I wake bright and early with the sun very high in the sky already. All around are verdant gentle hills covered in pine forest. This is the Urals, the end of Europe and the gateway to Asian Russia. Officially it is 6 am as the whole of Russia is on Moscow time. Locally it is 3 hours later already.
Unfortunately the first shiny train seems to be a one off as I spend the night in an ancient rattler. Unprepared I have brought no food on board and there is no restaurant car on this one. I chow down on two minute noodles and coffee brought from the carriage attendant. More of a worry is that no water comes out of the washroom tap when I turn the handle. After a couple of hot and sweaty days without a shower I can barely endure my own smell so I improvise and use a cup of water cooled down from the samovar at the end of the coach and have a bird bath. I laugh the next morning to find that there is water residue in the wash basin and after some exploration find that while the knobs are useless pressing up on a bit of metal sticking out of the spout releases copious water.
I hit the streets of Yekatarinburg late morning again with bright sunshine. This city, surprisingly, is the fourth largest in Russia and the hub of the extensive mining industries that abound in the mineral rich Urals. In the late 1980s President Gorbachov promoted a certain Boris Yeltsin to the politburo and he took over as first president of the “new” Russia. This is not what I am here for. Students of history will know of the last Russian Tsar, Nicholas 11. As absolute ruler of Russia he conducted the military campaign of WW1 from the front lines. In the wake of the February revolution of 1917 where a coalition of socialist and communist parties assumed control he abdicated the throne and was placed under house arrest. Following the subsequent October 1917 Bolshevik revolution he and his family were eventually moved to Yekaterinburg in detention and ultimately they and their remaining loyal staff were herded into the cellar of the house where they were staying and mowed down in a hail of gunfire by the Bolsheviks. Their bodies were dumped and burned in a forest 16 km out of the city.
Graphic snippets of history such as these fascinate me and stay with me. Decades ago I determined that when I went to Russia I would seek out this place, not for any misplaced loyalty to the Tsars or any political reasons as the Romanov dynasty was an autocratic greedy repressive regime that cared less for the people and more for building the opulent palaces that I have already seen in St Petersburg. Its more to feel history, stand there, close my eyes and imagine. To augment the experience I am in the midst of reading a historical book of this time in Russian history and the book and being here perfectly complement each other.
I trudge up the hill to the spot, it nicely overlooks the whole city. Post Soviet Russia has built a massive new, beautiful Byzantine style church named the Church of the Holy Blood where the now destroyed house was. Marking the spot of the execution in the church’s ground is a metal orthodox cross and there is a tiny wooden church adjacent. As I wander in to there it is full with all of 5 people praying and the entrance has a tiny kiosk selling icons and framed pictures of Tsar Nicholas and Alexandra. Now this is no tourist town, in fact for my whole day there I see only 1 other tourist. This is for local consumption. Even more intriguing is that there is a police and army presence that I only saw at the Moscow Kremlin in Russia. It is still there when I walk back to catch the next train out in the evening.
