THE ABDICATION OF TSAR-MARTYR NICHOLAS

THE ABDICATION OF TSAR-MARTYR NICHOLAS

The abdication of Tsar Nicholas II on March 2, 1917 (old style) was the single most important event in modern history, whose consequences are still reverberating to the present day. And yet it remains in many ways shrouded in mystery. For there is no consensus on several critical questions raised by it, such as: Did the Tsar in fact abdicate? Did he have the right to abdicate? Was he right to abdicate?

In the months leading up to the abdication, the Tsar was put under increasing pressure by the political and military leaders of Russia. They were convinced that his abdication in favour of a government “responsible to the people”, i.e. a constitutional monarchy or parliamentary democracy, would bring peace and prosperity to the country. But Nicholas, with his deeper knowledge of God’s ways and his country’s needs, was doubtful, repeatedly asking: "Are you confident that my abdication will save Russia from bloodshed?"

They reassured him that it would. But the Tsar knew the quality of the men who were advising him. As he sadly wrote in his diary on the day of his abdication: "All around me I see cowardice, baseness and treason."

And again, on the same day, while holding a bundle of telegrams from the Corps of Generals and even from his own uncle, he said: "What is left for me to do when everyone has betrayed me?"

And indeed, there was very little he could do. He could probably continue to defy the will of the social and political elite, as he had done more than once in the past. But could he defy the will of his generals? Perhaps he could count on the support of some military units. But the result would undoubtedly be a civil war, whose outcome was doubtful, but whose effect on the war with Germany could not be doubted: it would undoubtedly give the Germans a decisive advantage at a critical moment when Russia was just preparing for a spring offensive.

It was probably this last factor that was decisive in the Tsar’s decision: he could not contemplate undermining the war effort for any, even the most plausible reason. For the first duty of an Orthodox Tsar after the defence of the Orthodox faith is the defence of the country against external enemies; and if his continuing in power was likely to undermine that defence, then it would be undermining the very purpose of his service as Tsar. And so, after an entire night spent in prayer, he laid aside the crown for what he felt was the good of his country. For, as he wrote: "I am ready to give up both throne and life if I should become a hindrance to the happiness of the homeland." And again: "There is no sacrifice that I would not make for the real benefit of Russia and for her salvation."

What has been called “the Abdication Manifesto” was in fact a telegram to the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Alexeyev: “During the days of the great struggle against the external foe which, in the space of almost three years, has been striving to enslave our Native Land, it has pleased the Lord God to send down upon Russia a new and difficult trial. The national disturbances that have begun within the country threaten to reflect disastrously upon the further conduct of the stubborn war. The fate of Russia, the honour of our heroic army, the well-being of the people, the entire future of our precious Fatherland demand that the war be carried out to a victorious conclusion, come what may. The cruel foe is exerting what remains of his strength, and nor far distant is the hour when our valiant army with our glorious allies will be able to break the foe completely. In these decisive days in the life of Russia, We have considered it a duty of conscience to make it easy for Our people to bring about a tight-knit union and cohesion of all our national strength, in order that victory might be the more quickly attained, and, in agreement with the State Duma We have concluded that it would be a good thing to abdicate the Throne of the Russian State and to remove Supreme Power from Ourselves. Not desiring to be separated from Our beloved Son, We transfer Our legacy to Our Brother Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, and bless Him to ascend the Throne of the Russian State. We command Our Brother to conduct State affairs fully and in inviolable unity with the representatives of those men who hold legislative office, upon those principles which they shall establish, swearing an inviolable oath to that effect. In the name of our ardently beloved Native Land We call upon all faithful sons of the Fatherland to fulfil their sacred duty before it, by submitting to the Tsar during the difficult moment of universal trials, and, aiding Him, together with the representatives of he people, to lead the Russian State out upon the path of victory, well-being and glory. May the Lord God help Russia. Pskov. 2 March, 15.00 hours. 1917. Nicholas.”

It has been argued that the telegram was not an abdication, but a final coded appeal to the army to support him. But such a supposition cannot be reconciled with the plain meaning of the text. And since everyone agrees on the crystal-clear sincerity and selflessness of Nicholas’ character, there is no reason not to believe the plain meaning of the text.

It has also been argued that the “abdication”, if that is what it was, had no legal force, that there was no provision for abdication in the Fundamental Laws. Thus, as Mikhail Nazarov points out, the Basic Laws of the Russian Empire, which had been drawn up by Tsar Paul I and which all members of the Royal Family swore to uphold, “do not foresee the abdication of a reigning Emperor (‘from a religious… point of view the abdication of the Monarch, the Anointed of God, is contrary to the act of His Sacred Coronation and Anointing; it would be possible only by means of monastic tonsure’ [N. Korevo]). Still less did his Majesty have the right to abdicate for his son in favour of his brother; while his brother Michael Alexandrovich had the right neither to ascend the Throne during the lifetime of the adolescent Tsarevich Alexis, nor be crowned, since he was married to a divorced woman, nor to transfer power to the Provisional government, or refer the resolution of the question of the fate of the monarchy to the future Constituent Assembly.

“Even if the monarch had been installed by the will of such an Assembly, ‘this would have been the abolition of the Orthodox legitimating principle of the Basic Laws’, so that these acts would have been ‘juridically non-existent’, says Zyzykin (in this Korevo agrees with him). ‘Great Prince Mikhail Alexandrovich… performed only an act in which he expressed his personal opinions and abdication, which had an obligatory force for nobody. Thereby he estranged himself from the succession in accordance with the Basic Laws, which juridically in his eyes did not exist, in spite of the fact that he had earlier, in his capacity as Great Prince on the day of his coming of age, sworn allegiance to the decrees of the Basic Laws on the inheritance of the Throne and the order of the Family Institution’.

“It goes without saying that his Majesty did not expect such a step from his brother, a step which placed the very monarchical order under question…”[1]

M.A. Babkin points out that Great Prince Michael’s statement contained the sentences: “I made the firm decision to accept supreme power only if that would be the will of our great people, to whom it belongs in the Constituent Assembly to establish the form of government and the new basic laws of the Russian State. Therefore I ask all citizens of the Russian Realm to submit to the Provisional Government until the Constituent Assembly by its decision on the form of government shall express the will of the people”. “We can see,” writes Babkin, “that the talk was not about the Great Prince’s abdication from the throne, but about the impossibility of his occupying the royal throne without the clearly expressed acceptance of this by the whole people of Russia. Michael Alexandrovich presented the choice of the form of State government (in the first place – between people power and the monarchy) to the Constituent Assembly. Until the convening of the Constituent Assembly he entrusted the administration of the country to the Provisional Government ‘which arose on the initiative of the State Duma’.”[2]

Since Great Prince Michael had presented the choice of the form of State government to the Constituent Assembly, many firm opponents of the revolution – for example, Hieromartyr Andronicus, Archbishop of Perm – were prepared to accept the Provisional Government on the grounds that it was just that – provisional. They were not to know that the Constituent Assembly would hardly be convened before it would be dissolved by the Bolsheviks, and therefore that the monarchical order had come to an end. So the results of the Tsar’s abdication for Russia were different from what he had hoped and believed. Instead of an orderly transfer of power from one member of the royal family to another, Great-Prince Michael also abdicated, the Constituent Assembly was not convened, and the whole dynasty and autocratic order collapsed. And instead of preventing civil war for the sake of victory in the world war, the abdication was followed by defeat in the world war and the bloodiest civil war in history, followed by unprecedented sufferings and persecutions of the faith for generations. Indeed, in retrospect we can see that this act brought to an end the 1600-year period of the Orthodox Christian Empire that began with the coming to power of St. Constantine the Great. “He who restrains” the coming of the Antichrist, the Orthodox Christian Emperor, “was removed from the midst” (II Thessalonians 2.7) – and very soon “the collective Antichrist”, Soviet power, began his savage torture of the Body of Holy Russia. St. John of Kronstadt had said that Russia without the Tsar would no longer even bear the name of Russia, and would be “a stinking corpse”. And so it proved to be…

So was the Tsar right to abdicate, if there was no provision for such an act in the Fundamental Laws and if the results of his decision were so catastrophic for Russia?

Even the saints were not unanimous, it would seem, in their answer to this question. Let us take the words of three holy eldresses.

First, Blessed Duniushka of Ussuruisk, who was martyred in 1918: “The Tsar will leave the nation, which shouldn’t be, but this has been foretold to him from Above. This is His destiny. There is no way that He can evade it.”[3] “Which shouldn’t be”, said the eldress. But is that the same as: “he shouldn’t of done it”, especially in view of the fact that this was “his destiny”, there was no way he could evade it, it was foretold him from Above.

Another great eldress, Blessed Matrona of Moscow (+1952), was more categorical: ”In vain did Emperor Nicholas renounce the throne, he shouldn’t have done that. They forced him to do it. He was sorry for the people, and paid the price himself, knowing his path beforehand.”[4]

And yet a third great eldress, Paraskeva (Pasha) of Sarov (+1915), who had foretold the Tsar’s destiny at the glorification of St. Seraphim of Sarov in 1903, is reported to have said: “Your Majesty, descend from the throne yourself”.[5]

So he was both right and wrong to descend from the throne. How are we to resolve this conundrum?

Let us approach this problem, not from the side of the Tsar, but from the side of the Church. This is natural, because the philosophico-religious foundation of the Orthodox autocracy is the “symphony” between Church and State, whereby the State receives its legitimisation and sanctification from the Church and in turn protects the Church from external enemies and internal division, the welfare of the Church being the ultimate purpose and justification of the State. Christian States fall when this symphony is destroyed for one or another reason. It may be that the State falls through heresy, while the Church remains unshaken. More rarely, the Christian rulers may remain Orthodox while the Local Church is shaken by heresy, and the majority, if not all of the people, withdraws its support for the ruler. This is what happened in the seventh century, when large parts of the Orthodox East fell away from the Christian Roman Empire. Or both Church and State may agree with each other in going down the path of heresy. This is what happened in 15^th-century Byzantium, when both Church and State adopted the false unia with Rome. The result of this “pseudo-symphony” – a “symphony” that was for evil rather than for good – was the fall of Constantinople in 1453. This had been foretold by an anonymous Greek prophecy of the eighth-ninth century, which said that "the sceptre of the Orthodox kingdom will fall from the weakening hands of the Byzantine emperors, since they will not have proved able to achieve the symphony of Church and State."[6]

In 1917 the Emperor was unshaken in his Orthodoxy. In fact, he was the most Orthodox of all the Tsars, and was counted worthy of a martyr’s crown. The symphony between Church and State was destroyed, not by betrayal on his part, but by betrayal on the part of the majority of the educated population, which had fallen away from Orthodoxy into the western heresy of social democratism, while even many of the workers and peasants were deeply infected by a spirit of rebellion. Moreover – and this is what made the fall still more catastrophic – even the Church hierarchy wavered in its loyalty to the Tsar.

At first sight, this may elicit surprise and disagreement. After all, the Church in the persons of most of its leaders remained to the end at least formally faithful to the Tsar and Tsarism; the Holy Synod, unlike the generals or the Duma leaders, did not call on the Tsar to abdicate. At the same time, the surprising reaction of the Church to the Tsar’s abdication – passivity bordering on indifference - should make us pause…

The first question that needed to be answered concerned the legitimacy of the new Provisional Government. As we have seen, the constitution of the Russian Empire did not allow for any transition to a non-autocratic, still less an anti-autocratic form of government. However, the Synod showed itself to be at a loss at this critical moment. At its session of February 26 (old style), it refused the request of the Assistant Procurator, Prince N.D. Zhevakhov, that the creators of disturbances should be threatened with ecclesiastical punishments.[7] Then, on February 27, it refused the request of the Procurator, N.P. Raev, that it publicly support the monarchy.

“On March 2,” the day of the Tsar’s abdication, writes M.A. Babkin, “the Synodal hierarchs gathered in the residence of the Metropolitan of Moscow. They listened to a report given by Metropolitan Pitirim of St. Petersburg asking that he be retired (this request was agreed to on March 6 – M.B.). The administration of the capital’s diocese was temporarily laid upon Bishop Benjamin of Gdov. But then the members of the Synod recognized that it was necessary immediately to enter into relations with the Executive committee of the State Duma. On the basis of which we can assert that the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church recognized the Provisional Government even before the abdication of Nicholas II from the throne. (The next meeting of the members of the Synod took place on March 3 in the residence of the Metropolitan of Kiev. On that same day the new government was told of the resolutions of the Synod.)

“The first triumphantly official session of the Holy Synod after the coup d’état took place on March 4. Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev presided and the new Synodal over-procurator, V.N. Lvov, who had been appointed by the Provisional government the previous day, was present. Metropolitan Vladimir and the members of the Synod (with the exception of Metropolitan Pitirim, who was absent – M.B.) expressed their sincere joy at the coming of a new era in the life of the Orthodox Church. And then at the initiative of the over-procurator the royal chair… was removed into the archives… One of the Church hierarchs helped him. It was decided to put the chair into a museum.

“The next day, March 5, the Synod ordered that in all the churches of the Petrograd diocese the Many Years to the Royal House ‘should no longer be proclaimed’. In our opinion, these actions of the Synod had a symbolical character and witnessed to the desire of its members ‘to put into a museum’ not only the chair of the Tsar, but also ‘to despatch to the archives’ of history royal power itself.

“The Synod reacted neutrally to the ‘Act on the abdication of Nicholas II from the Throne of the State of Russia for himself and his son in favour of Great Prince Michael Alexandrovich’ of March 2, 1917 and to the ‘Act on the refusal of Great Prince Michael Alexandrovich to accept supreme power’ of March 3. On March 6 it resolved to accept these acts ‘for information and execution’, and that in all the churches of the empire molebens should be served with a Many Years ‘to the God-preserved Russian Realm and the Right-believing Provisional Government’.”[8]

But was the new government – almost entirely masonic and social-democratic in its membership - really “right-believing”? Could supporters of the revolution really be “right-believing”? Was the Church allowing her members vote for masonic or democratic delegates to the Constituent Assembly? After all, that Assembly would determine the future form of government of the Russian land. Had the Church so quickly renounced Tsarism, which had formed one of the three foundation stones of Russian identity for nearly 1000 years?

Babkin continues: “The members of the Holy Synod understood the ambiguity of the situation and foresaw the possibility of an alternative resolution of the question of the choice of the form of State power in Russia, which was witnessed in the Synodal resolutions of March 6 and 9. In them they said that Great Prince Michael Alexandrovich had refused to accept supreme power ‘until the establishment in the Constituent Assembly of the form of government’. Nevertheless, already on March 9 the Most Holy Governing Synod addressed an epistle ‘To the faithful children of the Orthodox Russian Church with regard to the events now being experienced’. In it there was an appeal to entrust themselves to the Provisional Government. Moreover, the epistle began as follows: ‘The will of God has been accomplished. Russia has entered on the path of a new State life. May the Lord bless our great Homeland with happiness and glory on her new path.’

“De facto, the Synod had officially proclaimed the beginning ‘of a new State life’ in Russia, while the revolutionary events were declared to have accomplished ‘the will of God’. This epistle was characterised by B.V. Titlinov, professor of the Petrograd Theological Academy, as ‘an epistle blessing a new and free Russia’, and by General A.I. Denikin as ‘sanctioning the coup d’état that has taken place’. To the epistle were affixed the signatures of the bishops of the ‘tsarist’ composition of the Synod, even those who had the reputation of being monarchists and ‘black hundredists’, for example, Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev and Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow. This witnessed to the ‘loyal’ feelings of the Synodal hierarchs…”[9]

Although Metropolitan Macarius soon rejected the Provisional Government, the “democratic revolution” in the Church continued and even became stronger, with old bishops being voted out of office and new ones voted in. Moreover, the old Synod was forcibly retired and a new one put in its place, with only Archbishop Sergius (Stragorodsky), the future traitor and first “patriarch” of the Sovietised Moscow Patriarchate, accepting a place in the new synod. This revolutionary fervour made itself felt even at the beginning of the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, which began in August. Many delegates opposed the restoration of the patriarchate because of its supposedly “monarchist” connotations. By the time of the October revolution, it is true, the revolutionary tide had turned, the “monarchist” principle of the patriarchate had been restored to the Church in the person of Patriarch Tikhon, and in January, 1918 the Council even anathematised Soviet power. However, there was no explicit call for a return to the Tsarist order; and it was left to the All-Emigration Council meeting in Karlovtsy, Serbia in 1921 to sound the old note of devotion to “Faith, Tsar and Fatherland” publicly for the first time since the revolution. The conclusion to be drawn must be that, in spite of her formal loyalty to the Tsar up to the moment of his abdication, the Church’s rapid and fairly sustained renunciation of Tsarism in the months and years that followed demonstrated an inner infidelity, if not of the Church as a whole at any rate of many of its leading members, that must have been there before, and that the Tsar’s words about the “treason, cowardice and deceit” all around him must be deemed to include many, if not all of the Church leadership…

The question then arises: if the Tsar had been inwardly betrayed, not only by the Duma, the aristocracy and the army, but even by the Church, traditionally the closest support of the monarchy, did he really have any alternative but to renounce the throne?

In an important address entitled “Tsar and Patriarch”, P.S. Lopukhin approaches this question by noting that the Tsar’s role was one of service, service in the Church and for the Church. And its purpose was to bring people to the Church and keep them there, in conditions maximally conducive to their salvation. But if the people of the Church, in their great majority, cease to understand the Tsar’s role in that way, then he becomes literally of no service to them.

“The understanding of, and love and desire for, the ‘tsar’s service’ began to wane in Russia. Sympathy began to be elicited, by contrast, by the bases of the rationalist West European state, which was separated from the Church, from the religious world-view. The idea of the democratic state liberated from all obligation in relation to God, the Church and the spiritual state of the people began to become attractive. The movement in this direction in the Russian people was long-standing and stubborn, and it had already a long time ago begun to elicit profound alarm, for this movement was not so much ‘political’ as spiritual and psychological: the so-called Russian ‘liberation’ and then ‘revolutionary movement’ was mainly, with rare and uncharacteristic exceptions, an areligious and anti-religious movement.

“It was precisely this that elicited profound alarm in the hearts of St. Seraphim, Fr. John of Kronstadt, Dostoyevsky and Metropolitan Anthony…

“This movement developed inexorably, and finally there came the day when his Majesty understood that he was alone in his ‘service of the Tsar’.

“The Orthodox Tsar must not be in spiritual isolation. For example, the ‘theocrat’, the ruler who believes that he is sent by God to rule a given people, that a God-established aim is the very fact of this monarch’s power over this people, such a monarch can drench the country in blood, subdue it, in order that everyone should tremble in fear, and ideologically he would be justified.

“The Orthodox Tsar has authority in order that there should be a Christian state, so that there should be a Christian-minded environment. The Tsar bears his tsarist service for this end.

“When the desire for a Christian state and environment is quenched in the people, the Orthodox monarchy loses both the presupposition and the aim of its existence, for nobody can be forced to become a Christian. The Tsar needs Christians, not trembling slaves.

“In the life of a people and of a man there are periods of spiritual darkening, of ‘stony lack of feeling’, but this does not mean that the man has become completely stony: the days of temptation and darkness pass, and he is again resurrected. When a people is overcome by passions, it is the duty of the authorities by severe means to sober it up and wake it up. And this must be done with decisive vividness, and it is healing, just as a thunderstorm is healing.

“But this can only be done when the blindness is not deep and when he who is punished and woken up understands the righteousness of the punishment. Thus one peasant reproached a landowner, asking why he had not begun to struggle against the pogroms with a machine-gun. “Well, and what would have happened them?’ ‘We would have come to our senses! But now we are drunk and we burn and beat each other.’

“But when the spiritual illness has penetrated even into the subconscious, then the application of force will seem to be violence, and not just retribution, then the sick people will not longer be capable of being healed. Then it will be in the state in which the sinner was whom the Apostle Paul ‘delivered to Satan for the tormenting of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved’ (I Corinthians 5.5).

“At the moment of his abdication his Majesty felt himself to be profoundly alone, and around him was ‘cowardice, baseness and treason’, and to the question how he could have abdicated from his tsarist service, it is necessary to reply: he did this because we abdicated from his tsarist service, from his sacred and sanctified authority…

“But perhaps his Majesty made a mistake in thinking that he was so alone. Perhaps quite close to him there was cowardice, meanness and treason, but further away and deeper in the people there was both courage and faithfulness and honourableness?

“At such a time, when his Majesty was deciding these questions, it was impossible to calculate or vote: the question was decided through intuition. But was the intuition of his Majesty reliable? Was it true that he was so alone, that there was already no place for the tsar’s service and nobody and no sympathetic environment for whom he could bear this service?”[10]

No, as we have seen, his intuition was reliable. The next four-and-a-half years, until the Russian Church Council at Karlovtsy, demonstrated a remarkable absence of enthusiasm for the idea of the Orthodox autocracy even in the Church, even in the White movement. And Karlovtsy was not situated in Russia… The Tsar was alone; and since the leadership of a Christian State must be dual – through a partnership or “symphony” of Church and State – he could not continue to rule as an Orthodox Christian tsar. Just as it takes two to make a marriage, so it takes two powers to make a Christian state. The bridegroom in this case was willing and worthy, but the bride was not. And so the marriage ended, de facto if not de jure.

In Deuteronomy 17.14 the Lord had laid it down as one of the conditions of the creation of a God-pleasing monarchy that the people should want a God-pleasing king. [11] The Russian people did not want their pious Tsar. And so the Scripture was fulfilled: “We have no king, because we feared not the Lord” (Hosea 10.3).

And yet in a sense the Tsar saved the monarchy for the future by his abdication. For in abdicating he resisted the temptation to apply force, to start a civil war, in a cause that was just from a purely juridical point of view, but which could not be justified from a deeper, eschatological point of view. He resisted the temptation to act like a Western absolutist ruler, and thereby refuted the critics in both East and West who looked on the Russian tsardom as just that – a form of absolutism.

He showed that the Orthodox Autocracy was not a form of absolutism, but something completely sui generis – the external aspect of the self-government of the Orthodox Church and people on earth. He refused to treat his power as if it were independent of the Church and people, but showed that it was a form of service to the Church and the people from within the Church and the people, in accordance with the word: “I have raised up one chosen out of My people… with My holy oil have I anointed him” (Psalm 88.18,19). So not “government by the people and for the people” in a democratic sense, but “government by one chosen out of the people of God for the people of God and responsible to God alone”.

In demonstrating this, not in words only but in the whole manner of his self-sacrificial life, the Tsar actually preserved the power of the Orthodox Autocracy, if not on earth, then in heaven. He handed that power over “for safe-keeping”, as it were, to God Who gave it, and to the Mother of God, the Queen and Protectress of the Russian Land. That is the mystical meaning of the miraculous appearance, at the precise day and hour of the Tsar’s abdication, of the “Reigning” icon of the Mother of God, in which the Queen of heaven is shown bearing the orb and sceptre of the Orthodox Tsars.

But if the Orthodox tsardom is to be restored from heaven to earth, it is now up to the Orthodox Church and people to show themselves worthy of it again. The Tsar did what he could; he demonstrated an image of self-sacrificing service to Church and people, an image that towards the end of the twentieth century began to captivate more and more hearts by its intrinsic, spiritual beauty; he preserved the Orthodox Autocracy undefiled, and even added to its glory by his own martyric sacrifice. It is now up to the Church and people to respond to that sacrifice and love with sacrifice and love, by casting aside her heresies and apostasies and internal divisions and calling on the Lord with true repentance for the return of the bridegroom. And when the bride is ready, the Lord will bring her her true bridegroom. For then “thou shalt not more be called ‘Forsaken’, neither shall thy land any more be called ‘Desolate’: but thou shalt be called ‘Hephzi-bah’, and thy land ‘Beulah’: for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thou shalt be married…” (Isaiah 62.4).

July 19 / August 1, 2004.

The Holy Fathers of the First Six Ecumenical Councils.

St. Seraphim of Sarov.

[1] Nazarov, Kto naslednik rossijskogo prestola?(Who is the Heir of the Russian Throne?), Moscow: “Russkaia Idea”, 1996, p. 68 (in Russian). In defence of Great Prince Michael, it should be pointed out that he, too, acted under duress. As Nazarov points out, “Great Prince Mikhail Alexandrovich also acted under duress, under the pressure of the plotters who came to his house. Kerensky admitted that this had been their aim: ‘We decided to surround the act of abdication of Mikhail Alexandrovich with every guarantee, but in such a way as to give the abdication a voluntary character’” (p. 69).

[2] Babkin, “Sviatejshij Sinod Pravoslavnoj Rossijskoj Tserkvi i Revoliutsionnie Sobytia Fevralia-Marta 1917 g.” (“The Most Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Revolutionary Events of February-March, 1917”), http://www.monarhist-spb.narod.ru/D-ST/Babkin-1, p. 3.

[4] In V. Gubanov, Tsar’ Nikolai II-ij i Novie Mucheniki (Tsar Nicholas II and the New Martyrs), St. Petersburg, 2000, p. 62 (in Russian).

[6] Archbishop Seraphim, "Sud'by Rossii", Pravoslavnij Vestnik, № 87, January-February, 1996, pp. 6-7 (in Russian).

[7] A.D. Stepanov, “Mezhdu mirom i monastyrem” (“Between the World and the Monastery”), in Tajna Bezzakonia (The Mystery of Iniquity), St. Petersburg, 2002, p. 491 ®.

[9] Babkin, op. cit., pp. 3-4. The epistle also said: “Trust the Provisional Government. All together and everyone individually, apply all your efforts to the end that by your labours, exploits, prayer and obedience you may help it in its great work of introducing new principles of State life…” (quoted by Oleg Lebedev, “Mezhdu Fevraliem i Oktiabrem” (“Between February and October), Nezavisimaia Gazeta (The Independent Newspaper), 13 November, 1996, p. 5 (in Russian)).

[10] Pravoslavnij Put’(The Orthodox Way), 1951, pp. 103-104 (in Russian).

[11] As Lev Tikhomirov writes: "Without establishing a kingdom, Moses foresaw it and pointed it out in advance to Israel... It was precisely Moses who pointed out in advance the two conditions for the emergence of monarchical power: it was necessary, first, that the people itself should recognize its necessity, and secondly, that the people itself should not elect the king over itself, but should present this to the Lord. Moreover, Moses indicated a leadership for the king himself: 'when he shall sit upon the throne of his kingdom, he must.. fulfil all the words of this law'." (Monarkhicheskaia Gosudarstvennost'(Monarchical Statehood), Buenos Aires, 1968, pp. 127-129 (in Russian)).