daughter of Queen Victoria and the Tsar’s sister-in-law, went to see Kalyayev in jail.
Elizabeth understood only too well the grievances of Russia’s people. Her husband had once expelled twenty thousand Jews from the capital, and Elizabeth had warned him that such actions could only bring grief to their country, and to themselves.
But she understood, too, the futility of violence. She hoped that if Kalyayev would renounce it, her brother-in-law, the Tsar, might be persuaded to pardon him, and break the cycle. But Kalyayev was defiant.
Widowed and childless, Elizabeth now sold her possessions to found a convent and become a nun, nursing the sick and assisting the poor in Moscow’s slums.
But in 1917, the violence broke out again. Kalyayev’s Marxist confederates overthrew Tsar Nicholas, and took him, his wife Alix, who was Elizabeth’s younger sister, and their five children prisoner.
Précis
Elizabeth, a grand-daughter of Queen Victoria, was the wife of the Tsar’s uncle Sergei, the Governor of Moscow. After Sergei was assassinated, Elizabeth tried unsuccessfully to get his murderer to renounce violence in the hope of a pardon. She dedicated the rest of her life to Moscow’s sick and poor, as a nun in a convent of her own foundation. (60 / 60 words)
Part Two
The Church of the Protection of the Mother of God, at the Convent of Saint Mary and Saint Martha in Moscow. It was founded by the Grand Duchess after the death of her husband, using her fortune, and finished in 1912. There was a hospital, an orphanage for girls, and quarters for nearly a hundred nuns, who served 300 meals daily to the poor.
ON July 17th, 1918, Elizabeth’s younger sister, Alix, was murdered with her husband Tsar Nicholas II and their five children by the Cheka, Vladimir Lenin’s secret police.
A month earlier, on Lenin’s orders they had also arrested Elizabeth, together with other Russian nobility and the nun Barbara, who had once been her maid.
The Red Army took them to a school on the outskirts of Alapayevsk. On July 5th, the soldiers were dismissed, and the Cheka drove their prisoners in a cart to an abandoned iron mine.
There Elizabeth, Barbara and the others were beaten, and tossed down a 66-foot deep shaft to break their necks.
However, most survived the fall. Elizabeth tended their wounds, and soon the sound of hymns floated up the shaft. Lenin’s men dropped in grenades, but the singing continued, so after more grenades they threw down burning brushwood, and left any survivors to choke or starve.
Lenin announced that ‘an unidentified mob’ had been responsible.
Précis
Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, Elizabeth was arrested. Lenin ordered his secret police to execute Elizabeth and other Russian nobility by dropping them into an abandoned mineshaft, to die of their wounds and of starvation. Two weeks later, Elizabeth’s sister Alix and her husband, the Tsar, were also assassinated. (49 / 60 words)
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