THE FUTURE HAPPENED HERE

Russian Orthodox basilica dedicated on site of Tsar's death (CWNews.com, 7/18/03)

A new Orthodox basilica has been consecrated in Yekaterinburg, on the site where, 85 years ago, on July 17, 1918, the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, together with his wife, son, four daughters and four servants who had been allowed to remain with them, were shot by the Bolsheviks.

The consecration ceremonies began on the morning of July 16 and continued through the day, culminating in a midnight procession to the site where the Bolsheviks tried to destroy the bodies so that- in their own words-- "no one would ever know what happened." (Their efforts were unsuccessful; the remains of the imperial family and their servants were located in 1991, verified by DNA matching, and eventually re-interred in St. Petersburg).

The new Yekaterinburg church, to be called the Basilica of the Blood in the name of All the Saints of Russia, stands on the site of the "Ipatyev house" where the imperial family was confined and eventually
shot. The house itself was destroyed on the orders of Boris Yeltsin, during his term as Communist Party boss there: a decision which, as Russia s first post-Communist president, he came to regret. However, stones from the foundations of the Ipatyev house have been built into the basilica, and a special side-chapel replicates the cellar where the shooting took place.

Some crimes you just can't bury deep enough:

Liberal minds flocked to the USSR in an unending procession, from the great ones like Shaw and Gide and Barbusse and Julian Huxley and Harold Laski and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, down to poor little teachers, crazed clergymen and millionaires, drivelling dons, all utterly convinced that, under the aegis of the great Stalin, a new dawn is breaking in the world, so that the human race may at last be united in liberty, equality and fraternity forevermore . . . These Liberal minds are prepared to believe anything, however preposterous, to overlook anything, however villainous, to approve anything, however obscurantist and brutally authoritarian, in order to be able to preserve intact the confident expectation that one of the most thoroughgoing, ruthless and bloody tyrannies ever to exist on earth can be relied on to champion human freedom, the brotherhood of man, and all the other good Liberal causes to which they had dedicated their lives . . . They are unquestionably one of the marvels of the age . . . all chanting the praises of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and of Stalin as its most gracious and beloved figurehead. It was as though a Salvation Army contingent had turned out with bands and banners in honour of some ferocious tribal deity, or as though a vegetarian society had issued a passionate plea for cannibalism.
-Malcolm Muggeridge (Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim)

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 19, 2003 2:32 PM