The accession to the Russian throne of the Romanov family was accompanied by evil and mystical events. Death by Godunov's hand of almost all the relatives of the future tsar, after - the curse of Marina Mnishek, who died in captivity, whose three-year-old son was hanged in the first years of Mikhail's reign. Archpriest Avvakum, who cursed the son of Mikhail Romanov, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich the Quiet, before his execution. The beginning of a series of bloody destinies was laid. After that there were Peter I, who was popularly called "the devil", and Paul I, who had a presentiment of his murder. The mysterious death of Alexander I and the appearance of the elder Fyodor Kuzmich. Grigory Rasputin. And the finale of the House of Romanov, striking in its symbolism: after 23 years of reign, Nicholas II, the last representative of the dynasty that ascended the throne from the cell of the Ipatiev Monastery, was killed with his whole family in the Ipatiev house. Shot in the basementwhere exactly 23 steps led.
The Polish aristocrat and adventurer Marina Mniszek has become a truly sinister figure of the Time of Troubles. Many contemporaries considered her a real witch who, using charms, helped her chosen ones in the seizure of the Moscow throne. She was in turn the wife of two False Dmitriy. Who, however, were killed, despite all her sorcery abilities.
The curse of Marina Mnishek
At the end of 1610, a few days after the death of "Tushino thief" - False Dmitry II, Marina Mnishek had a son, Ivan. The compiled horoscope of his birth turned out to be terrible and promised trouble for the child. However, the mother again found herself a patron who could help her seize the Muscovy. In 1613, in Astrakhan, the dashing ataman of the Volga Cossacks, Ivan Zarutsky, proclaimed two-year-old Ivan the new tsar. But Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich, who came to power, the first of the Romanov dynasty, could not put up with the son of an impostor.
The Cossacks gave the ex-queen Mnishek and the ataman Zarutsky to the house of the Romanovs.
The ataman was immediately impaled in Moscow, but Marina Mnishek could not be afraid of meeting the executioner. Formally, thanks to her marriage to False Dmitry I, she was crowned Tsarina of Russia, and according to the law it was impossible to execute her. Even the Moscow tsar could not ignore this.
However, the boyars, young Ivashka-Vorenko, were sentenced to death. They were afraid to tell Marina Mnishek, who was in the same cell with her son. Perhaps they feared her witchcraft. Marina Mnishek was assured that Tsar Mikhail would not offend her son, and the executioner took Ivan to Execution Ground. The boy was hanged, presumably on October 4, 1614.
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Having learned about the execution of her son and the false promise, the unhappy mother cursed the entire Romanov family. Marina Mnishek said that none of them would die a natural death, and that crimes in their families would not stop until the dynasty died. But she herself was the first to die. She died of illness and longing for her executed son, as the Kremlin assured.
There were rumors that Marina herself smashed her head against the wall in the cell. It is also possible that the jailers killed her.
Poor Pavel
Contemporaries and descendants noted the mysticism of Paul I. And indeed, in his life there was something fatal, inexplicable, involuntarily suggestive of interference in the fate of the emperor of some otherworldly forces.
The 18th century was the age of the mystics. People of that time believed in ghosts, fortune-tellers and fortunetellers. Charlatans like Count Cagliostro were welcomed in high society salons. Well, gothic novels, published in large numbers in the second half of the 18th century, were the favorite reading material of Europeans.
And it is not at all surprising that the young Tsarevich Pavel Petrovich believed in everything supernatural. To a large extent, his inner world was influenced by the tragic fate of his father, Emperor Peter III, who was dethroned by his mother and killed in Ropsha. The passions in Paul's family were truly Shakespearean, his contemporaries called him "Russian Hamlet", and during the reign of Paul I the staging of this Shakespearean drama was prohibited.
One of the brightest mystical episodes associated with Pavel Petrovich is his meeting with the ghost of Emperor Peter the Great. And it became known about her from the words of the great Russian commander - Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov.
On the eve of the death of Empress Catherine II, Paul had a dream - some unknown force grabbed him and dragged him up. Waking up in the morning, he told his wife about this dream, and soon the courier on a lathered horse brings the tsarevich the news - his mother is dying, and the tsarevich is about to become emperor.
Having ascended the throne, Paul decided to change his place of residence. He did not like the Winter Palace, the residence of the Russian autocrats. Everything here reminded Paul of his mother and her arrogant favorites, who did not reckon with the Tsarevich and in every possible way treated him. He decided to build a castle-palace, impregnable for enemies. He chose the place for the construction on the banks of the Fontanka, where the wooden Summer Palace of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna once stood. It was in this palace that the then Grand Duchess Ekaterina Alekseevna gave birth to Paul. “I want to die where I was born,” said Paul I. This is exactly what happened.
The castle-palace was named Mikhailovsky, in honor of the Archangel Michael - the leader of the heavenly army. Its construction was also associated with various mystical incidents. For example, it was said that when the construction was already in full swing, an old monk met with Paul, who said that the emperor's wife would soon give birth to a son, who should be called Michael. “And memorize my words, - said the monk, -“YOUR HOUSE WILL LIKE THE HOLY OF THE LORD FOR A LONG DAYS”.
Pavel, amazed at the prediction of a strange monk, ordered the architect Brenna to reinforce on the pediment of the main facade of the castle-palace the text that the monk had dictated to him.
By the way, one more prediction is connected with this text. On the eve of Christmas in 1800, the famous holy fool from the Smolensk cemetery, Xenia of Petersburg, predicted that Emperor Paul I would live for as many years as there are letters in the dictum on the main facade of the new royal residence. There were 47 letters. Pavel, who was born in 1754, was supposed to be 47 years old in 1801.
However, Paul himself already knew about the time and place of his death. At one time, he talked with a certain monk Abel, who had already predicted the date of the death of Empress Catherine II. For this he was sent to prison. But after the death of the empress, which happened on the day predicted by Abel, he was released. Paul had a long conversation with the fortuneteller. He told the emperor the date of his violent death, and the place - the royal bedroom. Abel even knew that his relatives would also take part in the conspiracy against the autocrat.
The so-called "Ostankino old woman" predicted the same to Paul. In Ostankino, where the estate of the Sheremetevs was located, according to legend, lived a gloomy old beggar woman. She appeared from nowhere and predicted various misfortunes for people. In 1797, Pavel arrived in Moscow for his coronation. He visited the Sheremetevs' estate, and there he unexpectedly ran into the same old woman. The count's servants wanted to remove the beggar, but the emperor opposed this and talked with her for a long time. Then he said: "Now I know when I will be killed …"
The new royal palace was being built in a terrible hurry. Dampness reigned inside it, streams of water flowed down the walls painted with red paint. “It’s like blood is flowing,” Paul said more than once, watching the intricate stains on the walls of the castle.
The mirrors in the halls were foggy, and the images in them were distorted. “Look,” Paul once said, “what a strange mirror. In it I see myself as if with a neck rolled on the side. And on the eve of the murder, Pavel had a dream that a tight shirt was being put on him, which prevented him from breathing.
As you know, Paul I was strangled by his killers …
Rasputin knew everything …
To paraphrase a well-known expression, we can say that if Rasputin was not there, he should have been invented. It is difficult to imagine a more “necessary” figure at court than a “holy elder”. He was expected like the second coming. And they waited: a semi-literate man with a tattered beard and a burning gaze literally materialized from the Siberian haze, from the foggy flashes of the mystically endless Russian expanses, inhabited by hermits, wanderers and demoniac holy fools.
Rasputin can, of course, be considered a swindler and a pretender, but he was amazingly accurate in guessing many events that had not yet happened.
Here is what he wrote long before the terrible tragedy of the royal family: “Every time I embrace the tsar and mother, and the girls, and the tsarevich, I shudder with horror, as if I embrace the dead … And then I pray for these people, for in Russia they most in need. And I pray for the Romanov family, because the shadow of a long eclipse falls on them."
The entire royal entourage certainly knew about the elder's prophecies. And he shared some of them both with Alexandra Feodorovna and with the tsar. Once the elder wrote to the sovereign the following: “Tsar of the Russian land, when you hear the ringing of bells informing you of the death of Gregory, then know: if the murder was committed by your relatives, then none of your family, that is, children and relatives will not live longer than two years. They will be killed …"
Julia von Den, the closest friend of Alexandra Feodorovna, recalled that Elder Grigory once said about the Romanovs: "Willingly or unwillingly, they will come to Tobolsk and, before they die, they will see my native village."
What was it? An accidental hit on the target or the highest knowledge bestowed on a Siberian wanderer?
Later, on the way to Tobolsk, the tsarina wrote a letter to Vyrubova, which said: “We are not told where we are going … and for how long, but we think this is where you recently went / Rasputin's homeland, p. Pokrovskoe /. Saint / St. John of Tobolsk / calls us there and our Friend / Elder Gregory, by that time martyred /. No wonder we're right here."
Rasputin's predictions were the tracks along which the train called "The Death of the Tsar's Family" rushed. And there was no one in Russia who could change this movement.
Last few days…
In October 1888, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich and his wife were present at the consecration of the Orthodox Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Jerusalem, at the foot of the Mount of Olives. Overcome with delight from the contact with the biblical story, Elizaveta Fedorovna uttered the prophetic words: "How I would like to be buried here!"
In 1905, the Social Revolutionaries decided to liquidate the former Moscow governor-general - Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, the fifth son of Alexander II. The execution of the sentence Azef and Savinkov was assigned to Ivan Kalyaev.
On February 4, 1905, the body of the Grand Duke was torn to pieces, which were scattered by an explosion on the cobblestones of the Kremlin.
When the princess was informed of the death of her husband, she ran to the scene of the tragedy and, despite the persuasion of the assembled crowd, wept bitterly on the bloody pavement.
After the death of her husband, Elizaveta Fedorovna retired from secular life and devoted herself entirely to charity and service to God. With her jewels, she acquired an estate on Bolshaya Ordynka in Moscow, built there the Church of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos according to the project of the academician of architecture Alexei Shchusev and organized the Martha-Mariinsky Convent of Mercy, becoming its abbess. The painting of the church was carried out by the famous artist Mikhail Nesterov.
The Grand Duchess lived here as an ascetic of the faith of Christ: she strictly observed the fasts and performed all the prayers prescribed by the Orthodox Church; bare boards served as a bed; secretly from her sisters, under her clothes she even wore chains - iron chains on her naked body.
- Like the elders in monasteries and hermitages, the gift of foresight came to Elizaveta Fedorovna. Foreseeing the future, she tried, if not to save the country from disaster, then at least to distance it, opening the eyes of the king and queen to the true state of affairs in the country. In vain. In 1916, she made such an attempt for the last time. Nicholas II did not accept her, and Alexandra Feodorovna did not want to listen.
And then the elder sister said to the younger sister:
- Remember the fate of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
This French royal couple ended their lives on the guillotine in 1793.
The Chekists arrested Elizaveta Fedorovna on May 7, 1918 and sent her to the Urals: first to Perm, then to Yekaterinburg, and finally to Alapaevsk. The nun of the Martha-Mariinsky monastery, Varvara Yakovleva, refused to leave her.
On the night of July 18, a day after the execution of the royal family in Yekaterinburg, the abbess was thrown alive into a mine near Alapaevsk. Together with her, the nun Varvara and several representatives of the Romanov family were martyred. Before her death, the Grand Duchess baptized the executioners and repeated the words of Christ: "Forgive them, Lord, for they do not know what they are doing."
Alexey LYKOV