The Best American Magazine Writing 2018 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

Of those few individuals who can place Yekaterinburg on a map, even fewer know that it has a population of 1.4 million. When the missionary sitting next to me on the plane asked why I was going there, I told her, “To visit family.” My son, Thomas, lives in that city because of his girlfriend, Olesya Elfimova, who grew up there. The two met at Vassar College when he was studying Russian and she was taking time from her studies at Moscow University to be a language instructor. After graduating he moved with her to Yekaterinburg and taught English. Now they both work for a Swiss computer company that’s based there, and he also writes fiction and articles.

I had stopped in Yekaterinburg during my Siberian travels in 2001; one of my goals then had been to find the house where the Romanovs were murdered. After some searching I located the address. But the house, known as the Ipatiev Mansion, had been torn down in 1977. I could not evoke much from what remained—it was just an empty half-acre lot of bulldozed dirt and gravel.

On this trip, Olesya’s father, Alexei, a slim, athletic building contractor twenty years my junior who drives a Mercedes SUV, brought me to the site. I had forgotten it’s in the center of the city. Now when I got out of the car, I was stunned. An Orthodox church perhaps fifteen stories high, topped with five golden domes, occupies the same piece of ground. It’s called Khram na Krovi, the Church on the Blood. The cathedral venerates Nicholas and his wife and five children, who are now saints of the Orthodox Church. Above the main entryway a giant statue of Nicholas strides into the future, with his son in his arms and his wife and their daughters behind him. Inside, depictions of other saints cover the walls all the way to the distant top, where a portrait of a dark-browed, angry Jesus stares down.

Viewed from a distance, the church provides a strong addition to the city’s skyline, a radiance in white and gold. The name of the street that the church is on—Karl Liebknecht Street—has not been changed since Soviet times. Liebknecht, a leader of the German Social-Democratic Labor Party, was killed by right-wing militia after participating in a communist uprising in Berlin in 1919. Thus history makes its juxtapositions: a church in memory of sanctified royal martyrs gilds a street named for a martyr of international communism.

Because I wanted to see other local sites associated with the Romanov murders—the place where the bodies were doused with acid and burned and the swampy lane where they were buried—Alexei obligingly brought me to them, overlooking the gloominess and even creepiness of my quest. The first place, known as Ganyna Yama, is now a monastery and complex of churches and pathways in a forest outside the city. The tall firs and birches stood distinct and quiet, and deep snow overhung the church roofs. A granite marker quoted a biblical

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