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Modern Theologians

St Elizabeth of Russia

Which of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren became a saint? The answer is Elizabeth of Hesse-Darmstadt, who was born in 1864 and who died at the hands of a Communist death squad in July 1918, at roughly the same time as her younger sister, Tsaritsa Alexandra, and her brother-in-law, Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia. Elizabeth has been in my thoughts this Lent because I have been directing a production of the play Just Terrorists (Les Justes) by Albert Camus in which she is an important character.

Elizabeth was married at the age of twenty to the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, the fifth son of Tsar Alexander II, who had been assassinated by terrorists in 1881. Sergei put no pressure on Elizabeth, who had been brought up as a Lutheran, to convert to Orthodoxy, and it was not until 1891 that she was received into the Russian Orthodox Church. For the next fourteen years she lived a life of conventional piety and charitable works. The couple remained childless and Sergei became Governor-General of Moscow. Then, in February 1905, he was assassinated in the Moscow Kremlin. A Socialist Revolutionary terrorist, Ivan Kaliayev, threw a bomb at his carriage. Elizabeth rushed to the scene, a few yards from the Nicholas Palace where she was living, and helped to gather up the remains of her husband.

Two days later she visited Kaliayev in prison, gave him a copy of the Bible and an icon, assured him of her forgiveness and begged him to repent. When he refused, the Grand Duchess petitioned the Tsar to pardon him. Kaliayev rejected the pardon and was hanged. The death of her husband proved to be a turning point in Elizabeth’s life. She divested herself of her considerable wealth, including a lavish collection of jewellery and used the money to found a religious community in Moscow dedicated to St. Martha and St. Mary and living a mixed life of contemplative prayer and social action and running a hospital, an out patient’s clinic, a pharmacy and an orphanage for the city’s poor. In 1910 she became abbess of the community, and told her sisters: "I am about to ascend into a much greater world, the world of the poor and the afflicted." From their base in the convent Elizabeth and her sisters worked in the Hitrovka, the worst of Moscow’s slums. Someone once asked her how she was able to deal with the brutality and violence that were endemic in the Hitrovka. "God’s image may get blurred", she replied, "but it is never obliterated."

When the Bolshevik Revolution came it was clear that Elizabeth’s life was in danger, but she refused all offers to help her escape. She was arrested during the Easter festival of 1918 and was taken to Alapaevsk in Siberia, close to where the former Tsar and Tsaritsa were being held in captivity. From there she was taken, on the night of 17-18 July, out into the countryside and, together with one of the sisters from the convent and several members of the Imperial family, was thrown down a mine shaft. The fall did not kill all of them, and neither did the grenades which the executioners dropped down the shaft. For many hours, before she died of thirst, hunger and her injuries, Elizabeth could be heard singing psalms and hymns. When anti-Communist forces retrieved the bodies from the mine a few weeks later they discovered that she had used her veil to bind up the wounds of one of her fellow victims. Her body was taken to Jerusalem, where it was buried in the Russian Orthodox Church of St. Mary Magdalene. Elizabeth was canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad in 1981, and by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1992. She is one of the 20th century martyrs commemorated by statues on the west front of Westminster Abbey.

David Warnes