Tsar, Soviets, Meyendorff
June 1/14, 1970
Holy Pentecost
Dear Brother in Christ, Daniel,
I pray this finds you well and in the Grace of the Holy Spirit, the Feast of Whose Descent upon the Apostles we celebrated today. We spent the day here and read the kneeling prayers ourselves, as we’ve been travelling too much of late and plan to go to San Francisco again in two weeks for the day of Vladika John’s repose. Our unseasonal rains, which broke out again yesterday, made our road somewhat slippery in any case. I have a feeling our weather portends a cold, white winter, for which we had better start getting prepared!
A brief book report: I was somewhat disappointed in Hunt for the Czar, expecting to find more about the mysterious figure of Genelevsky, about whom the author has apparently written another book. There is actually nothing new revealed in the book, and about all that is documented is the fact that at various times various people have believed that one or more members of the whole imperial family escaped from Ekatarinberg. I found the author far too prone to jump to conclusions which he favors, and which half the time just don’t make sense: for example, finding a newspaper clipping of a “Nicholas Romanov” visiting S.F. in 1919 makes him think it very likely that it was the Tsar—but if he was in hiding surely he wouldn’t call himself “Nicholas Romanov”! In general the book is full of guesses and intimations which, I think, really lead nowhere because (leaving aside for the moment whatever proof there is on the opposite side) the whole idea of the survival of the imperial family does not make sense psychologically, whether from the point of view of the Tsar or that of the Bolsheviks, and it gets itself mixed up in a number of self-contradictions. For example, several times the author mentions that the Tsar and Tsarevich wanted to live in Poland because it was close to Russia in case the political situation should change—but if the Tsar is incognito and goes out of his way to make everyone believe he is dead, what possible role4s there for him in Russian politics? And the longer he waits to reveal himself, the more difficult it will be to persuade people he can possibly be alive; if he wants to be ready to reascend the throne, he surely has to let people know who and where he is far in advance. Again: if the Tsar is so anxious to make everyone believe he is dead, what is he doing coming to S. F. “very possibly” to prepare a wild book on his escape for publication and then to sell it to the movies!!? The parts of “Rescuing the Tsar” which the author quotes certainly do not carry much conviction as to their truthfulness, seeming more like far-out spy fiction. And from the Bolshevik point of view: what possible compensation could have persuaded them to let such a great potential hindrance to their cause (the very symbol of the “old order”) out of their power? And since when did they begin trusting their enemies to keep such an impossible secret? But on the contrary the Bolshevik psychology is quite understandable if they really murdered the imperial family: of course they would never let the Tsar out of their hands, and under the conditions of civil war it is quite likely that the murder would be performed not publicly by command from the top, but as the conditions (the advance of the White Army) demanded; of course they could not admit to the world that they had murdered the whole family (defenseless woman and children—nothing to the Soviets, but world opinion must be respected!) and that is why the first announcement mentioned only that the Tsar had been “executed” and left it vague where the rest of the family was—a stimulated massacre of the whole family was certainly not in the Bolshevik interests. It is also understandable why no one could be found who had witnessed the act—most if not all the participants were back of the Communist lines, where the Bolsheviks could handle them as they saw fit, and if any of the murderers were caught by the Whites, they weren’t likely to confess such a crime which would mean their own deaths; the one person who was suppose to have participated quite understandably said he was outside the building at the time. All this psychological evidence, while not direct proof in itself, does serve to confirm the generally accepted story of the massacre, for which there is after all some fairly good evidence which there seems no logical reason for the Soviets to have manufactured. Without quite strong evidence to the contrary, I think the story of Romanov survival will have to be classed with the similar stories concerning the Dauphin Louis XVII, who apparently died or was killed as a child in prison under equally shady circumstances which the revolutionary government didn’t care to reveal, but who was resurrected many times in later legends. The psychology of various pretenders, while weird, has enough precedents (false Dimitrys and by the dozen!) not to be surprising.
Here it is June and we’ve hardly started on the March-April Orthodox Word, almost half of which will be devoted to the service to Father Herman, hopefully in two colors. Pray for us. These next two months will be a trial, but after that, God willing, we should begin to make progress. Gleb’s brother in law is coming for a few days this week, and we’ll let him try to finish the linotype wing to the printshop. Fr. Alexy will probably be here within two weeks to put the linotype together, and then we can really start work. We already have a tank of liquid gas for it, and before long we might even have such modern conveniences as a gas burner and gas refrigerator! But most of all we dream of getting more building done so as to get more protection against the relentless fogs of November-September and sometimes later. Hopefully we’ll get more snow this year and so avoid the fogs in Jan-Feb, which settle in with long rainy periods.
Did I mention that Fr. Michael Azkoul sent us an excellent answer to Fr. Schmemann’s attack on the Russian Church Abroad (his answer to Metr. Philaret’s Sorrowful Epistle)? In their mutual correspondence, Fr. Schmemann finally admitted that he simply didn’t have the facts about the Russian Church Abroad. The manuscript was turned down by Fr. Meyendorff for The Orthodox Church (Fr. Michael notes that Fr. Meyendorff is extremely emotional about the Synod and simply can’t reason about it, while Fr. Schmemann is somewhat more reasonable, half of his own family being in the Synod!), but is extremely objective and fair, and mentions a fact that hasn’t been brought out before— that the Moscow-Metropolia negotiations took place in Geneva and New York under WCC auspices, with representatives of the WCC present! Alas for our beloved Alaska—Bp. Theodosius has been to Moscow twice (Once for the Patriarch’s funeral, and several weeks ago to receive the “Tomos”), and on June 5 (we just received photographs) Bp. Juvenal (second under Nikodim in the Foreign Relations Dept) served with him before Fr. Herman’s relics and on Spruce Island. Next we fully expect to hear that the Soviets, out of “brotherly” feeling, are sending monks to Spruce Island—an ideal espionage center. God save us all. It is all very sad, but we have yet to see what Father Herman will do.
Pray for us,
With love in Christ,